Health, Human Rights and Lesbian Existence

This essay briefly examines the intersection of "health and human rights" strategies with two critical international human rights movements: women's rights and gay rights. It concludes that within international frameworks defining a woman's right to health, reproductive health has played a predominant role, and when discussions of health and human rights have addressed issues of homosexuality, they have tended to focus on the explosive conjunction of AIDS and discrimination in the lives of gay men. Nevertheless, despite the fact that strategies for achieving a human right to health have tended to focus on issues less than central to many lesbians' lives, the emerging health and human rights paradigm by allowing a "whole person" analysis that takes into account the dynamics of individual and social relations as well as basic human needsmay paradoxically offer lesbians the potential to counteract the harms that have evolved within the arenas of health and human rights independently, while avoiding the pitfalls of identity-based claims.