Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies

Corinne L. Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315529516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Around the world lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer individuals are subjected to violence and intimidation based on their real or perceived sexuality, gender identity or expression. With those most at risk of human rights violations often living in areas of low economic development, questions of sexuality, gender identity, and expression have become a significant area of research within the field of development studies. The Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies is the first full length study of queer development studies, collecting the very best in research from around the world. Topics for discussion include:

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• Queering policy and planning in development

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• Queer development critique and queer critiques of development

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• Global LGBTIQ rights

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• Queer social movements and mobilizations

At a time when development and human rights organizations such as the World Bank, Office of the UN Secretary General and Human Rights Watch are placing increasing importance on global LGBT rights, the Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies is an essential guide for scholars, upper level students, practitioners and anyone with an interest in global sexualities, gender identities, and expressions.

Part I
Queering policy and planning

1
Changing Families and Communities

An LGBT contribution to an alternative development path¹

Peter Drucker

In recent years the international institutions that dominate international development policy have given increasing attention to issues that are not narrowly economic, including in particular gender issues and democratic participation (referred to more often under the rubric of ‘good governance’). Non-economic issues are also important to those in the global justice movement challenging neoliberal orthodoxy. LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender) issues have, however, most often been addressed through such categories as citizenship, less often as directly related to alternative development strategies.

In fact LGBT people have the potential to play a significant role in formulating and implementing an alternative path to sustainable and equitable development. Mobilization and self-organization of those who suffer most directly from neoliberalism, though no panaceas, are indispensable to creating, let alone implementing, alternative development strategies. Self-organization, including LGBT self-organization, needs to take place in the most basic units of society—families and communities—so as to counter policies imposed from above by the state and capital. This makes it important to understand the role of gender and sexuality in the ways families and communities are structured and the ways family and community intersect with the state and economy.

Neoliberalism: the heteronormative dimension

The economic policies that have been imposed virtually worldwide since the early 1980s are generally summed up in the phrase ‘neoliberal globalization’. The economic harm that neoliberal globalization has done is now widely recognized. Less widely recognized are the ways in which neoliberal globalization is heteronormative.

Heteronormativity means the ways in which heterosexuality is institutionalized, ‘both explicitly (by excluding LGBT people from the analysis) and implicitly (by assuming that all people are heterosexual…)’ (Lind and Share 2003, 57). Neoliberalism has changed the forms heteronormativity takes as it has changed the forms of gender oppression.

Under capitalism the family has served as a mechanism both for inculcating hierarchical and authoritarian social relations and for reproducing the labour force through women’s unpaid labour (Seccombe 1993, 5–20; Coontz 1988, esp. 287–365). The reproduction of heteronormativity has facilitated both of these basic functions of the capitalist family. However, neoliberalism in many ways undermines the direct and obvious domination of wives and daughters by husbands and fathers and the Fordist gender regime, under which men in the 1950s and ’60s had a privileged position in the wage labour market and women in many families a correspondingly constricted sphere in the home (Brenner 2003, 78–79). Neoliberalism may thus be undercutting the heteronormative family’s effectiveness as a site for inculcating traditional authoritarian hierarchies. But it reinforces the family’s role as a site where basic needs are met in privatized ways. By imposing cuts in social spending—education, health care, childcare—since the 1980s, structural adjustment programmes in underdeveloped countries have displaced the costs of social reproduction even more onto women in the family (Barbosa et al. 1994, 8–9). Wherever LGBT people are excluded from or marginalized in families, they must struggle harder to have their basic needs met.

The enduring strength of women’s and lesbian/gay movements and the difficulty of rolling back many of their non-economic achievements complicated the victories of pro-market forces in the 1980s and ’90s. Women’s and lesbian/gay equality have become steadily more established as political commonplaces (in rhetoric if not in reality) at the same time that once widespread redistributive economic policies have been dismissed as outmoded. Alongside the global economy, the idea has also spread that there is now a ‘global gay’ (a term problematized by Dennis Altman in e.g. 2003) or ‘globalization of sexual identity’ (Wright 2000, 107, as cited in Lind and Share 2003, 65–66).

In fact many of women and LGBT people’s gains are delayed effects of battles that were fought in the 1970s, based on the dynamic of a different regime of capital accumulation, a different relationship of forces between labour and capital and a different social climate (Went 2000, 89–90). The link between emancipation and globalization is thus in part an optical illusion. The illusion helps obscure gender and sexual aspects of ‘really existing globalization’.

