This article considers how Margaret Jane Radin’s theory of the feminist double bind can bring conceptual clarity to the difficulties feminisms face in engaging with political and legal institutions of global governance. I draw on her theory to reinitiate a conversation on ideal and nonideal theory, in order to answer the call of key proponents in international legal feminism to reevaluate methodologies in critiquing mainstream institutions. By providing an account of how to navigate the double bind, this article brings conceptual clarity to the tension between resistance and compliance that has been argued to lie at the heart of the feminist project in international law. I demonstrate how this theoretical framework can foster greater pluralist perspectives in feminist engagement of ideal theories to temper the deradicalising and conservative risk of navigating feasibility constrained nonideal strategies.
Legal feminist theories have troubled dominant conceptions of statehood, revealing the threat of the ‘Other’ as integral to the hegemonic masculinity of powerful states. In this paper I provide a critical gendered discourse analysis of the UN Security Council’s response to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL). I consider the role of personification in constituting legal subjects as states (persons) and excavate this from the Council’s resolutions concerning Iraq. In constituting ISIL as a barbaric, hypermasculine terror group in relational opposition to the state of Iraq, the Council draws on gendered normativities ordinarily veiled by seemingly objective legal criteria as to the creation of states. Whilst the state of Iraq is constituted through the hegemonic model of statehood, one premised upon democratic, liberal Westphalian ideals, it is still subject to the paternalism of the Security Council. In this way, the state of Iraq is framed as failing to reach a particular masculine standard of statehood, and is thus subject to the continuation of ‘civilising’ discourses. Thus, instead of asking whether ISIL is or is not a state under international law, it is revealing to consider how responses to it work to maintain and (re)produce a graded, hierarchical international community of states.
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