This is a monthly seminar on feminism and law. We convene every 1st Tuesday of the month, online at lunch time. The link for each seminar is available below under each seminar title.
The aim of the seminar series is to amplify feminist legal scholarship and voices and to address contemporary concerns within the field. By launching the series, and through our talks we hope to strengthen the feminist legal community wherever like-minded feminist lawyers are based. We are committed to showcasing a diverse range of feminist voices, encompassing various perspectives under the umbrella of feminism and equality. Based at Gothenburg university, the series has a broad scope, seeking to include both established and previously unheard, silenced, and exiled voices in the realms of law and academia.
Our series is online with recorded sessions available for later viewing. Each talk will focus on a specific text, body of scholarship or practice, providing a shared feminist platform for in-depth discussions and critical engagement.
Seminar co-organizers: Dr Matilda Arvidsson & Dr Moa Bladini.
Upcoming talks
7 April 2026, at 12-13 CET: Juho Aalto, University of Turku, Finland
Title: Nordic Feminist Perspectives on Law: What now? Revisiting Hirdman’s ”genussystem” as the sexgender system
Zoom link to the seminar
Abstract: This text argues that Hirdman’s genussystem theory can be reconceptualised as a sexgender system theory to highlight the presence of power in all dichotomies based on binary. Hirdman introduced genussystem as a theory inspired by Gayle Rubin in 1987. In 1990, the theory made its breakthrough in a government report titled ”Demokrati och makt i Sverige”. Hirdman’s theory became influential in legislative reforms and policy programmes intended to remedy the weaker societal position of women in Sweden and across Nordic countries. However, radicalism often develops into a paradigm and starts to serve the interests of the status quo in society. Hirdman’s original conception of genus did not treat the binary dichotomy between men and women as either neutral or based on biology. She placed the material body and meanings attached to it, both by sex and gender, within the same concept of genus that is not only attached to bodies but to everything: thoughts on masculine/feminine, man/woman permeate everything in the world around us and fill places, situations, food, politics and work. Hirdman’s genus is more complex than sex + gender, because anything ‘social’ and sex cannot, according to her, be considered as pre-existing or fixed entities. Later on, Hirdman came to consider the binary dichotomy between men and women as the power structure in society leading to women’s subordination. Nordic feminist perspectives on law are still attached to a binary understanding of male/female, even though performativity of sex and gender has become a simultaneous paradigm in scholarship. My aim is to re-visit Hirdman’s earlier conceptions present in genussystem and to theorise the existing gap between structural understanding of sex and gender in conjunction with performativity. The aim is to develop a new theory on sexgender and power by combining structures with performativity for addressing contemporary issues of vast inequality.
Bio: Juho Aalto is a university teacher and doctoral researcher at the University of Turku Law Faculty. His research focus is on legal theory, specifically the intersections of sex, gender, sexuality, materiality and law. His research explores how the sexgender binary impacts legal subject formation, using new materialist, posthumanist, and Nordic feminist perspectives law. Aalto has operationalised binary dichotomies to analyse how legal subject formation can be considered material-discursive through an ontoepistemological method of legal analysis called BinaryTech. BinaryTech can be used to analyse how binary structures affect in legal subject formation through inter alia sexgender, space and physical matter.
3 March 2026: Emily Jones and Eliana Cusato
Title: Abolition Feminism and International Law: Critiques of Carcerality meet Environmental Justice
Abstract: This talk is based on the article with the same title in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, drawing on the work of North American Black feminist activists and scholars, particularly Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, alongside other anti-carceral and abolitionist perspectives. It asks what happens when abolition feminism perspectives are brought to international law to study legal responses to the current ecological and climate breakdown. Building upon recent abolition feminist literature and activism against what Braz and Gilmore term the ‘three Ps’, referring to ‘police, pollution, and prisons’, we aim to illuminate and address the connection between transnational criminalisation, capitalism, patriarchal structures, and environmental exploitation. Our argument is that abolition feminism can inspire different legal engagements with the ongoing environmental catastrophe and its uneven racialised and gendered impacts. We identify three key features of abolition feminist thought that are particularly poignant in this regard. The first is abolition feminism’s use of intersectionality, not merely as a tool for better inclusion, but as a way of understanding the interlocking nature of multiple forms of oppression. The second is the ‘both/and’ approach, which embraces what appear as contradictory legal strategies to pursue longer-term political goals. The third is abolition feminism’s critique of the violent nature of racial capitalism that calls for the need to repel the state’s coercive apparatus, while exposing the role that corporations play in fostering extractivism. Whereas the complicity of the international legal order in producing ecological privileges and vulnerabilities has been discussed in the literature, in this article we contend that abolition feminism can offer fresh intellectual tools to develop both a generative critique of international legal approaches to the socio-ecological collapse, particularly those that reproduce a carceral logic, and compelling visions of more liveable societies.
