National Mother, Global Whore, and Transnational Femocrats: The Politics of AIDS and the Construction of Women at the World Health Organization

Abstract

This article examines the early discourse on women and AIDS in the Global Program on AIDS (GPA). It also analyzes the subsequent efforts of women and the AIDS strategy group to create a mechanism by which GPA could help redress sexual and gender inequality. The data for analysis were gathered by interviews and archival research at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. Overall it is argued that internationalist constructions of womens needs dominate because of the organizational interests of the UN femocrats. These interests stem from the fact that the WHO derives its legitimacy from member states perceptions of it as an apolitical agency. In addition although feminists participation in such an ideology is at times conscious and challenged it is an organizational imperative. If they challenge the nation-states rights to control women they challenge their legitimacy as experts in an international technical bureaucracy. For the femocrats they occupy a truly contradictory ground. Such contradictions do not disappear because at one moment some of them are able to advance an agenda that appears to limit the potential threat of feminist politics to organizational practices.