Language: English

All are welcome. Free admission

This lecture explores the challenges and opportunities of gender constitutionalism in order to explain the extent to which constitutional law and litigation have provided an adequate venue to advance the equality claims of women and sexual and gender diverse people in the Asian context. In particular, the focus on the constitutional framing of sexual and reproductive rights seeks to illuminate questions about the relationship between gender constitutionalism and national identity. A comparative analysis of the constitutional treatment of sexual and reproductive rights in several Asian jurisdictions reveals a spectrum of approaches, which reflect a combination of nationalist, cosmopolitan, and pragmatic responses to demands for change in these areas. This set of questions will be explored in a comparative perspective and through an in depth case-study, that of Nepal — one of the few jurisdictions in the world in which reproductive rights are explicitly enshrined in the text of the constitution.