ABSTRACT
This chapter is an argument for rethinking public health crises through a double lens, integrating the perspective of Foucauldian biopolitics with that of feminist intersectionality. These convergent perspectives direct us to see controversies over public health, particularly in a globalized world fraught with catastrophes, as inseparable from macro-economic and militarized power relations, and such power relations in turn as laden always with contests over the meanings and lived realities of sexuality, race and gender. An intersectional approach invites us to conceptualize every domain or issue of political economy – markets, poverty, growth, militarization, climate change, as well as most problems in public health – as profoundly gendered and sexualized from the start. Conversely, every arena of sexual, gender and reproductive health politics has its deeply macro-economic and development-related dimensions (see Corrêa, Petchesky and Parker 2008; Eisenstein 2004 and 2007; Harcourt 2009; Petchesky 2003). Influenced by moves in queer theory, intersectional analysis also calls into question a regressive gender binarism (the ubiquitous ‘women and men’), recognizing instead the multiple expressions of masculinity, femininity and hybridity that travel across diverse bodies and intersect with race and ethnicity in historically and geographically specific ways (see Butler 2004; Currah, Juang and Minter 2006; Puar 2007). A language and politics that erase gender nonconforming people become particularly exclusionary in the midst of disasters, where privileged victim status is routinely conferred on legible ‘women and children’. 2
