Gendering the Hallways of International Law Through Intersectional Portraits and Life Stories^*

In academia, international law is commonly perceived to be rooted in its ›founding fathers‹ – of whom Hugo Grotius is most famous – through which a white, male and elitist image of the discipline’s history has been continuously generated and perpetuated. Immi Tallgren’s edited volume titled Portraits of Women in International Law. New Names and Forgotten Faces? seeks to confront this male-biased representation and to remove the gendered blind spot by inserting stories of women’s contributions into the history of international law. It is not her objective to rewrite the history in itself, but to disrupt the so far dominant gendered, racialized and classed imagery by adding onto it through diversifying and creating an inclusive, gendered and shared narrative. The discipline – through this holistic endeavour – is opened up to become defined in the broadest of terms as an intellectual tradition and social practice, to which not only lawyers have contributed, but also individuals who imagined, developed and contested international law.

The book explicitly calls for the reader to visualise it as a gallery or as the hallways of an exhibition on international law, with 42 portraits in it. Each portrait is represented by visual imagery and offers narrative potential that is then explored by the contributors. The book is structured in parts designed to reflect the architectural wings of the exhibition; for example, »The Winter Garden of Abolition and Resistance: Women against Slavery, Racism and Imperialism«, »The Breakers of the Glass Ceiling: The ›First and Only‹ in International Institutions«, »The Hall of Diversity of Feminist |Activism in International Law« and »The Roof-Top Gallery of Diplomacy and International Relations«. Each chapter offers a biographical portrait of an individual – or a group of individuals – who have contributed to the history of international law in their respective capacities as activists, professors of law, wives, feminists, philosophers and so on. As the subtitle »New Names and Forgotten Faces« implies, some of these women were never perceived as contributors to international law (or did not consider themselves to be) but were remembered for other contributions, some were previously recognised as contributing to the discipline but have been forgotten over time, and some were explicitly acknowledged as part of the international law scene. These portraits aim not only to address the gendered blind spot in international law, but also to provide intersectional approaches which include gender, race, colonialism, sexuality and other forms of differences. The exhibition format implies gaps – storage units containing portraits not on display – and a continuance, a never-ending curation by any visitors who might feel like someone is missing or something should be restructured. Tallgren calls for readers to engage with the work and perceive it as on-going. Thus, the image of the exhibition as an unfinished gallery of hallways with portraits divided into various wings functions as the organising principle of the book.

This edited volume was created as part of Tallgren’s research project »End of International Law (As We Know It)? ›Women‹ and the Construction of Another International Order« funded by the Kone Foundation, at the Erik Castén Institute of International Law and Human Rights of the University of Helsinki, where she is a Senior Researcher. It brings together over fifty contributors from across continents and is the outcome of various online collaborations between 2020 and 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The premises of the book might initially instigate scepticism in the reader, for a number of reasons. The visual use of portraiture or the symbolic use of the exhibition, the attempt to resolve the women’s question of ›Where are the women?‹, the apparent use of ›women‹ as a comprehensible category and its male-female binary implications – all these seem outdated and remind us predominantly of the 1970s’ push for more interest to be paid to the status of women. However, Tallgren acknowledges these aspects in her introductory chapter »Re-curating the Portrait Gallery of International Law: The Objectives, Process, and Floorplan of the Exhibition« where she states that the outdated starting points of the work function as a call for attention or a manifesto to address how the waves of critical questioning and revision on sex and gender have not yet managed to reach the histories of international law. Furthermore, in the actual work it becomes clear that the category of ›women‹ is not represented or defined in a homogenised, essentialised or universal manner, and there are no attempts to trace an overall history of women’s involvement in international law or to depict these women as having a joint or shared history.

Nonetheless, Tallgren also claims that this re-curation project per definition challenges essentialism and implies a diversity of understanding and descriptions of sex and gender, through which it would be impossible – according to her – to see the male and female binaries as foundational to the work. But this argument is less convincing. Whilst there is no representation of a homogenised idea of ›women‹, for the predominant part of the volume (apart from a few exceptions such as the chapter on Thomas Baty) women’s achievements are formulated in binary relations to those of men as their husbands, colleagues and contemporaries. Thus, whilst her argument might be true for the overarching work, within the chapters the binary is not always broken. Additionally, there seems to be an at times redundant focus on feminism. Suzanne Bastid, for example, is described as »an emblem of progress for women’s access to the legal professions, but was she a feminist?« (230); which the chapter authors answer by stating that she conformed to the heteronormative expectations for married women and mothers as she was cooking daily meals, whilst on the other hand she was working ambitiously, travelling abroad and using help for household chores. One cannot help but question whether these arguments are actually useful for the narrative, and to which extent they are based on Western definitions of feminism.

With a captivating premise and unique structure – but a sometimes overwhelming amount of‍‍‍ historical and biographical information and detail –, the differentiated perspectives on women as subjects, agents and creators of international law provoke us to challenge our perspectives on how we define international law and who we perceive to have contributed to its fabric.