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.