Feminist endeavours to make international laws often yield ‘soft law’, ‘marginalized treaties’, or mere political recommendations. Against this background, feminist scholars have assumed that these outcomes only attest to the exclusion of feminist plights from international law more broadly. However, rather than seeing these outcomes as failed attempts to make law and using this as a critical departure point, I propose re-evaluating whether those outcomes are indeed failures in and of themselves. For that, instead of drawing a clear line between law and non-law and testing feminist endeavours in international law against it, I suggest that this line-boundary exercise may hinder a more nuanced understanding of such feminist endeavours and their impact on international lawmaking. As an alternative, I suggest discarding this binary perspective of law/non-law for international legality, focusing instead on three key aspects: (1) recognizing legality perceptions as culturally and plurally constructed; (2) understanding lawmaking as a contingent and performative practice; and (3) acknowledging that law is made amid dynamic gender knowledges. To illustrate these aspects, the study introduces three methodological concepts—shadows, drag, and silence—derived from empirical investigations of three feminist international lawmaking endeavours: (1) UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security agenda; (2) Yogyakarta Principles on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity rights; and (3) the non-definition of gender in international criminal law. The study employs semi-structured interviews, meeting records, and jurisprudential databases using a qualitative and interpretive methodology.