'Walking wombs': making sense of the Muskoka initiative and the emphasis on motherhood in canadian foreign policy
- 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.
Author: | Rebecca Tiessen |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-405407 |
URL: | http://www.theglobaljusticenetwork.org/index.php/gjn/article/view/58 |
ISSN: | 1835-6842 |
Parent Title (English): | Global justice : theory, practice, rhetoric |
Publisher: | The Global Justice Network |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of Completion: | 2015 |
Year of first Publication: | 2015 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2016/07/01 |
Tag: | Canadian foreign policy; gender essentialism; gender inequality; maternal health; mothers |
Volume: | 8 |
Issue: | 1 |
Page Number: | 22 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 22 |
HeBIS-PPN: | 399860681 |
Institutes: | Gesellschaftswissenschaften |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 34 Recht / 340 Recht |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Licence (German): | Deutsches Urheberrecht |