About Us

The Feminist Constitutional Futures Project (FemCon) is about imagining what a Feminist constitutional future could look like on the island of Ireland. The project embraces feminist ideas of constitutional law, but also law and art, law and literature, especially feminist utopias, as well as drawing inspiration from the work of activist feminists in law and policy across Northern Ireland and Ireland.

There are mounting discussions, especially since Brexit, about the political future of the island. Most of these discussions are built on traditional ways of thinking about constitutions, who should write them, what they should contain, what kind of vision for a future they should include. They are also mostly predicated on one of two potential futures. This project reframes these debates, FemCon does not begin with sovereignty or territoriality but rather asks feminist questions about what we would like the future to look like and who must be involved in those discussions. For instance, who gets to draft constitutions, who gets to decide the agenda of what goes into them, how could we draft constitutions in a feminist way?

FemCon looks to law and literature to consider what a feminist constitution could look like, for instance, how might decision-making work? It also draws on law and art to ask how to we represent constitutions, how do constitutions operate within society, on the body, across our lives?  The project engages with feminist activists and civil society across Ireland and Northern Ireland and their rich experiences of long running campaigning for legal change. The project also looks to the experiences of feminists across the world in constitutional change and considers what Ireland and Northern Ireland might learn from listening to them.

FemCon is led by Máiréad Enright (Birmingham) Catherine O’Rourke (Durham) & Aoife O’Donoghue (QUB).