Global gender constitutionalism and women’s citizenship

Abstract

It is generally assumed that liberal constitutionalism has offered a platform for women and sexual minorities to affirm their equal citizenship status. But has this really been the case? Have constitutions throughout history and the world facilitated their emancipatory claims or rather acted as a stumbling blocks? By drawing from examples of jurisdictions from all continents the lecture takes us through a journey form the inception of constitutionalism to the present day and from and exclusionary gender constitutionalism (which denied women and sexual minorities an equal citizenship status), to an inclusive gender constitutionalism (which affirmed their equality yet mostly measures against male standards that privileged the public realm), to a more recent and still tentative form transformative gender constitutionalism that asserts the political relevance of the private domain and foregrounds the need to disestablish gender roles within it, facilitated by a participatory turn demanding that women and other minorities join in constitution-making and public decision-making in ways that enable their say in defining the contours of constitutionalism.