Feminist Global Health Security

Abstract

Abstract Feminist Global Health Security highlights the ways in which women are disadvantaged by global health security policy, through engagement with feminist concepts of visibility; social and stratified reproduction; intersectionality; and structural violence. The book argues that an approach focused on short-term response efforts to health emergencies fails to consider the differential impacts of outbreaks on women. This feminist critique focuses on the policy response to the Zika outbreak, which centred on limiting the spread of the vector through civic participation and asking women to defer pregnancy, actions that are inherently gendered and reveal a distinct lack of consideration of the everyday lives of women. The book argues that because global health security lacks a substantive feminist engagement, policies created to manage an outbreak of disease focus on protecting economies and state security and disproportionately fail to protect women. This state-based structure of global health security provides the fault-line for global health security and women. Women are both differentially infected and affected by epidemics and, the book argues: it was no coincidence that poor, black women living in low quality housing were most affected by the Zika outbreak. More broadly, it poses the question: What would global health policy look like if it were to take gender seriously, and how would this impact global disease control sustainability?