Yasmine Ergas

Yasmine Ergas is the Director of the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy and Co-Director of the Concentration in Human Rights, Gender and Equity at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.  Among other commitments at Columbia, she serves on the Faculty Advisory Board of the Institute of Global Politics and on the Executive Committee of the Committee of Global Thought. Her recent work has focused on global markets in reproduction and their human rights implications, as well as on (il)liberalism, sovereignty and gender-related policies and politics.  She is currently at work on a set of essays titled “After “Gender”? On plasticity, humanity, and the return of the “woman question.”

Ergas’ recent publications include Paradossi contemporanei: maternità tra riluttanza e desiderio, tra scelta e costrizione, tra incentivi e divieti, in Enciclopedia Treccani (forthcoming), International human rights law and the rights of women in reproductive surrogacy: between

principle and pragmatism,  in Achmad, Shakargy and Trimmings, Research Handbook on Surrogacy and the Law (Elgar, 2024) , Take Back the Future: Global Feminisms and the Coming Crisis of the Beijing Settlement, Journal of International Affairs (2019), Arguing for Equality: between pragmatism and principle in Silvia Sansonetti and Niall Crowley (eds.)Visions for Gender Equality Post-2020, SAAGE–Scientific Analysis and Advice on Gender Equality in the EU(2019) and Reassembling Motherhood: Procreation and Care in a Globalized World, coedited with Jane Jenson and Sonya Michel (Columbia University Press, 2017, 2019.

In 2022-23 Ergas was an IIE-SRF Inaugural Vartan Gregorian Research Fellow. She has also received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Italian National Research Council, the Compton Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, and

has served as a consultant to international and domestic policy organizations.

Contact: ye2214@nyu.edu

Research Project

After Gender: On plasticity, humanity and the return of the "woman question". Is the era of "gender" over? This question is at the center of my current book project, which is tentatively organized in five chapters: 1. Was "gender" liberal? From Wollstonecraft and Mill to Pope Benedict XVI and radical feminists: the political fashioning of the female self and its critics 2. The end of the Beijing Settlement? From the incorporation of the Beijing Settlement in the international -- and European -- legal order to the (re-) emergence of alternative understandings of the nature -- and, hence, of the rights and obligations -- of the sexes. 3. Reproductive panics and bonanzas: Do nations require sex? Do markets require gender? 4. Undoing "gender": sticky concepts and policy contests. The return of the "woman question" and the politics of rights. 5. Why "gender" is both anodyne and radical.