Introducing the Fifth Annual ‘Women in International Law’ Symposium

‘Gravity of Tenderness’ by The Fabler.

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, celebrated on the 8th of March, Völkerrechtsblog hosts the ‘Women in International Law’ symposium. Held each year during this week, it features blogposts, interviews, and podcasts on women’s rights, feminist approaches to international law, and the challenges faced by female scholars in international legal academia.

The fifth annual ‘Women in International Law’ symposium features solicited contributions, as well as contributions received following our Call for Contributions, and will focus on non/motherhood and international law. More specifically, through a series of blogposts, the symposium will explore the impact of international law on the protection of non/motherhood, as well as the impact of motherhood on the shaping of international law and knowledge production. Ultimately, through a podcast episode on the experiences of mother academics, the symposium seeks to challenge structural silences and open space for a more inclusive and mother-friendly international legal academia.

Two artworks are woven into this year’s ‘Women in International Law’ symposium and appear above each contribution. First, the symposium features the song ‘Gravity of Tenderness’ created by The Fabler. The song was composed following the artist’s discussion with the symposium organisers on the relationship between international law and non/motherhood as well as on women scholars’ reflections on non/motherhood. The song is premiering through this symposium, and its official release by the artist on streaming platforms will follow later this month.

Second, the symposium cover, created by Polina Kulish and Daniel S. Penagos Molina, is a stop-motion embroidery, assembled from sequential photographs taken as the stitching progressed and re-ordered into a looping animation. It opens on an empty embroidery hoop. Ornamental florals appear first; only then does the central word arrive: ‘otherhood’. A beat later, a small parenthetical ‘(m)’ clicks into place, and ‘motherhood’ suddenly reads as well – before the lower floral band completes the frame, sealing the message inside a familiar, comforting, yet constraining frame.

The choice of the embroidery medium is not incidental. Embroidery has long lived inside a contradiction: it has disciplined women into ideals of patience and domesticity, yet it has also served as a vehicle for resistance and a space to subvert the norms. ‘As I cannot write’ begins Elizabeth Parker’s stitched work from the early 19th century, and continues as an insistence on not disappearing from memory after her death. In Argentina, the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ turned white headscarves, often embroidered with the names of their ‘disappeared’ children in the ‘Dirty War’, into a public demand for answers. Suffragists in Britain stitched banners to claim the vote; quilts have carried grief and survival into view (see more here).

This cover leans into the embroidery’s double life. The floral border depicts the romance that culture assigns to embroidery and motherhood, while the text inside strains against it. The hinge from ‘otherhood’ to ‘(m)otherhood’ frames motherhood not only as an identity but as a process, often produced through mechanisms of othering; and, by holding space for both motherhood and non-motherhood, the work draws attention to the forms of social sorting and misrecognition that can attach to either position (see generally de Beauvoir).

By foregrounding the process of stitching rather than presenting only a finished result, the animation refuses the bowed-head stillness traditionally associated with the embroiderer and replaces it with an emphasis on becoming – an ongoing labour that resonates with mothering itself. Placed on the cover of an academic symposium, this ‘domestic’ medium of embroidery also deliberately unsettles the boundary between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres, bringing into view motherhood and the wider web of private care responsibilities that many women in academia, mothers and non-mothers alike, are expected to carry alongside their public roles (cf Ukeles).

The symposium kicks off this Monday with a blogpost written by Annika Knauer. The author will examine whether the forthcoming General Recommendation No. 41 of the CEDAW Committee can effectively combat gender inequality through an anti-stereotyping approach, focusing in particular on the deeply entrenched stereotype of women as mothers and caregivers. The symposium will then continue with contributions addressing women’s reproductive autonomy. Swarna Latha R. will critique how international human rights law constructs reproductive autonomy asymmetrically, protecting women from forced motherhood only when it constitutes harm or suffering, while leaving a ‘right not to mother’ unarticulated and ‘maternormativity’ unchallenged. As she notes, true reproductive justice demands recognising non-motherhood as a legitimate, self-determined choice beyond conditional tolerance, and further requires de-stereotyping motherhood itself under Article 5 CEDAW to affirm autonomy for all reproductive trajectories. Paulina Macías Ortega and Samantha Rodríguez Santillán will then argue that although forced pregnancy has been recognised as a form of gender-based violence in relevant jurisprudence, international law must move toward the explicit recognition of girls’ right to non-motherhood and their right to decide whether, when, and under what conditions to assume motherhood.