Varieties of heteronormativity

Focusing on sexual globalization also risks obscuring the different forms of heteronormativity under neoliberalism in different social formations. In developed capitalist countries since the Second World War, geographical displacement, rising wages, the development of a welfare state and legal victories have redefined the heterosexual norm from a strict taboo on ‘the love that does not speak its name’ to a situation where LGBT people are considered ‘abnormal’ more in a statistical than in a pathological sense—and in the sense that they are still more or less marginal to the family institutions through which society reproduces itself (D’Emilio 1983). This process of redefining the heterosexual norm has not been uniformly replicated in underdeveloped countries, however. First, pre-colonial and pre-capitalist sexual cultures had extraordinarily rich and varied forms of same-sex sexuality to begin with, in some cases expressed in open, socially accepted forms of same-sex identity in historical periods when ‘sodomites’ were still being burned alive in Europe. With the arrival of colonialism and capitalism, these varied indigenous sexual cultures combined with different modes of insertion into the world market to produce widely divergent heterosexual norms.²

This article cannot give much sense of the richness of the process (see Drucker 1996, 75–101). It can only cite a few examples of the different results that different modes of capitalist underdevelopment—along with colonialist, populist, fundamentalist and communalist ideologies and laws and other factors—have helped produce. In the Arab world, particularly low levels of women’s participation in the labour force have helped perpetuate harsh conditions of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ for women and lesbian invisibility (Khayatt 1996; Rich 1983, 183–185; Lind and Share 2003). In Caribbean regions whose role in the world economy has never fully recovered from the abolition of slavery and poverty is endemic among Afro-Caribbean women, forms of sexual and emotional bonding among women co-exist with heterosexual family patterns in which men are less than central (Wekker 1999). In much of South and Southeast Asia, pre-colonial forms of transgender have been incorporated into a domestic and global sexual market (Oetomo 1996; Altman 2000, 141–142, 149–150). In some of the most industrialized areas of the underdeveloped world, such as South Africa and the Southern Cone, by contrast, LGBT cultures resembling those of developed countries have become somewhat more prominent (Gevisser 2000; Green 1999).

A second set of reasons why the heterosexual norm has not been redefined in the same way in underdeveloped countries as in developed ones is the comparatively lower levels of working-class wages in underdeveloped countries, comparatively weaker welfare states and high levels of inequality. These have all helped ensure a great variety of forms of heteronormativity in much of the underdeveloped world. In particular, forms of same-sex sexuality identified as ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ tend more on average to be characteristic of middle-class layers of the population in many countries, while transgender often tends to be more prevalent among poor and working-class people (Carrier 1975, 120–121; Mejía 2000, 49; Oetomo 1996, 265, 268; Boellstorff 2005).

Third, heteronormativity takes different forms in different contexts, including within the same social formations, depending on whether or not existing families and communities bend to accommodate different forms of LGBT sexuality and identity. In underdeveloped countries people tend to be more dependent on their families and communities, even in big cities, where networks based on kinship, ethnicity and region of origin are often crucial to day-to-day survival. This means that breaking with families or communities is often harder to do, and has more drastic consequences when it occurs.

Sometimes LGBT people therefore seek and find ways to continue to take part in pre-existing family and community networks, and even incorporate same-sex partners into them. The often central role of religious and/or ethnic ‘tradition’³ in families’ and communities’ ideological discourses can complicate this process of incorporation; sometimes for example same-sex partners are just tacitly accepted as ‘friends’ (Chou 2000, 196–197). Another option—often the only one available to transgender people in many countries—is to join alternative families and communities of sexual dissidents. In many cases these sexually dissident communities are economically very marginal, confined to the informal sector and sometimes the sex trade.

Neoliberal globalization has compounded the divergences and inequalities that uneven capitalist development had helped produce. It ‘reinforces and reproduces inequalities’ (Mtewa 2003, 39). In the underdeveloped world specifically, the rise in economic inequality been accompanied by increased cultural tensions and class differences within both established and emerging LGBT communities (Fernández-Alemany 2000 and Babb 2001, cited in Lind and Share 2003, 60), including sexual divergences. On the one hand, commercial gay scenes and the disproportionately middle-class lesbian/gay communities oriented towards them have consolidated and expanded. On the other hand, various sexually dissident communities, such as increasingly militant transgenders in much of Latin America and South and Southeast Asia, have become more visible and vocal.

