Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

HLML2025: Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law: Continuing Conversations with Karen Knop - Session II - Gender and Feminism

·1 hr 6 min·5 clips

Professor Christine Trimkin reveals how 1920s laws stripped married women of their nationality, reducing them to 'simply being the wife'.

The episode is the second session of a lecture series commemorating Karen Knop, featuring two main speakers. Professor Christine Trimkin, an emeritus professor of international law, delivers a lecture structured around three 'encounters' with Knop's work. She first examines the early 20th-century campaign for married women's equal nationality rights, highlighting how laws forced women to adopt their husband's nationality, erasing their legal identity. Trimkin links this to self-determination, arguing it denied women individual choice. Second, she discusses the Tokyo Women's Tribunal (2000), a people's tribunal that judged Japanese wartime sexual slavery, which official courts ignored. Trimkin frames this as feminist 'alternative history' challenging international law's exclusions. Third, she covers the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (1981-2000), a protest against NATO nuclear missiles that created a women-only space and used legal arguments against genocide. Trimkin concludes by mentioning contemporary examples like the women's village in Rojava, Syria. Dr. Maitha Taha, an assistant professor, then presents a talk titled 'Ways of Seeing on the Gendering Work of Law and Violence.' She draws on Knop's metaphor of looking at portraits in an art gallery to critique how international law hides exclusions. Taha applies this to Palestine, arguing that legal categories like 'genocide' abstract from the slow violence of settler colonialism and that statistics on women and children obfuscate politics. She emphasizes seeing resistance from the margins. The format is a structured academic lecture with personal reflections, exploring themes of feminist methodology, historical erasure, and the limits of international legal frameworks.

As heard by us

A careful look at how feminist activism challenges erased histories and changes the legal meaning of protest.

The episode frames feminist legal history through power: who gets to decide which actions count, which stories enter the record, and which are pushed aside.

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Why you'd press play

You want to see Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp reframed through feminist international law, where protest becomes a way to notice what law usually leaves outside the frame.

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