ABSTRACT
The current COVID-19 pandemic reveals that human rights remain a tool of both promise and challenge, especially in addressing injustices arising at the intersections of gender and health. Our inventory of global rights guidance reveals a plethora of UN statements, suggesting acceptance of rights’ role in guiding state responses to health, and a welcome visibility of “intersectional” and “gendered” issues within reckonings on unequal distributions of pandemic-related suffering. But our scan also reveals a failure to move beyond siloed issues arising for women/girls and LGBTQ+ persons. We investigate gender and COVID-19 through lenses of “text, pretext, and context” across four geopolitical settings and health-related issues (movement control; migration, menstruation, queer public life and politics, priority setting in health intervention and SHR), to argue gendered rights analysis as yet fails to address the larger powers and structures organizing labor, care, markets, and public and private life that produce these gendered effects.
