Constitutionalism and Governance

From 18^th to 21^st October 2024, Professor Aoife O’Donoghue (Queen’s University Belfast) and Dr Ruth Houghton (Newcastle Law School) were teaching a course on “Feminist Constitutionalism: Law, Gender and Constitutions” at Masaryk University (MUNI) Law School. MUNI Law is based in Brno in Czechia.

The module was divided into five seminars: (1) Gender, Feminism and Law (2) Intersectionality, Poststructuralism, and Posthumanism, (3) Feminist Constitutionalism: Constitutional Change, (4) Speculative Feminist Constitutions (Manifestos, Utopias), and (5) Drafting a Feminist Constitution. After introducing students to a variety of feminist perspectives, the course takes a deep-dive into approaches of feminist constitutionalism. Drawing on Houghton and O’Donoghue’s work on feminist approaches to constituent power, the course interrogates processes of constitutional change through feminist lenses. Houghton and O’Donoghue highlight the role of feminist manifestos in claims of constituent power made by feminist movements and women’s activists across different historical periods and around the world. Working with this approach to manifestos within constitutionalism, the course works towards two creative tasks: writing feminist manifestos and then drawing on feminist perspectives to (re)write constitutional provisions.

As part of the Speculative Feminist Constitutions seminar, students worked in teams and individually to write their own manifestos. This teaching technique draws on workshops on feminist constitutional-drafting that are run by the FemCon team, as well as drawing inspiration from Joy Twemlow’s use of Zine-making as a teaching method and the DIYing Gender zine-making guide. The different feminist manifestos that students wrote were then compiled into a Zine:

Ruth and Aoife would like to thank all the students who participated in the course for their enthusiasm and their openness to sharing ideas, stories and examples. They would also like to sincerely thank Markéta Štěpáníková for the invitation to come to MUNI and Věra Redrupová for sorting out all the logistics including buying paper and glue as well as getting the scissors to aid in making the Zines.

Principles of doing feminist constitutionalism include (un)learning and continually working to learn from each other. And indeed, throughout the course there was a mutual sharing of knowledge and understanding about different constitutional and legal cultures.