Establishing Sexual Rights in International Law
Kudos to Mindy Jane Roseman, our Academic Director, who co-authored an article in this summer’s issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. Mindy’s expertise lies in sexual and reproductive rights; she’s currently working on a report about the forced sterilization of HIV-positive women in Namibia.
She co-authored the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender article, Normalizing Sex and its Discontents: Establishing Sexual Rights in International Law, with Alice M. Miller, an Associate Research Scholar in Law and Robina Foundation Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School.
Here’s how they describe the substance of it:
“Sexuality has become an essential component of humanity in the modern world, and in the last twenty years has become a major site upon which human rights claims have been advancing. This article examines some of those claims, as they are articulated through the UN human rights machinery, and suggests that the nature of international law making, and the political economy of UN institutions, coupled with the sectoral nature of human rights claims making itself, may impinge more upon the content of sexual rights than advocates realize. Advancing human rights norms around sexuality is critical; advancing them with critical awareness (of the means of their production), however, is indispensible.”
Mindy’s been busy this year: the University of Pennsylvania Press recently released Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward, a book she co-edited with Laura Reichenbach, Head of the Reproductive Health Unit at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh in Dhaka, Bangladesh.