Tracy Robinson

Tracy Robinson ’95 LL.M. delivered the Gruber Distinguished Lecture in Women’s Rights on October 20, 2025, at 4:30 p.m. at Yale Law School. Robinson is a leading Caribbean legal scholar whose interdisciplinary work spans human rights, gender and constitutionalism, and the legal regulation of sexuality. She serves as a Professor of Law at the University of the West Indies, Mona, where she founded and directs the Rights Advocacy Project, and she has held significant positions in international human rights bodies, including serving as the first Rapporteur on the Rights of LGBTI Persons at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and as a member of the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Libya. Her contributions have earned her the American Society of International Law’s Prominent Woman in International Law Award.

Robinson’s lecture, titled “Attention to Gender in a Not-So-Righted Order,” explored the contemporary global moment as a conjuncture: a period in which political, economic, social, and ideological contradictions converge to shape new configurations of power. Drawing on thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Iris Murdoch, and Christina Sharpe, Robinson framed “attention” as an ethical practice. She argued that to attend to gender is not only to study it, but to treat it as a shared object of concern, one that reveals how we behold one another and how we are bound to each other in feminist and moral practice. This ethic of attention resists the tendency to treat gender as simply “ours,” repositioning it as something with its own materiality and power.

Robinson described the current landscape as a “not-so-righted order,” emphasizing the fragility of rights systems amid civic repression, and the rise of what sociologist Latoya Lazarus calls “church law,” religious norms that assume quasi-legal authority within national governance. She discussed how conservative religious groups have increasingly moved inside international institutions, influencing debates about gender, sexuality, and religious freedom. These shifts have contributed to transnational culture wars in which progressive and conservative rights actors clash over the meaning of equality and dignity.

Using the landmark constitutional challenge to Belize’s colonial criminalization of same-sex intimacy as a central example, Robinson illustrated how rights contests unfold in practice. In that case, churches assumed a dominant role in opposing decriminalization, effectively shaping the state’s legal posture. Although the court ultimately ruled that criminalization violated constitutional guarantees of equality, Robinson reflected on how judicial decisions often rely on “gender-somethings,” which are bureaucratic interpretations of gender or sex discrimination that flatten lived experience and extract feminist ideas from their political context.

Despite the instability of the moment, Robinson urged resisting despair. She emphasized that this conjuncture requires renewed attention to how gender and sexuality are being contested, particularly regarding youth and civic space. Closing the lecture, she reflected on the meaning of intergenerational feminist relationships and the role of small, persistent acts of ethical attention. A recording of the lecture is available here.