In international law, the category of “violence against women” has been assembled through different legal instruments, interpretive practices and institutional responses, including the CEDAW Committee General Recommendations (GR), UN declarations, and regional treaties, each with different legal effects and (slightly) different understandings of what violence is. The result is a category that remains dispersed among sources rather than contained in a single, universally binding treaty.

This raises a critical question. When international law norms identify something as violence against women, what kinds of violence become legally visible? And what kind of subject is the “women” whom the law seeks to protect?

Feminist legal scholarship has long and variously shown that international law never expressed a gender-neutral understanding of violence, not least because law’s purported neutrality is an illusion. Its paradigmatic human rights violations were often imagined through the relationship between the individual and the State. Violence occurring in the private sphere, including domestic violence, one of the most common forms of violence against women, was consequently harder to articulate within the same legal grammar. 

A classic example is the 1984 Convention Against Torture which defines torture through, among other things, the involvement of a public official. Under this instrument, international law “prioritises violence perpetrated within the context of state custody, a form of harm more typically meted out against men than women.”¹ Violence committed by a private individual therefore does not simply become “torture” because of the severity of the harm.

The subsequent development of international human rights law has challenged this public/private divide. For example, the CEDAW Committee’s GR 19 (1992) recognised gender-based violence as a form of discrimination against women, including violence occurring in the private sphere, thereby triggering positive state obligations of due diligence. GR 35 (2017) later developed this framework further. Regional treaties such as the Belém do Pará Convention (1994) and the Istanbul Convention (2011) have also established more specific obligations concerning violence against women.

Yet this legal development creates a further question. If law can expand to recognise experiences that were previously difficult to articulate as human rights violations, how should we examine the subject that emerges through this process of recognition? This is where Carla Lonzi can offer an unexpected methodological resource.

Lonzi’s Unexpected Subject

Lonzi has never engaged with international law, nor did she regard law straightforwardly as a vehicle of women’s freedom. However, this, for me, makes her particularly interesting for legal research. Rather than providing a feminist theory that can simply be “applied” to legal norms, Lonzi unsettles some of the assumptions on which legal analysis tends to proceed.

At the centre of her thought is the question of women’s subjectivity. For Lonzi, women become subjects not by being incorporated into an already existing universal order, but through relationships between women and through autocoscienza: a practice of consciousness-raising in which women encounter and recognise² one another and begin to name their experiences outside a male-centred symbolic order. It is only within women’s feminist groups practising autocoscienza that women can enact the scatto a soggetto (sudden leap into subjectivity).³

More importantly, Lonzi defines women as an “unexpected” or “accidental” subject (soggetto imprevisto): someone whose claims to rights appear, within a male-forged legal order,⁴ as disruptions rather than the system’s ordinary business. Women are unexpected not because they are absent from society, but because the symbolic and political order has not been constructed with them as autonomous subjects in mind. They appear as a disruption of categories that present themselves as universal.

Interestingly, Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1825-26) affirms that the purpose of philosophical speculation is to suppress the “accidental” or “inadvertent”. Women, in much of Western thought, have been identified as “accidental”, remaining invisible in social and legal terms for a long time. 

If women are simply understood as a group that has been “excluded” from an otherwise neutral legal order, the solution appears relatively straightforward: include them. But Lonzi invites a more difficult question. What if the problem is not only exclusion, but the terms on which inclusion becomes possible? This question can be brought to bear on international legal research.

Reading VAW Norms Through this Lens

Consider the CEDAW Committee’s 1992 definition of gender-based violence as violence “directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately.” The definition was landmark because it made violence against women visible within the international human rights framework, but, read through Lonzi, it can also become the beginning of another inquiry. Who is the “woman” appearing in this definition? Is she primarily the autonomous subject who names and understands her own experience, or is she the person identified through a gendered reason, or a particular vulnerability? 

This does not mean that the legal definition is wrong. Nor does it mean that legal recognition is undesirable. Rather, I argue, Lonzi encourages us to examine the subject-position produced by legal recognition itself.

The phrase in GR 19 only makes sense against a background norm, an unmarked default, from which the category “woman” is understood as a deviation. Law does not encounter a completely pre-existing, pre-discursive category of “woman” and simply place a protective rule around it. Legal categories help shape what counts as a harm, whose experience can be translated into a legal claim, and what forms of evidence are intelligible. The question therefore becomes not only whether international law recognises women as victims of violence, but how it makes women legally intelligible in the process of recognising violence against them.

