Morss on Gender and Culture in International Legal Theory.

John R. Morss, Deakin University Law School, has published ‘Call Me Ahab’: On Gender and Culture in International Legal Theory. Here is the abstract.

This paper investigates the project of public international law from two directions. First from the direction of the gendered character of international law; second from the direction of international law as cultural analysis. If gendered discourse plays a role within international law it is likely to operate in a ubiquitous and a structural manner, not in ways that are entirely captured by considerations of equity and representation. The search for national identities or personalities is a quest as perverse as that of Ahab. Whether from the ’inside’ – the identity politics of the nationalist – or from the ‘outside’ – the armchair analyses of the scholar of history, of culture, or of international law – this search is in some way not yet articulated, the opposite of what we should be doing.

The full text is not available from SSRN.