The struggle for gender justice lies at the fulcrum of global movements for human rights. This course focuses on the intersection of gender justice, the category of law, and transnational activism. The first part of the class examines how gender was constituted under empire and how it came to pervade all other intimate social relations, and how law is undergirded by heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification. The class then critically examines key symbolic legal victories as homogenizing narratives before turning to activist case studies. Students will engage with a global range of case studies and legal briefs around gender justice, including sexual asylum, migrant transgender sex workers, HIV travel and immigration bans, sex trafficking, same sex marriage, pinkwashing, strip searching, police custodial rape, indigeneity, outsourced industrial disasters, and green imperialism. Cases and readings will bring together, conversations about gender, law, and race from across Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, as well as the Americas. Students will focus on the notions of “obscenity”, “sexual deviance”, and “monstrosity” in colonial jurisprudence to trace the racialized legacies of gender injustice that mark jurisprudence and our sexual orders across the world today. They will also examine anti-imperialist genealogies of transnational feminists and queer activism that contest both conservative and liberal sexual and gender politics. We will engage with authors such as Jasbir Puar, Sara Farris, Susan Stryker, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Durba Mitra, Holning Lau, Ratna Kapur, María Lugones, Dipika Jain, Edgar Fred Nabutanyi, Eddie Ombagi, Srila Roy, J. Jarpa Dawuni, and others. Students will serve as discussion leaders throughout the semester, write two short papers, and work on a semester end oral presentation of a research project. Class participation is a crucial part of the course.