Abstract
Maritime historiography, as well as the modern maritime world, needs this impressive and path- breaking collection of essays about gender’s relationship with the law of the sea. This book’s stimulatingly global approach enables us to give profound attention to the gendered – and therefore limited – thinking behind how we regulate the use of our seas. It also assists in clarifying the status of the 350 million people working in/on/ by the sea, as well as the temporary users, such as smuggled migrants and armed forces women serving on vessels. Such far-sighted thinking about recent decades and the future can enable historians to raise their consciousness of gendered maritime legal situations in the distant past
Unwise people might expect, from the title, a summary of what goes wrong for women in 24:7 floating institutions: women ranging from pregnant cruise ship croupiers to tuna fish smoker staff to trafficked refugees. To be sure, discriminatory employment opportunities, the sexual harassment that has been so exposed by the #MeToo movement, and unjust social conditions for workers on land and littorals certainly are discussed. However, human rights and labour law are less the point than two main foci: questioning ‘the apparent neutrality of existing rules and legal instruments’ (3) and exploring the frameworks that help societies move towards women’s empowerment and equality.
A 2017 Milan conference on the subject brought about this book. Most of the 17 authors here are very global citizens indeed: lawyers, lecturers in law and even a judge. These leading members of a plethora of international agencies with concerns ranging from sustainability, poverty, cultural heritage, and climate change bring valuable perspectives to this book. Rigorous and clear-sighted co-operative questioning tackle the many ways that laws, as tools ‘to pursue societal ends’ (2), impact on maritime life.
‘What’s love got to do with it!’ Tina Turner once sang. Equally it might be asked ‘what’s gender got to do with it?’ – maritime law. As this book repeatedly shows, legislation and its cultural contexts are gendered in many ways. This includes protecting ‘vulnerable women and children’ (and thereby under-estimating women’s abilities). Difficulties also involve the failure to comprehend that many statements and initiatives, such as the Geneva Convention, are imagined to be ‘gender neutral’. But actually they are built on a foundation of unacknowledged bias. They can perpetuate hegemonic, unconstructive, patriarchal controls – conscious or not.
So this is a book for people interested in the bigger philosophical and practical problems of how we can make legal changes which lead to social and cultural change. It will be welcomed by blue-sky, non-traditional thinkers, and for those who value thorough works. It’s not for browsers who want a quick flip through condensed versions of Maritime law re Dames, for Dummies. (No, such a thing doesn’t exist, anyway.)
Editor Irini Papanicolopulu has divided the 16 chapters of Gender and the Law of the Sea into two parts. Part one comprises six chapters on the general framework of gender and the law of the sea. Part two is made up of nine chapters under the heading gender and maritime activities.
Part one’s summaries of the laws of the sea, as they relate to gender, are wide in scope, and very usefully referenced. Together with Papanicolopulu’s introduction, Gabriele Goettsche-Wanli’s encyclopaedic chapter would make the basis for a one-year course in the subject. Her 280 footnotes are not only germane, but also, because of the global perspective, they will help point scholars towards initiatives far beyond their own countries.
Loveday Hodson provided the most visionary – but perhaps impossiblist – chapter in this section: ‘Mermaids and Utopias: the High Seas as a Feminist Space?’ Taking a literary and cultural studies perspective, she uses both the hybrid bi-located girl-fish figure and Women on Waves (the Dutch ship that provides safe off-shore abortions) in her argument for a new vision of the sea: common property and an alternative conceptual regime, beyond the gendered binaries and sovereign territories.
This reviewer finds that part one needed to provider more concrete examples and focus on major tendencies. Sometimes it was hard to see the wood for the trees. Sometimes it was hard to comprehend which were the key trees, because of the overarching focus on policy. Also not enough attention was explicitly paid to tackling women’s multiple difficulties – race, class, sexual orientation and disability – on top of gender.
I could find no mention of the most important case of our times: that of Safmarine cadet Akhona Geveza, whose parents think she was raped and murdered by a senior officer in 2010. Such an omission is a bit like discussing naval war without referring to Nelson or movie history without mentioning Marilyn Monroe. Nor is there reference to the new phenomenon of cruise ship crime, in which women (passengers and crew) are disproportionately the main people to inexplicably disappear overboard, and become victims of legislative black holes.
Part two moves beyond the abstract. It includes chapters on the management of marine living resources and sustainable development; migration; and maritime labour. Among the very interesting information was the acknowledgment of a foundational difference in thinking about prostitution. Are all sex-workers abused victims of crime? Or are they just people making a living by doing a stigmatised job, like sewerage workers? Such characterisations affect the way smuggled and trafficked women at sea are seen by legislators and campaigners.
I would have preferred far more insightful indexing, interventionist editing, and some images. But even so these 366 pages are dense with crucial data. Most contributions are invaluably clear-sighted about gender’s significance, especially in their concluding sections.
This over-all feat implicitly raises the question ‘How can the legal worlds and maritime worlds have done without such a study for so long?’ Singly and together, the contributors create coherence and global understanding of maritime difficulties. They do so in a field where such matters are, if discussed at all, too often fragmented, under-systemic, and fuzzy about the way gender actually underpins so much of life.