Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T08:19:09.819Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Depleting fragile bodies: the political economy of sexual and reproductive health in crisis situations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2018

Maria Tanyag
Maria Tanyag*
Affiliation:
Research Fellow, Monash University Gender, Peace and Security Centre
*
*Correspondence to: Maria Tanyag, Monash University, School of Social Sciences, 20 Chancellor’s Walk, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia. Author’s email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In a crisis-prone world, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by both armed conflicts and environmental disasters has drastically increased and displacement risks have intensified. Despite the growing attention within global security and development agendas to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), there remain striking gaps in addressing SRHR in crisis situations, particularly among IDP women and girls. This article examines the continuum between social reproduction in times of crisis and the material and ideological conditions that restrict women’s bodily autonomy in everyday life. Using the case of the Philippines where millions of people are routinely affected by conflict and disaster-induced displacements, it argues that the failure to recognise the centrality of women’s health and bodily autonomy not only hinders the sustainable provision of care and domestic labour during and after crisis, but also fundamentally constrains how security is enacted within these spaces. Thus, the article highlights an urgent need to rethink the gendered political economy of crisis responses as a building block for stemming gendered violence and depletion of social reproductive labour at the household, state, and global levels.

Keywords

Feminist Political EconomySocial ReproductionDepletionCrisisGlobal Health
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 654 - 671
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Ban Ki Moon, ‘Secretary-General’s Opening Remarks at World Humanitarian Summit’ (23 May 2016), available at: {https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2016-05-23/secretary-general%E2%80%99s-opening-remarks-world-humanitarian-summit} accessed 28 October 2017.

2 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Global Report on Internal Displacement (Geneva: IDMC, 2016), p. 7 Google Scholar.

3 UN General Assembly, ‘One humanity: Shared responsibility’, Report of the Secretary General for the World Humanitarian Summit, 70th session (2 February 2016), p. 6.

4 UNFPA, The State of the World Population 2015: Shelter from the Storm: A Transformative Agenda for Women and Girls in a Crisis Prone World (New York: UNFPA, 2015)Google Scholar.

5 UN Women, Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace: A Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2015), available at: {http://wps.unwomen.org/}; UNFPA, The State of the World Population 2015.

6 UNFPA, The State of the World Population 2015, p. 5.

7 See, for example, Petchesky, Rosalind, ‘Editorial: Conflict and crisis settings: Promoting sexual and reproductive rights’, Reproductive Health Matters, 16:31 (2008), pp. 4–9 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Urdal, Henrik and Primus Che, Chi, ‘War and gender inequalities in health: the impact of armed conflict on fertility and maternal mortality’, International Interactions, 39:4 (2013), pp. 489–510 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davies, Sara, ‘Healthy populations, political stability, and regime type: Southeast Asia as a case study’, Review of International Studies, 40:5 (2014), pp. 859–876 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davies, Sara E. and True, Jacqui, ‘Reframing conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence: Bringing gender analysis back in’, Security Dialogue, 46:6 (2015), pp. 495–512 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Tanabe, Mihoko, Schaus, Kristen, Rastogi, Sonia et al., ‘Tracking humanitarian funding for reproductive health: a systematic analysis of health and protection proposals from 2002–2013’, Conflict and Health, 9 (Suppl. 1):S2 (2015), available at: {https://conflictandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1752-1505-9-S1-S2} accessed 4 November 2017Google Scholar.

