Negotiating Bodies

Negotiating Bodies reveals the geopolitical alliances that attack social and gender justice and the health of all bodies - living, material, symbolic, and institutional.

Drawing on first-hand ethnographic research on negotiations at United Nations agencies, the World Health Organisation in Geneva, and global case studies, this book explores how gender gained transactional diplomatic currency in a geopolitical and ideological contest for global governance within the post-war system of multilateralism.

Through local histories to the floor of the Human Rights Council Room XX at the Palais de Nations, Claire Somerville explores how gender has acquired transactional and tradable characteristics in normative global health negotiations, human rights resolutions and even technical discussions. The bodies of women, girls and gender minorities are contested, erased and re-made in a political world polarized between equity approaches to gender and social justice, and the ideologies of the restorative anti-gender movements.