Bio:
Dr Emily Jones is a Senior Research Fellow in the Newcastle University Academic Track (NUAcT) programme based in Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University, UK. Dr Jones’ interdisciplinary research applies critical theory including feminist, queer, posthuman, postcolonial and critical disability studies, to analyse and re-imagine international law. Her work spans several fields of international law, such as international environmental law, international human rights law, science, technology and international law and gender and conflict, among others. She is currently working on projects focusing on intergenerational equity and the rights of future generations, the nonhuman in international law, the right to a healthy environment and reparations in international law. Dr Jones has also published in the humanities, primarily within the fields of gender, posthuman and interdisciplinary studies.
Dr Eliana Cusato is an Assistant Professor of international law at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the academic coordinator of the UvA Decolonial Futures Research Priority Area. Her research explores the interrelation of political ecology, political economy and violence in the theory and practice of international law. She is the author of The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law (CUP, 2021). She is a member of the editorial board of the Leiden Journal of International Law (International Legal Theory). From April 2026, she will join Tilburg Law School as an Associate Professor.
Previous talks
6 Maj 2025: Fiona Vera-Gray, London Metropolitan University, UK
1 April 2025: Professor Clare McGlynn, Durham University, UK.
Title (and link to video recording): New frontiers in violence against women: AI and deepfake sexual abuse
Abstract: Deepfake sexual abuse is now an ever-present threat pervading the lives of women and girls. The threat is real, and the legal system is failing to prevent this abuse or provide effective redress. In this presentation, I examine the harms of deepfake sexual abuse and recommend the new terminology of sexual digital forgeries to better convey the nature and harms of this abuse. I set out the legal framework as advanced in the EU’s gender-based violence directive and identify some of its failings. Looking forward, I examine the new frontiers of abuse from emerging technology and the consequent challenges for legal responses.
Bio: Clare McGlynn is Professor of Law with particular expertise in the legal regulation of pornography, sexual violence and online abuse, particularly cyberflashing and image-based sexual abuse (taking, creating and sharing intimate images without consent). She is a qualified as a solicitor with City firm Herbert Smith Freehills and took up a Lectureship at Newcastle University before moving to a Readership at Durham University in 1999. She was appointed Professor of Law in 2004.
4 March 2025: Dr Paola Zichi, Warwick Law School, UK
Title (and link to video recording): ”On Feminist Governance and International Law: A Critical Legal History from Mandate Palestine”
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss an overview of my first monograph titled On Feminist Governance and International Law: A Critical Legal History from Mandate Palestine, soon to be submitted for publication with Routledge. The monograph investigates the shared history of international institutions and transnational feminism from the point of view of Mandate Palestine. Drawing upon archival research across different countries, the book unveils an underexamined history of global southern feminist transnational networks at the League of Nations. The book argues that a focus on the international legal activism of marginalised actors such as the Arab Women’s Union allows us to examine the historical formation of a prototypical form of ‘feminist governance’ in international history. By doing so, it demonstrates how today’s feminists’ missions enshrined in the UN Charters are the by-product of a much longer history of resistance and contestations at the global and colonial level. The book’s significance lies in the fact that, by highlighting Arab women’s activism and interventions at the League of Nations, it offers a pre-history of the Third World feminists’ critique of what constituted ‘international women’s rights’ long before the 1975 Mexico Conference
Bio: Paola Zichi is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Warwick Law School, working on a research project on ‘Feminist Lawyering and International Law: Women Jurists in European Legal History (1899-1949)’. Previously, she worked at QMUL History as a postdoctoral researcher on an AHRC-funded project on sex work and migration in Jewish history between 1875-1940 in Europe. In April 2020, she. completed her PhD at SOAS on feminisms, gender law reform and the League of Nations in Mandate Palestine. Her research interests and expertise fall within the broader field of feminist approaches to international law, international legal history, Jewish history, Israel/Palestine, and, broadly speaking, the history of women’s international law and global governance in the twentieth century. She won the Modern Law Review’s Helen Reece Prize for best PhD in feminist legal studies. Her forthcoming monograph, part of the Routledge Feminist and Queer International Law Series, is titled Feminist Governance and International Law: A Critical Legal History from Mandate Palestine.