9 Patel, Preeti, Roberts, Bayard, Guy, Samantha et al., ‘Tracking official development assistance for reproductive health in conflict-affected countries’, PLoS Med, 6:6 (2009), e1000090, available at: {doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000090}CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

10 Rai, Shirin, Catherine Hoskyns, and Dania Thomas, ‘Depletion: the social cost of reproduction’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16:1 (2014), pp. 86–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Tanyag, Maria, ‘Invisible labor, invisible bodies: How the global political economy affects reproductive freedom in the Philippines’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19:1 (2017), pp. 39–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Doyal, Lesley, What Makes Women Sick: Gender and the Political Economy of Health (London: Macmillan, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elson, Diane, ‘Gender and the global economic crisis in developing countries: a framework for analysis’, Gender and Development, 18:2 (2010), pp. 201–212 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bedford, Kate and Rai, Shirin, ‘Feminists theorize international political economy’, Signs, 36:1 (2010), pp. 1–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Calkin, Sydney, ‘“Tapping” women for post-crisis capitalism’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17:4 (2015), pp. 611–629 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Elson, ‘Gender and the global economic crisis in developing countries’; Maxine Molyneux, ‘Change and Continuity in Social Protection in Latin America: Mothers at the Service of the State’, Gender and Development Paper No. 1 (Geneva: UNRISD, 2007).

15 Robinson, Fiona, The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Robinson, Fiona, ‘Feminist care ethics and everyday insecurities’, in Jonna Nyman and Anthony Burke (eds), Ethical Security Studies: A New Research Agenda (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), pp. 117–131 Google Scholar.

16 Elson, Diane, ‘Social reproduction in the global crisis: Rapid recovery or long-lasting depletion?’, in Peter Utting, Shahra Razavi, and Rebecca Varghese Buchholz (eds), The Global Crisis and Transformative Social Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 63–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffin, Penny, ‘Crisis, austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective’, Feminist Review, 109 (2015), pp. 49–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Rai, , Hoskyns, , and Thomas, , ‘Depletion’; Sophie Harman, ‘Ebola, gender and conspicuously invisible women in global health governance’, Third World Quarterly, 37:3 (2016), pp. 524–541 Google Scholar.

18 Chopra, Deepta and Sweetman, Caroline, ‘Introduction to gender, development and care’, Gender and Development, 22:3 (2014), pp. 410–411 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sutton, Barbara, Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women’s Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

19 Elias, Juanita and Rai, Shirin, ‘The everyday gendered political economy of violence’, Politics & Gender, 11:2 (2015), p. 428 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas, ‘Depletion’, p. 87.

21 True, Jacqui and Tanyag, Maria, ‘Global violence and security from a gendered perspective’, in Anthony Burke and Rita Parker (eds), Global Insecurity: Futures of Global Chaos and Governance (Canberra: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 43–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Sjoberg, Laura, Hudson, Heidi, and Weber, Cynthia, ‘Gender and crisis in global politics: Introduction’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17:4 (2015), p. 530 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Urdal and Che, ‘War and gender inequalities in health’; Harman, ‘Ebola, gender and conspicuously invisible women in global health governance’; Robinson, The Ethics of Care.

24 Centre for Reproductive Rights, Hidden Casualties: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and Sexual Violence in Conflict (2016), available at: {https://www.reproductiverights.org/document/hidden-casualties-sexual-and-reproductive-health-and-rights-and-sexual-violence-in-conflict} accessed 4 November 2017.

25 Harman, ‘Ebola, gender and conspicuously invisible women in global health governance’.

26 Benatar, Solomon, Gill, Stephen, and Bakker, Isabella, ‘Global health and the global economic crisis’, American Journal of Public Health, 101:4 (2011), pp. 646–653 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

27 Ibid., p. 532.

28 McInnes, Colin and Lee, Kelley, ‘Health, security and foreign policy’, Review of International Studies, 32:1 (2006), pp. 5–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nunes, João, ‘Questioning health security: Insecurity and domination in world politics’, Review of International Studies, 40:5 (2014), pp. 939–960 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Nunes, ‘Questioning health security’, p. 957.

30 WHO, ‘Spending on Health: A Global Overview’, Fact Sheet No. 319 (2012), available at: {http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs319/en/} accessed 4 November 2017.

