Story of Unpaid Care Labour in International Law: An Agenda in Women’s Global Resistance

This panel, convened by the Gender, Sexuality, and International Law Interest Group of ANZSIL, prompts the audience to think about politics of violence and care in and beyond international law. Using feminist and decolonial/TWAIL/Global South methodologies, this panel explores violence (with a focus on genocide and apartheid), and the invisible practices of reproductive and care labour that sustain international law.

Laura Schranz uses visuals to consider how sexual violence, combined with settler colonialism, gendered orientalism, and hegemonic masculinity, could constitute genocide; Saumya Uma and Ramya Jawahar Kudekallu raise concerns as Global South and TWAIL scholars that such an extension of apartheid may have the potential to reinforce colonial and imperialist notions regarding gender. Turning to questions of care, Radhika Jagtap explores feminist and Indigenous resistances to unpaid care labour, while Zora Geertsema argues for a resource-based right to care within international human rights law.

All papers on this panel provoke a reimagining of international law by rendering visible the politics of violence and care that underpins international law, and in doing so, centring marginalised, feminised, and racialized voices.