4 February 2025: Dr. Silvana Tapia Tapia, University of Birmingham, UK and Universidad del Azuay’s Law School, Ecuador
Title (and link to video recording): ”Feminism, Violence Against Women, and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador”
Abstract: Challenging the consensus that penal expansion is mainly associated with the co-option of feminist campaigns to counteract violence against women in the context of neoliberal globalisation, this book shows that long-standing colonial narratives underlie many of today’s dominant legal discourses justifying criminalisation, even in countries whose governments have called themselves ”leftist” and ”post-neoliberal”. Mapping the history of law reform on violence against women in Ecuador, the book reveals how the conciliation between feminist campaigns and criminalisation strategies takes place through liberal legality, the language of human rights, and the discourse of constitutional guarantees, across the political spectrum. Whilst human rights make violence against women intelligible in mainstream legal terms, the book shows that the emergence of a ”rights-based penality” produces a benign, formally innocuous criminal law, which can be presented as progressive, but in practice reproduces colonial and postcolonial paradigms that limit and reshape feminist demands. The book raises new questions on the complex social and political factors that impact on feminist law reform projects, as it demonstrates how colonial assumptions about gender, race, class, and the family remain embedded in liberal criminal law.
Bio: Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia is Associate Professor in Law at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, where she previously held a Leverhulme Early Career fellowship (2022-2024). Until 2022, Silvana was Lecturer in Law and Coordinator of legal research at the University of Azuay, Ecuador. Her book ”Feminism, Violence against Women, and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador” received the Hart-Socio-Legal Studies Association Book Prize in 2023. Her work has been published in world-leading journals such as Feminist Theory, Social and Legal Studies, Law and Critique, and Feminist Legal Studies.
Silvana’s research empirically examines the limitations of criminal legal system and mainstream human rights frameworks in addressing violence against women. Employing an anticolonial and abolitionist lens, Dr Tapia Tapia collaborates with anti-carceral grassroots organisations to understand the impact of penality on marginalised women’s lives and the role of criminal law and hegemonic human rights in the production of carceral violence.
7 January 2025: Professor Emerita Nicola Lacey, London School of Economics, UK.
Title (and link to video recording): ”Revisiting Feminist Legal Theory”
Abstract: In this seminar, Prof Nicola Lacey reflects on her recent experience of teaching feminist legal theory to undergraduates for the first time in 20 years. What has changed in terms of students’ expectations and the resources available in the classroom? And how has feminist scholarship shaped legal studies in the past two decades?
17 December 2024, 12-13 (CET): Dr Rohini Sen, Jindal Global Law School, India.
Title (and link to video recording): ”TWAIL Feminisms: Divergent Praxis, Contingent Subjects”
Abstract: This work explores the intersection of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and critical feminist approaches through different configurations such as TWAIL and Feminisms, TWAIL-Feminisms and, TWAIL Feminisms. These configurations critically examine the structural inequalities embedded in international law, revealing how these systems perpetuate power imbalances favoring a few while marginalizing others in diverse ways. TWAIL Feminisms challenge the notion of universal legal principles and subjects by highlighting the different, complex and often conflicting experiences of those in the periphery, particularly in the Global South. The scope of this work is to foreground how TWAIL Feminisms are not merely gendered perspectives but are comprehensive critiques of international law’s hegemonic structures, including patriarchy, capitalism, and Eurocentrism which affect everyone, however differentially. By focusing on the crises of international law, dominant feminisms, and the production of legal subjectivities, TWAIL Feminisms offer new ways of understanding and transforming legal frameworks which are more inclusive and attentive to experiences and knowledge frameworks beyond the mainstream. In this work, I hope to illustrate TWAIL feminisms as heuristics and critique by emphasizing the politics of definitions and categories and by positioning TWAIL and feminisms as dynamic processes rather than static concepts. In these forms, TWAIL Feminisms intervene in international legal structures and processes with the aim of reimagining it through the experiences and alternate epistemologies of different marginalized subjects where marginality is also a location of empowered clarity from where the status quo may be challenged.
