DrWendy O'Brien

Research Interests
children's rights
gender justice
human rights-led law reform
technology and human rights
SOGIESC rights

Knowledge Areas
children's rights
gender justice
human rights-led law reform
technology and human rights
SOGIESC rights

Projects
2015 Projects

"International Legal Norms on the Right to Sexual Orientation and Gender
Identity: Australian Reforms Contextualised" (Published in the volume Queering
Criminology in 2015).

At a time when the international momentum for sexual orientation and gender
identity rights is strong it is important that scholars and activists remain
vigilant to ensure that the discourses framing sexuality rights do not
intentionally, or inadvertently, deepen incursions on the rights of
individuals of sexual and bodily diversity. This chapter offers a critical
examination of selected Australian case law and legal reform for the putative
progress t offers sexual minorities. Identifying the entrenched binary
determinism at the heart of the law, this chapter echoes the call of queer
criminology, concluding that challenging invisibility is but part of the
project. Queer scholars need also remain vigilant about the law's constitutive
power, and its role in producing sexual minorities as objects of pathology,
perversion and criminality.
"Can International Law Accommodate Bodily Diversity?" (Published in the Human
Rights Law Review in 2015).

This article considers recent efforts by international bodies and advocacy
groups to secure the human rights of individuals with intersex variation.
Identifying that these efforts are constrained by powerful assumptions about
binary sex, it argues that international rights discourse looks set to
regulate intersex individuals by the same protective strategies applied to the
last four decades of the women's rights movement. A frank reading of legal
feminist scholarship indicates several possible risks for the nascent intersex
campaign. Efforts to ensure the substantive enjoyment of rights (for all) need
to move beyond the constraints of a binary system in which women and
sexed/sexual minorities will always be produced as other. Having argued that
human rights are not contingent on biological determinants, the right to non-
discrimination on the basis of sex traits is considered.

"Australia's Digital Policy Agenda: Adopting a Children's Rights Approach."
(Published in the International Journal of Children's Rights in 2015).

Children's engagement with online technologies may seem second nature, yet the
impact that the Internet has on their lives is shaped by a powerful public
policy agenda that largely overlooks children's interests. Australia's digital
policy framework is dominated by discourses of safety and risk on the one hand
and, on the other, neoliberal arguments about the possibilities for economic
growth offered by e-commerce. In the midst of such powerful discourses it is
difficult for children's voices to be heard. This paper offers a close textual
analysis of the Australian public policy context for regulating cyberspace.
Finding a discursive duopoly that overlooks children's interests, the author
identifies two key features of a rights-based approach to challenge the
dominant narratives currently serving the interests of the private sector and
the State.