ABSTRACT
Feminist perspectives remain on the borders of the evolving body of scholarship that situates global health within a security frame. Social and political life is profoundly gendered and feminist scholarship has a critical role to play in illuminating both the foundations of health insecurities and the effects of insecurities on differently gendered and located bodies. Security studies is ostensibly the most masculine of subfields within the discipline of political science. The variety of feminist approaches to security share the common project of transforming the field to take gender relations seriously, whether the focus is security in the military sense or the broader view of human security that transcends the pragmatic orthodoxy of the narrow state-centric definition of national security. Women’s health arrived on the global governance agenda in the mid-1990s at the 1993 Vienna Human Conference on Human Rights, the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, and in the 1995 Beijing Plan of Action.