LGBT people in the underdeveloped world have been fighting, socially and sometimes even politically, on one or both of two different fronts. More and more of them have begun to fight against prejudice and repression, which have been fuelled by the dislocation of societies all over the world with the collapse of Fordist-based social and political orders, in the underdeveloped world often meaning populist or nationalist ‘socialist’ regimes relying on import-substitution development strategies. At the same time many LGBTs have been trying to resist pressures to claim them for a homogeneous, middle class-dominated lesbian/gay community.

Casualization of wage labour and the growth of the informal sector in the underdeveloped world under neoliberal globalization have included the growth of the sex trade. Economic internationalization has included the rise of international sex tourism, in two directions: the arrival of tourists from developed countries taking advantage of cheap sex for sale, and the arrival in developed countries of sex workers. Undocumented immigrants form a high proportion of sex workers in many European countries; transgender people form a high-proportion of same-sex sex workers almost everywhere. Wholesale exclusion of transgender people from most sectors of formal employment is one reason for this.

Queering families and communities

The sexual dimension of neoliberal globalization has never received much explicit attention in official development policy. The international financial institutions have been enthusiastic proponents of tourism as a source of hard currency for countries like Thailand, but usually without acknowledging the major part that sex tourism plays in it. Transgender people and others who do not fit into normative gender and sexual categories, even within the increasingly normative categories of lesbian/gay identity, are voiceless and invisible as a rule in the official discourse of development.

Official development policy tends to focus on the public sphere of the economy, and turn its gaze away from aspects of life defined as private. To the extent it does pay attention to the public implications of private life, it usually sees the heterosexual, nuclear family as a useful contributor to as well as a beneficiary of market-based economic growth.

Admittedly, liberal feminism has had an impact on the World Bank’s conception of the heterosexual nuclear family. A proper family is assumed to facilitate women’s autonomous participation in the market economy as well as men’s, and women are assumed to benefit from autonomous economic activity by becoming more equal inside the family. But the reality that people in underdeveloped countries live on a mass scale outside the domain of proper heterosexual families, just as they live on a mass scale outside the formal market economy, is assumed to be a mess to be tidied away over time, rather than a potential basis for choosing other options than those foreseen in neoliberal economic or social theory. A 1994 World Bank policy paper acknowledged for example that barriers to economic participation by women with children are ‘less onerous in countries where extended families predominate’ but noted that the ‘cost-effectiveness’ of ‘alternative childcare arrangements’ ‘has yet to be evaluated’ (World Bank 1994, 38, 48). This kind of tunnel vision helps account for what Kleitz calls the ‘incapacity of development theory to imagine a functional role for sexual minorities’ and helps ensure that ‘queer women and non-traditional heterosexual women remain invisible’ (Lind and Share 2003, 69).

The biases of international financial institutions and aid agencies in developed countries in defining ‘family’ can have unfortunate effects, not only on LGBT people but on all those whose well-being is linked up with support from extended or unconventional family and community networks. Neoliberal economists’ inclination to see increases in economic well-being as the result of individuals’ insertion into a market economy, with only a basic domestic support structure behind them, in fact does scant justice to the social strategies that enable people in underdeveloped countries to survive and, sometimes, improve their lives. Especially with the cutbacks in publicly provided education, health care and social benefits as a result of structural adjustment programmes, people’s dependence on extended family and friendship networks to sustain them in times of sickness, disability, childhood, old age or other periods of dependency has become all the greater. Pressure from neoliberal institutions to give up existing patterns of subsistence and barter economics and rely more on market-derived income has left people more vulnerable to the periodic crises that are endemic to a neoliberal economy.

Patterns of subsistence, barter, and collective and communal mutual aid remain particularly important in various ways for LGBT people in underdeveloped countries. Those who are most excluded from formal employment and existing family structures, particularly transgender people, rely very much on their own self-created and -sustaining community and family structures for protection against violence and persecution and for economic su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies
• PART I Queering policy and planning
• PART II Queer development critique
• PART III Global LGBTIQ rights
• PART IV Aiding queer mobilizations?
• Postscript: Heteronormative legacies, queer turns
• Index