Resistance and solidarity: organising for women’s human rights

Using Lacanian, feminist, and organisational theory, this article explores the problem and question of violence against women and gender justice. In it, I argue that this violence and degradation against women is a fact, while simultaneously linking the notion of gender and its uncertain historicity to the traumatic discursive and psychical nature of en/gendering and to what this might mean for an organisation whose mission is gender justice. The inevitable push to settle the meanings of women and leadership marks the impossible desire to know. I highlight the work of an established feminist international women’s rights and gender-justice organisation and its efforts to resist this push to settle meanings and the related implications and challenges this may have on their shared-leadership model.