Gender Politics in Global Health: Negotiating Bodies

Gender politics in global health and gendered politicalization of the body have generated unprecedented contestation in recent years as "anti-gender" ideologies have permeated multilateral spaces and the global health ecosystem. Assuming gender as a concept of power, this course tracks current extreme polarizations from the late 1990s to Project 25, and situates these in a longer interdisciplinary studies of sex and gender constructs in global and public health fields. In this course, negotiating bodies refers to both the materiality of human bodies, "sexed and gendered" by multiple lenses, but also institutional negotiating bodies such the the Human Rights Council, World Health assembly and other governance bodies of the UN and international system, that are also "sexed and gendered". Definitions and conceptualizations of knowledge(s) on gender and sex and their consequences are subject to constant transformation and change - in light of political and philosophical thinking as well as cellular and genetic level biosciences. From the anatomy theatres of Alexandia and Bologna, to the US supreme court, the corridors of UN diplomatic negotiations, to the decisions on trans athletes at the International Olympic Committee, gender politics of the body in states of health and disease are never far from the surface of political and social life. Drawing on a range of academic disciplines, although rooted in the anthropology of gender and bodies with steps into epidemiology and health sciences, this course has broad appeal to interdisciplinary students who want to hone their critical thinking on current gender politics in multilateralism, most widely, and health more specifically. Question-led, and feeding from case studies that arise during the course, we ask: how, why and when did gender (and sex) become so political? What do queer and colonalist perspectives render visible? Who controls gender and where is the gender power? What do feminist and intersectionality approaches to gendered bodies and gender politics in global health theorise? What does all this mean in policy-practice?