ABSTRACT
HIV/AIDS, Avian Influenza, Ebola, and Zika are infectious diseases that have been constructed by the United Nations (UN) as “threats” to health security, thus requiring emergency responses. We see in these responses an almost singular attention to containment, while scant focus is directed on the drivers of novel pandemics, or the medium- and longer-term impacts in the aftermath of the crises in the places where health emergencies have been declared. This chapter casts a critical feminist lens on these responses, through the lens of four global health emergencies: HIV and AIDS, Avian Influenza, Ebola, and Zika. Taken together, the four cases illuminate the gendered and racialized structural violence that shapes both the conditions that incubate health emergencies, and their responses. The cases aim to uncover how novel pathogens and their emergency responses can reinforce and intensify the existing structural inequalities and the invisibilities of particular flesh-and-blood bodies that underlie our more virulent present.
