Book Reviews editorial

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that the governance of global health is a gendered practice, one that is entwined with persistent structures of violence and economic injustice. Using the pandemic as an analytical entry point, the contributors to this issue's Book Reviews section explore the social, economic, and political inequalities that are embedded within the provision and governance of global health. As the pandemic acutely demonstrates, the negative impacts of androcentric health governance upon women's lives and their rights can be devastating, widespread, and enduring.

Lynda Gilby argues that to understand this, a feminist analysis of violence, insecurity, and global health is of critical importance. In her review of Gender, Global Health and Violence: Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Disease, edited by Tiina Vaittinen and Catia C. Confortini, she discusses how the book's adoption of a feminist peace research approach to global health holds great potential for understanding and addressing contemporary global health insecurity. The contributors to this book approach the inequalities inherent in global health governance as manifestations of structural violence, which needs to be addressed through the promotion of peace and justice. Gilby contends that by bringing feminist global health scholarship and feminist peace research into conversation, the book generates new avenues for feminist analysis that can help us to better critique, resist, and remedy the unequal gendered effects of the pandemic.

Complementing this analysis of how global health is entangled with various forms of structural violence, Diane Perrons’ book Is Austerity Gendered? offers a thorough account of how the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the deeply gendered impacts of over a decade of economic austerity policies in the United Kingdom and beyond. Austerity is defined as a set of policies “designed to reduce public deficits and debt by cutting public expenditure or raising revenue or both.” In her review of the book, Luisa Lupo discusses its contribution to understanding the gendered impacts of austerity from the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 to the pandemic. Importantly, the book suggests that the pandemic marks a turning point, as austerity has given way to significant investment in the recovery from the immediate health and economic crisis. However, as Lupo notes,

it is yet to be seen whether the post-COVID-19 future will be characterized by a return to “normal,” pre-pandemic cuts in public spending and social protection, or whether we will embark on a more transformative path that prioritizes life and care over market imperatives.

Focusing on abortion politics as a specific, and highly politicized, aspect of global health governance, Reimagining Global Abortion Politics: A Social Justice Perspective by Fiona Bloomer, Claire Pierson, and Sylvia Estrada Claudio reveals the gendered inequalities underpinning health rights and provision. Although the book was written before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Olivia Engle emphasizes in her review how it constitutes a key resource for scholars and activists, making visible how the pandemic undermines abortion access and rights, and suggesting ways in which to challenge the threats to reproductive justice in the current context of the pandemic and beyond.

Finally, in Sophie Harman's review of Rethinking the Body in Global Politics: Bodies, Body Politics, and the Body Politic in a Time of Pandemic by Kandida Purnell, the politics of regulating bodies in global politics during the pandemic is the central focus of attention. In the book, the author explores the affective landscapes of individual and collective experiences of and responses to the pandemic to show how “bodies are not outside of politics but rather always and already contested sites of global politics.” For example, the pandemic has laid bare how different bodies are constructed as more or less worthy of protection, and as more or less “grievable.” In her assessment of the book, Harman argues that it initiates a conversation about embodiment, inequality, and global politics that is likely to be central to post-pandemic international relations for years to come.

In the Book Reviews section, we focus on books that explore feminist politics and gender relations in a global frame. We aim to include multi-disciplinary, cross-border, and critical feminist scholarship. The section includes three types of contributions: book reviews, review essays, and essays that rethink the canon of feminist scholarship. Book reviews engage with an individual, recently published piece of work, briefly describing its content and critically evaluating and locating its contributions to global feminist scholarship and to particular bodies of literature. Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming either to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications, or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established area of research. Essays that rethink the canon aim to re-evaluate the canon of feminist global political scholarship and its boundaries, and provide the opportunity to also engage with books that are not recently published. These essays may aim to critically rethink the established literature on a particular topic in light of recent events or new publications, or to engage with books that have been marginalized by existing disciplinary boundaries and explain why these ought to be essential reading for feminists working on global issues.

If you are interested in submitting a review essay or a review, please contact the Book Reviews Editors, Elisabeth Olivius, Ebru Demir, and Katrina Lee-Koo. Reviews and essays need to be written in English, but the texts they review do not.

For further information, please refer to the journal's FAQ page at https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_book_reviews_shortcut.