31 Camilla Schippa, ‘War Costs us $13.6 Trillion: So Why Do We Spend so Little on Peace?’, World Economic Forum (8 June 2016), available at: {https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/the-world-continues-to-spend-enormous-amounts-on-violence-and-little-on-building-peace/} accessed 4 November 2017; Corps, Mercy, An Ounce of Prevention: Why Increasing Investment in Conflict Prevention is Worth More than a ‘Pound of Cure’ in Addressing the Displacement Crisis (Oregon: Mercy Corps, 2016)Google Scholar.

32 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), States of Fragility 2016 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2016), pp. 26, 131 Google Scholar.

33 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), ‘Trends in World Military

Expenditure, 2015’, SIPRI Fact Sheet (2016), p. 3, available at: {https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/EMBARGO%20FS1604%20Milex%202015.pdf} accessed 4 November 2017.

34 Urdal and Che, ‘War and gender inequalities in health’, p. 492.

35 Petchesky, ‘Editorial: Conflict and crisis settings’.

36 UN Women, Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace.

37 Ibid., p. 78.

38 Fonn, Sharon and Sundari Ravindran, T. K., ‘The macroeconomic environment and sexual and reproductive health: a review of trends over the last 30 years’, Reproductive Health Matters, 19:38 (2011), pp. 11–25 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Benatar, Gill, and Bakker, ‘Global health and the global economic crisis’.

39 The Global Gag Rule (known formally as the Mexico City Policy) refers to the US policy that places limits on US aid distribution by excluding overseas NGOs that perform or promote abortion and related services, such as public information campaigns and lobbying. For further discussions, see Gezinski, Lindsay, ‘The Global Gag Rule: Impacts of conservative ideology on women’s health’, International Social Work, 55:6 (2012), pp. 837–849 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 See, for example, the official statement from UNFPA, Statement by UNFPA on U.S. Decision to Withhold Funding (4 April 2017), available at: {http://www.unfpa.org/press/statement-unfpa-us-decision-withhold-funding} accessed 4 November 2017.

41 UN General Assembly (UNGA), A/68/297, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right of Everyone to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health, 68th session (9 August 2013); UNGA, A/HRC/32/23, Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Analytical Study on the Relationship between Climate Change and the Human Right of Everyone to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health), 32nd session (6 May 2016).

42 UNFPA, The State of the World Population 2015; UNGA, Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

43 See, for a brief overview on the WPS agenda, Laura Shepherd, ‘Advancing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: 2015 and Beyond’, Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre Expert Analysis (28 August 2014), available at: {http://www.peacebuilding.no/Themes/Inclusivity-and-gender/Publications/Advancing-the-Women-Peace-and-Security-agenda-2015-and-beyond} accessed 4 November 2017.

44 UN Security Council, S/RES/2122, Resolution 2122 (2013), 7044th meeting (18 October 2013).

45 True and Tanyag, ‘Global violence and security from a gendered perspective’, p. 52.

46 Shepherd, ‘Advancing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: 2015 and Beyond’.

47 Asian-Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW), Zika: A Perfect Storm of Climate Change, Disease, and SRHR (3 February 2016), available at: {http://arrow.org.my/zika-a-perfect-storm-of-climate-change-disease-and-srhr/} accessed 4 November 2017.

48 Human Rights Watch, Dispatches: Zika Warnings Versus Realities Women Face (26 January 2016), available at: {https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/01/26/dispatches-zika-warnings-versus-realities-women-face} accessed 4 November 2017.

49 Vatican Radio, Card. Tagle: ‘Humanitarian Summit to Promote Trust in Religious Organisations (20 May 2016), available at: {http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2016/05/20/card_tagle_%E2%80%98humanitarian_summit_to_promote_trust/1231204} accessed 4 November 2017. The special session was called ‘Religious Engagement: The Contributions of Faith Communities to our Shared Humanity’. A summary of the session is available at: {http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Religious%20Engagement.pdf}.

50 Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), The Devil is in the Details: At the Nexus of Development, Women’s Rights, and Religious Fundamentalisms (Toronto and Mexico: AWID, 2016), p. 27, available at: {https://www.awid.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/final_web_the_devil_is_in_the_details.pdf Google Scholar}.

