Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance

Amy Lind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135244590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book addresses how sexual practices and identities are imagined and regulated through development discourses and within institutions of global governance.

The underlying premise of this volume is that the global development industry plays a central role in constructing people's sexual lives, access to citizenship, and struggles for livelihood. Despite the industry's persistent insistence on viewing sexuality as basically outside the realm of economic modernization and anti-poverty programs, this volume brings to the fore heterosexual bias within macroeconomic and human rights development frameworks. The work fills an important gap in understanding how people's intimate lives are governed through heteronormative policies which typically assume that the family is based on blood or property ties rather than on alternative forms of kinship. By placing heteronormativity at the center of analysis, this anthology thus provides a much-needed discussion about the development industry's role in pathologizing sexual deviance yet also, more recently, in helping make visible a sexual rights agenda.

Providing insights valuable to a range of disciplines, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Development Studies, Gender Studies, and International Relations. It will also be highly relevant to development practitioners and international human rights advocates.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203868348, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I
Querying/queering development

Theories, representations, strategies

1
Why the development industry should get over its obsession with bad sex and start to think about pleasure

Susie Jolly

Wanted sex, good sex and right to enjoy sex is not something that is covered in many intervention programmes. All I can say is that sexual reproductive health activities concentrate on ABC and family planning, in other words, more of the shock tactics type of education. How do we expect young women to understand the importance of consensual sex and negotiating skills if education is only limited to prevention of pregnancy, STIs, and sex being a no go area in many societies?

(Namibian participant, Young Women’s Dialogue, in International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS, April 13, 2004)

[W]hen we go beyond conventional research paradigms on African sexuality (which primarily focus on reproduction, violence and disease) to explore the area of desire and pleasure, we gain deeper insights into this complex subject matter. I believe that in the long run, by broadening the scope of our research on sexuality, we can offer fresh perspectives that support more astute strategic interventions on critical areas such as sexual rights, health education, HIV/AIDS and development.

(Tamale 2005: 18)

There is a myth that the development industry¹ is not engaged with sexuality – and some fears that if it does engage with these intimate areas of our lives, it will do harm. In fact, the development industry has always dealt with sexuality-related issues, although usually only implicitly, and negatively, in relation to population control, disease, or violence. More recently, the need to respond to HIV/AIDS, and the increasing legitimacy of human rights approaches in development, have created spaces for more open discussion of sexuality. Huge progress has been made, such as in the Cairo Convention (1994) which understands reproductive health to include that “people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life” and the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) which asserts women’s rights to “have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality”. However, the focus is still usually on sex as a problem, in relation to risk, vulnerability, ill-health, and violations of rights, and on how to say “no” to risky sex, rather than how to say “yes” or even ask for a broader range of safer sex options (Klugman 2000, Corrêa 2002, Petchesky 2005).

This chapter starts with a look at how development representations of the dangers of sexuality have been combined with stereotypical representations of gender with very problematic results. It then moves on to examine the realities of the imbrications of pleasure and danger in peoples lives, looking at how gender combines with other power dynamics to play out in a variety of sexual cultures. Lastly, the chapter considers why and how development should promote the good sides of sexuality.

Development representations: bad sex and gender stereotypes

The development industry has emphasized the dangers of sex and sexuality. This negative approach to sex has been filtered through a view of gender which stereotypes men as predators, women as victims, and fails to recognize the existence of transgender people.

Women as victims of bad sex …

Within the development discourses of sex as a problem, women are positioned as victims of bad sex, in line with Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s analysis of victim representations of “third world women” in her now renowned piece, “Under Western Eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses” (Mohanty 1991), which, sadly, is still relevant. In her publication, Mohanty considers a series of writings by “first world” feminists on subjects such as female genital mutilation and women in development. The texts she considers consistently define women as objects of what is done to them, and as victims of either “male violence,” “the colonial process,” “the Arab familial system,” “the economic development process,” or “the Islamic code.” An image is constructed of a homogeneous and victimized population of Third World women. Mohanty recognizes that this homogenizing includes sexuality, erasing “all marginal and resistant modes and experiences. It is significant that none of the texts I reviewed in the … series focuses on lesbian politics or the politics of ethnic and religious marginal organizations in third world women’s groups” (Mohanty 1991: 73).