Short Bio: Rohini Sen is an Associate Professor at the Jindal Global Law School and teaches as a Visiting Faculty in different institutions across India. Rohini thinks about, reads and writes on the various engagements between Law, Social Sciences and Humanities through ideas of – critical thinking, critical pedagogies, queer and feminist approaches and, different cosmologies of knowledge-making.
5 November 2024: Professor Ulrika Andersson, Lund University, Sweden.
Title: ”Personal and Professional”
Abstract: Feminist legal theory and method in a wide sense have been crucial to my academic career, personally as well as professionally. In this presentation I give an example of this, without actually emphasizing feminism as such. I take point of departure in a concrete case of family reunification for young unaccompanied children. My aim is to expose how the traditional legal notion of the liberal subject fails to provide protection in the context of legal practice. Instead, I argue for using the vulnerable subject as a starting point, to make more visible the context in which law operates and ensure protection even for the youngest children. I also call for an awareness of the mobile commons– the informal support that exists among migrating people, NGOs, and activists – in relation to the realization of family reunification.
1 October 2024: Dr Usha Natarajan
Title (and link to video recording): ”No Coward Soul is Mine: #MeToo in Academia”
Abstract: The #MeToo movement exposed cultures of sexual harassment in many industries and academia merits sustained attention. Increasingly, people are speaking out about sexual harassment as well as other forms of gender-based violence that are equally pervasive in academia albeit garnering less attention. While individual circumstances and voices are unique, there are some unmistakable patterns with regard to the types of privilege perpetrators exercise, the ways in which society displaces shame and guilt onto survivors, institutional complicity and cover ups, as well as widespread enabling and normalizing of gender-based violence. Cultures of complicity and hypocrisy can be changed. As people all over the world and of different generations of academia find their voice and share their wisdom, we better understand patterns of abuse and collusion in academic life. We formulate effective strategies and mobilize together tactically for change. Crucially, by giving voice to diverse experiences, those suffering in similar situations know that they are not alone and can not only survive but thrive.
4 June 2024: Professor Eva-Maria Svensson
Title: The Nordic states’ contribution to the shaping of EU gender equality law and policy
View the seminar recorded here
Abstract: The Nordic countries are broadly seen as a role model for gender equality. The objective of this chapter is to illuminate the interplay of the Nordic and EU legal regimes on gender equality, with a specific focus on how the Nordic states have contributed to the shaping of EU law. The complex and dynamic interplay is formed in a broader context; institutional, practical, and, normative. What is so significant for the comprehensive Nordic gender equality model is that it is not based only on legislation, but perhaps even more on policies and general welfare measures. The chapter embraces both political and legal aspects of the Europeanisation and shows some examples of gender equality exports of significance in the interplay between the Nordic countries and EU, family work life balance, prohibition of purchase of sex and gender quotas in company boards.
7 May 2024 Professor Jennifer Nedelsky
Title: Revaluing Care: Part Time for All and More Than Human Constitutionalism
View the seminar recording here
Abstract: This talk will present my argument in Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (co-authored with Tom Malleson, Oxford, 2023) along with some of its implications for my new project, “Constitutionalism through a More Than Human Lens.” PTfA sets out a program for new norms: everyone contributes about 22 hours a week of unpaid care and no-one does paid work more than 30 hours a week. We argue that these norms are vital for overcoming the pressing problems of family stress, inequality for care-givers, policy makers ignorant of care (the care/policy divide), and chronic time scarcity. Everyone needs to care because everyone needs to learn what is learned from doing care. The net result will be a revaluing of care. This is essential not only to equality and human well-being, but the capacity of humans to care for the earth—and to understand that care as a mutual responsibility. My relational approach (Law’s Relations, 2011) finally includes “all our relations.”
Dr Matilda Arvidsson 