TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tiessen, Rebecca
T1  - 'Walking wombs': making sense of the Muskoka initiative and the emphasis on motherhood in canadian foreign policy
T2  - Global justice : theory, practice, rhetoric
N2  - The Muskoka Initiative – or the Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) Initiative has been a flagship foreign policy strategy of the Harper Conservatives since it was introduced in 2010.  However, the maternal health initiative has been met with a number of key criticisms in relation to its failure to address the sexual and reproductive health needs of women in the Global South2. In this article, I examine these criticisms and expose the prevalent and problematic discourse employed in Canadian policy papers and official government speeches pertaining to the MNCH Initiative. I examine the embodiment of the MNCH and how these references to women’s bodies as “walking wombs” facilitate: the objectification and ‘othering’ of women as mothers and childbearers; a discourse of ‘saving mothers’ in a paternalistic and essentialist language; and the purposeful omission of gender equality. Feminist International Relations (IR) and post-colonial literature, as well as critical/feminist Canadian foreign policy scholarship are employed in this paper to frame these critiques.
KW  - Canadian foreign policy
KW  - gender essentialism
KW  - gender inequality
KW  - maternal health
KW  - mothers
Y1  - 2015
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/40540
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-405407
UR  - http://www.theglobaljusticenetwork.org/index.php/gjn/article/view/58
SN  - 1835-6842
VL  - 8
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 22
PB  - The Global Justice Network
ER  -