51 Oxfam, Leaving No One Behind: LGBT Rights Post-Haiyan (Quezon City: Oxfam in the Philippines, 2016)Google Scholar.

52 Lind, Amy, ‘Governing intimacy, struggling for sexual rights: Challenging heteronormativity in the global development industry’, Development, 52:1 (2009), pp. 34–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lind, Amy, ‘Development, global governance, and sexual subjectivities’, in Amy Lind and Suzanne L. Bergeron (eds), Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–20 Google Scholar.

53 Jolly, Susie, ‘Why the development industry should get over its obsession with bad sex and start to think about pleasure’, in Lind and Bergeron (eds), Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance, p. 25 Google Scholar.

54 Bujra, Janet, ‘AIDS as a crisis in social reproduction’, Review of African Political Economy, 31:102 (2004), pp. 631–638 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kunz, Rahel, ‘The crisis of social reproduction in rural Mexico: Challenging the “re-privatization of social reproduction” thesis’, Review of International Political Economy, 17:5 (2010), pp. 913–945 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elson, ‘Social reproduction in the global crisis’.

55 Peterson, V. Spike, ‘How (the meaning of) gender matters in political economy’, New Political Economy, 10:4 (2005), pp. 499–521 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brickell, Katherine and Chant, Sylvia, ‘“The unbearable heaviness of being”: Reflections on female altruism in Cambodia, Philippines, The Gambia and Costa Rica’, Progress in Development Studies, 10:2 (2010), pp. 145–159 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 See Sassen, Saskia, ‘Women’s burden: Counter-geographies of globalization and the feminization of survival’, Journal of International Affairs, 53:2 (2000), pp. 503–524 Google Scholar.

57 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Disaster-Related Displacement Risk: Measuring the Risk and Addressing its Drivers (Geneva: IDMC, 2015), p. 23, available at: {http://www.internal-displacement.org/assets/publications/2015/20150312-global-disaster-related-displacement-risk-en.pdf Google Scholar}.

58 See Philippine Statistics Authority, 2015 Survey on Overseas Filipino (2016), available at: {https://psa.gov.ph/content/statistical-tables-overseas-contract-workers-ocw-2015} accessed 4 November 2017.

59 Philippine Statistics Authority, 2015 Survey on Overseas Filipino.

60 OECD, States of Fragility 2016, p. 17.

61 The Global Gender Gap Index ‘is designed to measure gender-based gaps in access to resources and opportunities in countries rather than the actual levels of the available resources and opportunities in those countries’. It is measured based on four subindexes: Economic Participation and Opportunity; Educational Attainment; Health and Survival; and Political Empowerment. For full notes on methodology, see World Economic Forum (WEF), The Global Gender Gap Report 2016 (Geneva: WEF, 2016), p. 4 Google Scholar.

62 WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, World Bank Group, and United Nations Population Division Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group, Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2015 Executive Summary (Geneva: WHO, 2015), available at: {http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/monitoring/maternal-mortality-2015/en/ Google Scholar}.

63 Philippine National Statistics Office (NSO), Final Results from the 2013 National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) (2014), available at: {https://psa.gov.ph/content/one-ten-young-filipino-women-age-15-19-already-mother-or-pregnant-first-child-final-results} accessed 4 November 2017.

64 SIGI is a composite of scores from five dimensions: discriminatory family code, restricted physical integrity, son bias, restricted resources and assets, and restricted civil liberties.

According to OECD, ‘discriminatory social institutions perpetuate gender gaps in development areas, such as education, employment and health, and hinder progress towards rights-based social transformation that benefits both women and men’. See OECD, Social Institutions and Gender Index, available at:{http://www.genderindex.org/}.

65 OECD, Social Institutions and Gender Index Synthesis Report 2014 (OECD, 2014), p. 9 Google Scholar, available at: {https://www.oecd.org/dev/development-gender/BrochureSIGI2015-web.pdf}.