This is where feminist critiques of international human rights law become particularly important. The problem is not simply that women were historically invisible. It is also that the supposedly universal subject of human rights could conceal the standpoint from which universality had been constructed. As Catharine MacKinnon has argued, the male standpoint can become so deeply embedded in legal concepts that it ceases to appear as a standpoint at all, so that its particularity becomes the meaning of universality.⁵

Violence against women in international law demonstrates this: public and state-attributable violence was more easily recognised within existing human rights categories, while private violence required new interpretative approaches. Feminist approaches therefore do more than add “women” to the list of subjects protected by international law, as they interrogate the categories through which harm becomes legally recognisable.

Lonzi’s Potential Contribution

Lonzi’s potentially helpful contribution, then, is not a new definition of violence against women. It is a different way of reading legal norms. A doctrinal analysis might ask: What does the relevant instrument define as violence? What obligations does it impose on states? How have treaty bodies interpreted those obligations?

Clearly, these questions remain indispensable, but a Lonzian reading would place another set of questions alongside them. Who is speaking in the norm? Who is being spoken about? Do women appear only as the object of protection, or also as a subject capable of producing the knowledge through which violence is named?

This shift is particularly significant because the legal category “violence against women” fortunately remains unsettled, in both its components, namely, “violence” and “women.” GR 19 and 35 have progressively expanded the international legal understanding of gender-based violence against women, while regional treaties have developed binding obligations concerning violence against women. Yet, currently, no universally binding treaty is devoted specifically to this issue. The category is therefore still being constructed through interpretation, contestation and institutional practice. 

This incompleteness opens methodological space. If international law’s categories on violence against women are not fixed, neither should feminist legal research treat the subject of those categories as self-evident. 

This is where Lonzi’s insights about autocoscienza and women’s subjectivity become especially relevant. Consciousness-raising does not begin with institutional recognition, but with women encountering one another and producing knowledge from sharing their own experiences. This means that, as legal scholars, we need to constantly and seriously ask how to continue to investigate new avenues for making international law more sensitive to women’s shared experiences.   

Therefore, when researching international norms on violence against women, we should study not only what the law protects, but the subject that the law makes visible in protecting it. Such an approach can also complicate the familiar narrative of progress. The development from the exclusion of domestic violence from conventional human-rights frameworks towards its recognition as a matter of international concern is undoubtedly significant. But inclusion does not necessarily exhaust the feminist question. 

Lonzi helps us remain attentive to that tension. The point is not to reject entirely international law as a toolbox, nor to treat it simply as an instrument of patriarchal domination. Nor is it to claim that law cannot contribute to women’s liberation. Rather, it is to read legal norms from a position that refuses to take their categories for granted. International law can protect women from violence. But feminist legal research can ask a prior and more unsettling question: what does it mean for women to become subjects of that protection?

Perhaps this is one way in which Lonzi’s thought can enter international legal scholarship despite her distance from legal analysis. She does not provide us with legal doctrine, but her words can be a reason to hesitate before accepting the legal subject as already there. And that hesitation may itself be part of a feminist legal method.

Alessia Nicastro is a PhD researcher in international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland. 

1Alice Edwards, Violence Against Women Under International Human Rights Law (CUP, 2011), 53

2Lonzi’s account of the “unexpected subject” is also about recognition — though it engages the concept on terms quite different from the Hegelian tradition. She fiercely criticises the language of “recognition” in Hegel’s work, suggesting replacing it with the term riscontro, namely, a recognition that comes from comparison, from a matching part, in stark contrast with the master-servant dialectic. Carla Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel e altri scritti (La Tartaruga, 2023). 

3The Italian scatto a soggetto resists easy translation. Scatto can denote a sprinter’s burst off the blocks, the click of a mechanism snapping into place, or an involuntary muscular jolt — registers ranging from purposive agency to sheer reflex. I render it here as “sudden leap,” which privileges the sense of an achieved, willed transition.

4According to feminist legal scholars such as MacKinnon, law does not just reflect the male standpoint; it launders it. Concepts such as ‘objectivity’ are coopted by men, consciously or otherwise, to apply to their experiences rather than to those of women. Catherine MacKinnon, ‘Sex and Violence: A Perspective’, in Hackett and Haslanger (eds.), Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader (OUP, 2006), 267. 

5MacKinnon, ibidem.