Paper short abstract

I explore how gender inequalities come to matter as distinct bodily states in recent nutrition interventions in Uganda. I ask whether attention to instabilities of evidences linking the problem and its purported solution could help to move beyond some common critiques of global health.

Paper long abstract

In 2010 Ugandan guidelines on maternal nutrition established the importance of addressing gender inequality in society by improving the nutritional status of women. While gender inequality there is framed as a social problem, global health interventions typically are rooted in an understanding of biological sex difference. Drawing on recent fieldwork in Uganda, I examine nutritional interventions and surveys, seeking to measure, treat, and monitor micro-nutrient malnutrition. Gender inequality there is enacted as deficiency of some substances (folic acid, iron etc.). Nutritional interventions do not merely reflect distinctions drawn in everyday life concerning sex/gender but shape and naturalize "biological" differences by drawing a range metaphysical distinctions between bodies--bodies in need of different substances and female bodies before, between, or in the midst of pregnancy--with quantifiable micro-nutrient needs. These translations posit global health as the arena to work out social inequalities. I join others in questioning these assumptions while trying to move beyond a mere critical dismantling of practices in global health. I ask whether and how a stronger focus on mundane processes of biomedical evidence making could help to find other, possibly more hopeful affinities.