The Global Politics of Sexual and Reproductive Health

This public talk is focused on the implications of Dr Maria Tanyag’s recently published book The Global Politics of Sexual and Reproductive Health (Oxford University Press 2024).

Dr Tanyag’s lecture will be followed by brief interventions from an interdisciplinary panel made up of Dr Kelly Gerard (Politics & IR, UWA) and Dr Melanie O'Brien(Law, UWA), chaired by Dr Ari Jerrems (Politics & IR, UWA).

The Global Politics of Sexual and Reproductive Health examines everyday inequalities in sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and the failure to address them in crisis settings from a feminist international relations (IR) perspective. It seeks to address the puzzle of why inequalities and barriers to SRHR continue to exist within a wider political context where the importance of gender equality has never been more accepted, and women are represented as central to major global agendas. In the increasingly crisis-prone world we live in today, the neglect of health and particularly women's health and well-being, seems counter-intuitive. The significance of SRHR for global peace and security is often hidden or under-examined. The unique contribution of this book is therefore to show that restrictions to sexual and reproductive health can be traced back to macro-level processes such as how states and the international community allocate resources during crises and in peacetime. Drawing on a richer definition of bodily autonomy, it employs a nested and multi-scalar approach to trace the compounding of restrictions to SRHR with crisis-specific risks and violence from the household, community, state and global levels. Its central argument is that restrictions to SRHR are not incidental but rather integral to the reproduction of a neoliberal logic of depletion. Bodily autonomy is recognised not as a collateral issue where patriarchal bargains need to be made in order to advance feminism in global agendas. But rather as its cornerstone which ties together all sites, forms and temporalities of gender equality together. This book includes new empirical evidence drawn from primary field research in the Philippines and analysis of wide-ranging secondary sources across conflict and disaster settings.

Dr Maria Tanyag is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations of the Australian National University and an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow. Her research has been also published in various journals including The Lancet, Human Rights Quarterly, Signs, Gender & Development, and Review of International Studies. She has contributed Op-Eds in The Guardian and The Conversation. Maria specialises in critical and feminist approaches to global peace and security, focusing on the Asia Pacific region and the Philippines in particular. She was selected as one of the inaugural International Studies Association (ISA) Emerging Global South Scholars in 2019, as resident Women, Peace, and Security Fellow at Pacific Forum (Hawaii) in 2021, and as a British Academy Visiting Fellow in 2023.

Dr Tanyag is a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, working with Dr Ari Jerrems and colleagues in the UWA School of Social Sciences.