66 Davies, True, and Tanyag, ‘How women’s silence secures the peace’.

67 Ehrenreich, Barbara and Hochschild, Arlie, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (London: Metropolitan Books, 2003)Google Scholar; Yeates, Nicola, Globalizing Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)Google Scholar; Dumitru, Speranta, ‘From “brain drain” to “care drain”: Women’s labor migration, methodological sexism and care devaluation’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 47 (2014), pp. 203–212 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 See, for example, Blaine Harden, ‘In rural Philippines, a dearth of doctors’, Washington Post Foreign Service (20 September 2008), available at: {http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091903678.html} accessed 4 November 2017.

69 WHO, ‘Achieving the Health-Related MDGs: It Takes a Workforce!’, available at: {http://www.who.int/hrh/workforce_mdgs/en} accessed 4 November 2017.

70 WHO, ‘Density of Physicians (Total Number per 1000 Population, Latest Available Year’, available at: {http://www.who.int/gho/health_workforce/physicians_density_text/en/} accessed 4 November 2017.

71 Twenty-eight-year-old female quoted in Daguino, Dolores and Gomez, Norma, Reproductive Health Among the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Pikit, Cotabato (Davao City: Mindanao Working Group, 2010), pp. 28, 34 Google Scholar.

72 Regine Cabato, ‘DOH secretary: Philippines lacks 15,000 doctors’, CNN Philippines (13 October 2016), available at: {http://cnnphilippines.com/news/2016/10/13/department-of-health-lack-of-doctors.html} accessed 4 November 2017.

73 Benatar, Gill, and Bakker, ‘Global health and the global economic crisis’, p. 647.

74 All reports are accessible through the Human Development Network: {http://www.hdn.org.ph}.

75 Philippine Statistics Authority, 2015 Survey on Overseas Filipino.

76 The reported cases are registered in the report as under RA 9208, ‘Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003’.

77 Benatar, Gill, and Bakker, ‘Global health and the global economic crisis’.

78 UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), ‘Philippines: Typhoon Haiyan – November 2013: Total Funding per Donor as of 17 August 2015’, Financial Tracking Service (2015), available at: {https://fts.unocha.org/appeals/441/summary}.

79 See, for example, Elias, Juanita, ‘Women workers and labour standards: the problem of “human rights”’, Review of International Studies, 33:1 (2007), pp. 45–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chin, Christine, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Worker and the Malaysian ‘Modernity’ Project (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

80 The exact quote was ‘They might as well bring with them ‘yung pills wherever they go para di kayo mabuntis … otherwise pagdating dito manganak diyan sa toilet.’ This translates to English as: ‘They might as well bring with them [birth control] pills wherever they go so they don’t get pregnant … otherwise when they return they would give birth in a toilet [read: in secret; also implying self-induced abortion].’ See ‘Duterte Admits to Being a Flirt’, GMA News (31 March 2017), available at: {http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news/nation/605454/duterte-admits-to-being-a-flirt/story/} accessed 4 November 2017.

81 Tanyag, ‘Invisible labor, invisible bodies’.

82 Oxfam, Women after the Storm: Gender Issues in Yolanda Recovery and Rehabilitation (Quezon City: Oxfam, 2015), p. 35.

83 UN Women, Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace, p. 241.

84 Also known as Republic Act 9729. The full text is available at: {http://www.ifrc.org/docs/IDRL/RA209729.pdf}.

85 Also known as Republic Act 10121. The full text is available at: {http://www.ndrrmc.gov.ph/attachments/045_RA%2010121.pdf}.

86 Davies, Sara, Elbe, Stefan, Howell, Alison, and McInnes, Colin, ‘Global health in international relations: Editors’ introduction’, Review of International Studies, 40:5 (2014), pp. 825–834 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davies, ‘Healthy populations, political stability, and regime type’.