Conclusion: Body Politics and the Making and Unmaking of Gender and Development

Abstract

In June 2013 I was in Vienna speaking on a panel “Vienna+20: Women’s rights at stake?!: Voices of international women’s rights activists”. The occasion was the twentieth anniversary of the UN Conference on Human Rights. Held in a chandeliered room in Viennese government offices, the event was packed with women from the civil society and policy arena, eager to reflect on what had been achieved in the last two decades. The Vienna UN conference in 1993 had been a watershed for human rights and gender development processes. It was the Vienna conference that coined the phrase “women’s rights are human rights”, changing both human rights discourse and the broader gender and development project. As was clear from the panel, issues such as violence against women, rape in war, female genital cutting and domestic violence, once outside of development processes, were now well and truly within the development policy remit. Speaking on the panel were a feisty feminist minister, Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek, the Austrian Minister of Women Affairs; Valerie N. Msoka, the current head of the Tanzanian Women’s Media Association; Rosa Loga and Charlotte Bunch, renowned human rights activists and two of the original organisers of the women’s tribunals which featured in the NGO event in 1993 in Vienna; and Seidy Saltwo Viquez — an outspoken sexual health and reproductive rights activist from Costa Rica.