A powerful current version of this discourse of women as victims is about women’s absolute vulnerability to HIV/AIDS due to male violence and economic coercion. For example, at the time of writing, the most frequently downloaded news story on the UNIFEM HIV/AIDS portal reports that the HIV/AIDS pandemic: … has killed more people (mostly women) than World Wars I and II and

the Gulf War combined. Some of the reasons identified as the causes of the high prevalence of HIV infections in women include the cultural practice, which gave men the exclusive right to decide when, how and why to have sex with women in or out of marriage. Indeed these cultural practices are reinforced by the dependence of women on men for their needs, both financial and material. Women in this kind of situation, mostly in the developing countries, are subjected to sexual violence in the event they decide to postpone sexual intercourse for a moment for reasons of health, safety, or tiredness.

(Dowuona 2005)

This piece does reflect important aspects of reality. It is true that many women are pressured into unsafe sex by violence or economic dependency. I do not in any way want to undermine the hugely important work against this violence and coercion. However, the emphasis on violence and gender inequality as the causes of unsafe sex only presents half the picture. There’s an underlying idea here that men have total power in sex while women are just trying to impose damage limitation while we “lie back and think of England”² or some other appropriate patriotic love object (and that women only ever have unsafe sex because we lack power to negotiate with male partners, never due to our own desires). Do women really have no desire, agency or room for maneuver? Do women have no pleasure or hope of pleasure in sex?

Sylvia Tamale (2005) has challenged portrayals of African women as simply victims of sexual oppression through her research on the Ssenga – a tradition among the Baganda people in Uganda where the paternal aunt takes on the task of educating her nieces about sex. Tamale’s research shows that while the institution ofSsenga can reinforce patriarchal power over women’s bodies, it can also present new opportunities for women to challenge control of their sexualities. Many Ssengas in their contemporary form promote messages about women’s autonomy and economic independence, and some instruction includes lessons in oral sex, masturbation, and female ejaculation. Tamale also notes the pleasure-enhancing effects for both women and men of the extension of the labia minora,³ which the World Health Organization has lumped together with harmful forms of female genital mutilation (Tamale 2005).

The danger of the discourse of “women as victims of bad sex” is not just the crushing of any space for discussion of or mobilization around women’s pleasure. Dangerous convergences take place between certain feminist positions aiming to protect women from sexual violence and conservative forces concerned with women’s chastity. This has already been observed in several instances: feminist anti-pornography activists making alliances with right-wing groups in the West in the 1980s (Rubin 1984); some Indian feminists’ images of Indian women as chaste and vulnerable to sexual exploitation echoing the Hindu right’s portrayal of virtuous Indian womanhood (Kapur 2002); and the “unholy alliance” between some feminist groups and the Bush administration in the mobilization against prostitution and trafficking (Crago 2003). Such discourses around protecting women from exploitation – sexual and otherwise – have also been drawn upon by the US right to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (Petchesky 2005).

Men as perpetrators of bad sex …

The flipside of the “women as victims of bad sex” discourse is the “men as sexual predator” one. Both the global feminist and the neocolonialist enterprise become white women saving brown women from brown men.⁴ Just as Third World women are portrayed as homogeneous, Third World men are portrayed as monolithic, heterosexual, and as perpetrators of sexual oppression of women. The multiple and diverse forms of masculinity, and differentials in men’s power, are ignored. Ouzgane and Morrell (2005) argue that in much of the existing literature on gender in Africa, men have tended to be overlooked, taken for granted, or treated as a unified, homogeneous category.

In 2003, the US congress passed the Global Emergency AIDS Act. Gary Barker describes how:

… some lawmakers in the United States decided that African men were the problem behind HIV/AIDS and included language in the bill that called for changing how African men treat women, with funding provided for “assistance for the purpose of encouraging men to be responsible in their sexual behaviour, child rearing and to respect women.” While many persons would likely agree with the sentiment of this statement, it is important we avoid blaming individual men and instead examine more closely how it is that social constructions of gender and manhood lead to HIV-related vulnerability.

