A presentation by Ruth Rubio Marín, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sevilla. This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
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 will take us through a journey form the inception of constitutionalism to the present day and from an exclusionary gender constitutionalism (which denied women and sexual minorities an equal citizenship status) to an inclusive gender constitutionalism (which affirmed their equality yet mostly measured against male standards that privileged the public realm) to a more recent and still tentative form of transformative gender constitutionalism that asserts the political relevance of the private domain and foregrounds the need to dis-establish 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.
Ruth Rubio Marín is Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sevilla as well as member of the Faculty of The Hauser Global Law School Program at New York University and the holder of the UNIA Unesco Chair in Human Rights and Interculturalism. Formerly, she held a Chair in Comparative Public Law at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy where she currently teaches at the School of Transnational Governance. Professor Rubio has taught at several other prestigious academic institutions including Columbia Law School and Princeton University. Her research attempts to understand how public law creates categories of inclusion and exclusion around different axis including gender, citizenship, nationality and ethnicity. Her works include Transforming gender citizenship: The irresistible rise of gender quotas in Europe, with Lépinard (eds.) Cambridge University Press, 2018 and Women as Constitution Makers: Case Studies from the New Democratic Era (with Helen Irving, eds.) Cambridge University Press, 2019. Her most recent book is Global Gender Constitutionalism and Women´s Citizenship: A Struggle for Transformative Inclusion, Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details as well as a draft paper, on which the presentation is based, via e-mail prior to the event.
