Women and International Investment Law

This chapter proposes a feminist engagement with International Investment Law (IIL) to determine whether and how it envisions and impacts women's rights. Since IIL has turned into a potent governance structure, it is crucial to establish its participation in shaping the meaning of gender and in drawing the contours of what it means to be a woman in international law. To do so, the chapter analyzes IIL's silences regarding women and gender and the way in which it deploys the public/private and national/international dichotomies. It also explores the participation of women in the specialized elite that has emerged from IIL's adjudication system. This chapter's main objectives are to map the emergent scholarship on the interface between women and IIL and examine how this international law regulatory framework works as background norms of gendered capitalism.