| Summary: | In a conversation with bell hooks in 1996, Stuart Hall recounted his surprise when many feminists during the 1970s became Marxist Feminists: ‘I was more shaken by feminism’s critique of Marxism than they were,’ he confessed.1 He could not see how it was possible to reconcile these two political and intellectual movements. While tensions between Marxism and Feminism persist to this day, this chapter seeks to illustrate what a Marxist Feminist approach that builds on and transforms Marxism can add to the study of international law. Building on its recent revival, we sketch how Marxist Feminism can fundamentally reconstruct Marxist analysis of international law by illuminating the gendered and racialized relations of production and reproduction as a key organizing principle of capitalism and its international legal forms and histories. Such a Marxist Feminist perspective, moreover, can radically change how we view women’s relationship to international law. Rather than a tool for liberation that stands outside the economic order, international law emerges as a key social terrain for the struggle against capitalist patriarchy precisely because it operates as a key site of social reproduction.
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