What does it mean to talk about gender inclusivity in the legal sphere? In this lecture, migration emerges as grounds for discussions on how gender-specific laws and policies can fight or reinforce discrimination against those marginalised in contemporary society. Further, on how the pretence neutrality of the legal system hides its Western, white, patriarchal, and cis-hetero normative origins, hindering possibilities of queer inclusivity and protection.
About the speakers:
Elias Tissiandier-Nasom is a researcher and Project Coordinator at the Dutch NGO Global Human Rights Defence. He graduated with an advanced LLM in European and International Human Rights Law and an LL.M. in Public International Law from Leiden University. He also graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Sciences Po Paris. His research aims to understand human rights limitations to gendered laws and policies, particularly when targeting transgender and non-binary identities. Their recent work addresses the legal recognition of non-binary gender identities through third-gender markers in European states and the inclusion of trans asylum seekers under the definition of refugee in the Common European Asylum System.
Lucia Kula is an International Human Rights Lawyer and Lecturer in Law and Gender at SOAS University London. Her research focuses on an interdisciplinary study of international law, forced migration and gendered violence through an auto-ethnographic lens. With a background in EU law and human rights law, her interest in the language and the epistemology of legal scholarship weaves together the lived experiences of those in liminal spaces of belonging such as borders and borderlands. Through an interrogation of feminist legal scholarship, she examines how legal theory understands (il)legality and (im)mobility, and how conflict and violence affect displaced bodies through the multidimensional continuum of cross-border migrations.
This event is organised with the support of the Decentering Eurocentrism Interdisciplinary Research Cluster.