On Tuesday, Dilruba Begüm Kartepe Kemaloğlu and Mariia Zheltukha will stress that Türkiye’s spousal consent requirement for sterilisation makes women’s reproductive autonomy conditional on their husbands, even though international law recognises reproductive decisions as an individual right. They will show that because international law does not explicitly ban such requirements, States can keep formally gender-neutral rules that, in reality, reinforce gender inequality. Kim Ducho’s contribution will then show how the law of armed conflict addresses women mainly through pregnancy and motherhood, and will draw on feminist debates around ‘agency’ and the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda to reveal how this framing can make those who are not mothers less visible in both legal protection and accountability. Mariagiulia Masiero and Arianna Vettorel will then underline how international criminal law has historically struggled to name, frame and prosecute reproductive violence coherently, and argue that, notwithstanding recent jurisprudential and policy developments, reproductive autonomy must be recognised as a distinct and stand-alone legal interest so that women and girls can freely choose whether, when, and under what conditions to embrace (non)motherhood.

On Wednesday, the symposium turns to how international law protects – or fails to protect – mothers. Verónica García de Cortázar Galleguillos will focus on obstetric violence and will highlight that childbirth is a physiological, social, experiential, and political event shaped by power dynamics and medicalisation. She will further argue that understanding this context is essential for interpreting States’ human rights obligations to effectively prevent obstetric violence and guarantee women’s autonomy in childbirth. Devran Gulel, Sanja Djajić, and Ruth Dineen will then demonstrate how the Hague Abduction Convention has become a means that harms mothers fleeing domestic violence, and argue that national courts and the ECtHR must adopt a domestic abuse-informed interpretation of the Convention that prioritises the safety of mothers and children. Taking a materialist-feminist approach, Dilara Karmen Yaman will then argue that motherhood constitutes essential yet devalued reproductive labour sustaining capitalist accumulation, and that international law’s maintenance of the public/private divide structurally reinforces mothers’ economic dependency and double burden.

On Thursday, emphasis will be placed on the legal recognition of motherhood. Miriam Bak McKenna and Maj Grasten will argue that although international legal frameworks largely refrain from defining ‘the mother’, the law nonetheless exercises ideological and coercive power in constructing and normalising particular, racialised, classed, and heteronormative models of legitimate motherhood, thus shaping whose reproductive choices, kinship relations, and claims to parenthood are recognised as legally significant. Selin Altay’s contribution will then show, through key ECtHR Article 8 judgments from the 1990s to today, how the Court has handled queer family-making through assisted reproduction, and argue that its focus on a wide margin of appreciation often blocks legal recognition of these families and prioritises exclusive genetic parenthood over queer and heterologous family-making. In cases where motherhood is ‘split’ between genetic, gestational, and social mothers, the post calls for an approach that matches how parenthood and family life are lived in practice.

On Friday, attention will shift to the contribution of mothers to the development of international law. Carolina Lozano and Xilene Díaz will situate the struggle of the ‘Mothers of Acari’ within the broader fight against enforced disappearance in Latin America and will argue that their maternal activism before the Inter-American human rights system has contributed to the consolidation of regional standards concerning the protection of mothers searching for their disappeared relatives. Subsequently, Sabaa Khan’s contribution will examine how mothers shape international environmental law through care-based knowledge: from Brundtland’s sustainable development to Inuit mothers driving persistent organic pollutants treaties and Indigenous defenders like Berta Cáceres challenging extractivism. Nonetheless, the law dismisses it as unscientific amid corporate capture. As the author will argue, reclaiming law demands valuing mothers as epistemic authorities and centering intergenerational care over profit and sovereignty. Tania Ixchel Atilano will then focus specifically on motherhood and legal academia. She will argue that openly discussing pregnancy and motherhood in legal academia is essential to exposing the structural and cultural barriers behind the ‘maternal wall’ and promoting more flexible and humane institutional frameworks that can help close the persistent gender gap.

On Saturday, the symposium will feature two essays, in which authors will share their personal experiences and will reflect on the impact of motherhood on one’s international law career and on knowledge production. Precisely, Aurélia Gervasoni will explore how political or ‘progressive’ children’s books translate legal norms and structures of power into child-accessible language, and how motherhood and caregiving can become spaces of critical knowledge production that challenge dominant legal narratives. Additionally, Marianne Crielle G. Vitug will argue that for women from the Global South pursuing careers in international law, structural inequalities (ranging from financial precarity and visa instability to unequal professional recognition and limited networks) render the choice of motherhood deeply constrained rather than freely made. She contends that without systemic reforms to democratize the field and equalize opportunities, international law will continue to disadvantage women with childbearing capacity from the Global South.

Finally, a podcast episode with Tania Ixchel Atilano, Michelle Staggs Kelsall, and Joyce De Coninck will conclude the symposium on Sunday. In this episode, Sissy Katsoni and Polina Kulish will invite their interviewees to reflect on the relationship between motherhood and the development of one’s academic career, as well as on how international legal academia could become a better place for mother and non/mother academics.