Loading...
Strategic Human Rights Litigation: A Feminist Reflection
Yoshida, Keina
Yoshida, Keina
Files
Loading...
105.pdf
Adobe PDF, 1.64 MB
Abstract
In 2012, I was lucky enough to attend a Black feminist event at the Trafford Rape Crisis Centre in Manchester, United Kingdom, where Kimberlé W. Crenshaw and Sara Ahmed spoke about intersectional feminism. Ahmed explained that she often turns to the work of Audre Lorde as a feminist lifeline. Lifelines can be “anything or perhaps it is always something” and that something might be “words sent out by a writer, gathered in the form of a book, words that you hang on to, that can pull you out of an existence, which can, perhaps later, on another day, pull you into a more livable world.” Lorde’s work questioning whether the master’s tools could ever dismantle the master’s house, is among my lifelines. The question has taken on a different significance for me and has become central to my own thinking about strategic feminist praxis and the law. Can the law ever really dismantle patriarchy and challenge the oppression and discrimination women suffer through structural inequalities? What is the role of the master’s tools in all of this? How is the law complicit in such oppression?