In international human rights law, the right to food has become a widely accepted legal and normative framework for tackling the problem of food insecurity. However, as currently formulated, the right to food is insufficient as a framework to tackle gender-specific barriers that impede women's access to food, which has contributed to the persistence of women's food insecurity globally. While the equal enjoyment of the right to food is guaranteed by the non-discrimination and equality provisions in international law, this notion of equality, associated with the formal equality approach, fails to recognise and address women's historical experience of systemic discrimination. This article argues that women's food insecurity should be approached from a broader formulation of the right to food that is informed by a substantive equality perspective, drawing from contemporary interpretations and elucidations by human rights bodies which have pushed for a more substantive notion of equality.

Drawing on a qualitative study of Hong Kong's Women's Commission (‘WoC’), this article examines how institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women function in a hybrid regime that includes both democratic and authoritarian elements. Hong Kong has a rights-based legal framework and equality agencies that support the operation of equality laws and policies. Paradoxically, Hong Kong's political system is non-democratic, and Beijing's Central People's Government is exerting more direct control on the territory. Grounded in qualitative interviews conducted with WoC members, non-governmental organisations, and scholars in Hong Kong, this article concludes that the WoC's full institutional potential in drawing attention to gender inequalities has not been realised. The implementation of authoritarian governance practices also has implications for the WoC's composition and agenda and may inhibit the development of progressive gender equality strategies to advance the status of women.

Legality of abortion has been one of the most controversial political initiatives in modern times, which also impacts the healthcare delivery system especially for women. The debate often devolves into disagreement on either access to services on demand from healthcare providers or service refusal regardless of the circumstances. However, the reality is different from this bipolar conversation. Instead, it varies depending upon location of the potential abortion recipient and a host of factors associated with nation-states. Thus, our purpose is to reveal different legislative protocols that lead to or inhibit availability of this aspect of women's reproductive rights, and to empirically determine what are the underlying series of factors that drive these policy decisions. Together they reveal a complex mosaic of fundamental principles that are rarely considered when formulating public policy. We hope our research across nations will help healthcare providers and policy makers recognize the genealogy of options and opportunities as they continue to debate abortion's provision to women within healthcare systems.

In 2020 the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland held that the legislation that permitted abortion in cases of ‘fatal foetal anomaly’ was an unconstitutional interference with the right to life of the foetus. This article examines the recent decision, which prohibits abortion on the grounds of foetal anomaly, arguing that this decision is part of a broader scheme of Polish and transnational anti-abortion lawfare. This lawfare seeks both to (re)shape Polish law in an anti-abortion mould, and to take advantage of ‘gaps’ in European and international human rights law standards on abortion in order to claim rights compliance for law and policy that, in reality, restricts access to abortion in a manner that is incompatible with international human rights law.

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which ‘leftover’ women navigate legal and social discrimination. ‘Leftover women’ is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual ‘leftover’ women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: ‘buying a licence to be deviant’ and ‘identity-hopping’. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. ‘Buying a licence to be deviant’ refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. ‘Identity-hopping’ is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law.

This article examines the instrumentalization of women's rights and the transformation of the gender rights regime in the context of democratic backsliding in Turkey. I show how the Islamically rooted Justice and Development Party governments and their allies used women's rights in constructing authoritarian rule and promoting a conservative gender agenda. The governing elites had different needs at different political stages and instrumentalized women's rights to meet those needs. First, they needed to legitimize their rule in a secular context, so they expanded liberal laws on women's rights. Second, in the process of backsliding, they sought to construct and legitimize their conservative ideology, so they reinterpreted existing laws to promote conservative goals. Finally, they wanted to mobilize conservative women in support of the newly authoritarian regime, so they built new institutions and marginalized existing women's NGOs. The article contributes to the literature on regime types and gender rights by shifting the focus from regime type to regime change.

Pivoting around two sit-ins at the University of Georgia, this article examines student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US South. The first sit-in, at the conclusion of the spring 1968 March for Coed Equality, was part of the effort to overcome parietal rules that significantly restricted women's rights but left men relatively untouched. The second occurred in 1972 when the university responded to salacious allegations of immorality in women's residence halls by replacing progressive residential education programming with the policing of student behavior. This article centers student efforts for women's rights, demonstrates how students and administrators shifted tactics in reaction to external stimuli, and explores the repercussions of challenging the entrenched patriarchal power structure. In so doing, it joins the growing literature complicating understandings of student activism in the era by focusing attention away from the most famous and extreme cases.

The suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical scholarship. This essay brings together new research to demonstrate their close connections. Many suffragists became active in the birth control movement just before and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The roots of suffrage arguments were deeply embedded in the same ideas that were foundational to the birth control movement: bodily freedom and notions of what constituted full and participatory citizenship. Beginning in the 1840s, women's rights reformers directly connected the vote to a broad range of economic and political issues, including the concept of self-ownership. Wide-ranging debates about individual autonomy remained present in women's rights rhetoric and were then repeated in the earliest arguments for legalizing birth control. The twentieth-century birth control movement, like the suffrage movement before it (which had largely focused only on achieving the vote for white women), would then grapple with competing goals of restrictive racist and eugenic arguments for contraception alongside the emphasis on achieving emancipation for all women.

Society thinks, talks, and communicates in ways which are inherently different now from the pre-Internet era. Hashtags in particular have transformed community formation around a particular topic, issue, or goal. A new and relatively under-studied phenomenon is that of ‘hashtag hijacking’, where individuals or groups use a particular hashtag to draw attention to arguments and narratives which undermine or oppose the hashtag's objective. Most of the current literature looks at hashtag hijacking as a positive outlet for counter-discourse/counter-narratives to challenge dominant groups. This study, however, looks at the ‘dark side’ of hashtag hijacking, where groups use trolling tactics similar to the Alt_Right to reinforce misogynistic views. The hijacking of three hashtags is explored in this study: #notacriminal, #women2drive, and #mydressmychoice, to explore feminist theories on the role of social media in a ‘public space’. Does Twitter function as one common public sphere where inequalities are so deeply embedded that minority voices have no hope of being heard? Or does Twitter function as a meeting place for multiple competing public spheres, thus allowing minority – and in this case feminist – voices to be heard?

Domestic violence is the predominant form of violence against women in most countries in Africa and Latin America. Scholars have theorized the adoption of domestic violence laws and policies in both regions. However, policy implementation is understudied and under theorized. Therefore, we compare how international organizations and women's nongovernmental organizations have influenced the implementation of domestic violence policies by police officers in Liberia and Nicaragua. We introduce the concept of the transnational implementation process and describe how international organizations and women's organizations have employed training, institutional and policy restructuring, and monitoring to influence police behavior at the street level. The effects of these strategies have been conditional on the political environment. We identify two patterns of international and domestic influence on street-level implementation: internationally led and domestically supported implementation in Liberia, with domestically led and internationally supported implementation in Nicaragua.