It is generally assumed that liberal constitutionalism has offered a platform for women and sexual minorities to affirm their equal citizenship status. But has this really been the case? Have constitutions throughout history and the world facilitated their emancipatory claims or rather acted as a stumbling blocks? By drawing from examples of jurisdictions from all continents the lecture takes us through a journey form the inception of constitutionalism to the present day and from and exclusionary gender constitutionalism (which denied women and sexual minorities an equal citizenship status), to an inclusive gender constitutionalism (which affirmed their equality yet mostly measures against male standards that privileged the public realm), to a more recent and still tentative form transformative gender constitutionalism that asserts the political relevance of the private domain and foregrounds the need to disestablish gender roles within it, facilitated by a participatory turn demanding that women and other minorities join in constitution-making and public decision-making in ways that enable their say in defining the contours of constitutionalism.
Ruth Rubio Marín is a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sevilla, as well as the holder of the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Interculturalism at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. She is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Transnational Governance (STG), where she leads the work on Gender, Diversity and Governance. Previously, Professor Rubio Marín held a Chair in Comparative Public Law at the European University Institute. She has taught at several other prestigious academic institutions, including Columbia Law School; Princeton University and NYU, where she is a member the Hauser Global Law School Program. Her research represents an attempt to understand how public law creates categories of inclusion and exclusion around different axes including gender, citizenship, nationality and ethnicity both in peaceful and conflict-ridden contexts. Her publications are mostly in the area of law and gender, constitutional law, citizenship and democracy, immigration law as well as transitional justice.