(Barker 2005: 4)

Some men do fit the stereotypes of sexual predator. However, where men diverge from this image, their experiences are erased. Men have been victims of sexual violence in large numbers, and sexual violence against men has been used as a weapon of war and intimidation – for example in the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and in the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat, India in 2002, yet these incidents have been under-reported and did not make the media (Petchesky 2005).

This silence on men’s sexual victimization has been dramatically broken with stories of the US military’s sexual torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Now added to the relentless images we see of men attacking women are photos of men being tortured, sexually and otherwise, by women as well as men. Petchesky (2005) argues that the reason sexual violence inflicted on men and by women became visible at this point was not only because of the availability of new technologies (digital cameras, e-mail, and Internet), but because US intelligence interpreted sexual violence, and treating men as feminized and homosexualized, as particularly humiliating – both in their own American patriarchal and homophobic frame of reference, and also in their understanding of Muslim and Arab cultures. As such, publicizing such images multiplied the humiliation around the world. Thus while men became visible as victims, this portrayal emerged precisely because it served a deliberate function of showing these men as “less than” men. Where men retain their masculinity they remain predators, not victims.

Transgender people ignored

While women are positioned as victims, and men as predators, those who do not fit neatly into the male–female categorizations usually remain invisible in development discourses on sexuality or other issues. I will label these people very loosely as “transgender”⁵ by which I include a whole range of self-identifications such as tommy boys and lesbian men in Africa, hijras in South Asia, travestis⁶ in Latin America, ladyboys in Thailand, third spirit among native American Indians, the globalized identities of queer, trans, female to male transsexuals and male to female transsexuals, and all those who are intersex, as well as any others who identify as neither male nor female. By transgender, I refer to a gender identity, or anti-identity – a not fitting into the male/female categorizations.

The reality is that many people do not fit into the “male–female” sex categories. Numbers are not small. In his briefing to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 2002, Bondyopadhay records an estimate of between half to one million hijras in India. An article in The New Scientist declares that up to one in every 500 babies are born “intersex” with chromosomes at odds with their anatomy (Phillips 2001: 31), but this is usually hushed up. In the West one in 2000 babies have surgery because their bodies do not fit the accepted categories of “female” or “male” (Phillips 2001: 39).

Yet such diversity is erased in development discourses, including in gender and development discourses. In our insistence that gender comes from nurture rather than nature, we⁷ have been willing to leave sex, and the categorizations of male and female, uncontested in the domain of biology. See, for example, these current unexceptional definitions from the One World Action Glossary:

Sex marks the distinction between women and men as a result of their biological, physical and genetic differences.

Gender roles are the different roles that women and men, girls and boys have that often determine who does what within a society. Gender roles are set by convention and other social, economic, political and cultural forces.

(One World Action 2005)

Such definitions, and policies and programs based on this limited understanding of sex, erase the experiences of transgender people worldwide. Campuzano (2008) argues that development and colonialism have suppressed possibilities to identify outside the male–female categories. He gives the example of Peru where historically among indigenous people the distinctions between male and female were more flexible than they are today. A traditional travesti or transgender/transvestite identity and culture existed and persists in spite of the colonial and subsequently development influences which imposed a more restrictive order on gender identity and behavior (2006).

Currently, transgendered people are likely to face particular sexuality-related issues; for example, how to negotiate their own sexual interactions in societies which refuse to recognize their gender identities, high levels of rape and sexual violence from police and others, discrimination by sexual health services, as well as the fact that for certain transgender populations, labor market discrimination means that sex work is virtually th...

Table of contents

• RIPE series in global political economy
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Querying/queering development
• Part II Negotiating heteronormativity in development institutions
• Part III Resisting global hegemonies, struggling for sexual rights and gender justice
• Bibliography
• Index