June 28, 2010, Toronto

Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance

Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance

Edited By Amy Lind

• Publication Date: 4th January 2010 (Available for Pre-order)

About the Book

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: "Development, Global Governance, and Sexual Subjectivities" Amy Lind Part 1: 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 2. "Transgendering Development: Reframing Hijras and Development" Jyoti Puri 3. "Querying Feminist Economics’ Straight Path to Development: Household Models Reconsidered" Suzanne Bergeron Part 2: Negotiating Heteronormativity in Development Institutions 4. "The World Bank’s GLOBE: Queers in/Queering Development" Andil Gosine 5.: "NGOs as Erotic Sites" Ara Wilson 6. "Promoting Exports, Restructuring Love: How the World Bank Manages Policy Tensions through Heteronormativity in the Flower Industry" Kate Bedford 7: "’Headless Families’ and ‘Detoured men’: Off the Straight Path of Modern Development in Bolivia" Susan Paulson Part 3: Resisting Global Hegemonies, Struggling for Sexual Rights and Gender Justice 8. "Spelling It Out: From Alphabet Soup to Sexual Rights and Gender Justice" Sangeeta Budhiraja, Susana T. Fried and Alexandra Teixeira 9. "Disrupting Gender Normativity in the Middle East: Supporting Gender Transgression as a Development Strategy" Petra Doan 10. "Behind the Mask: Developing LGBTI Visibility in Africa" Ashley Currier 11. "Queer Dominican Moves: In the Interstices of Colonial Legacies and Global Impulses" Maja Horn

About the Author(s)

Amy Lind is Mary Ellen Heintz Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and faculty affiliate of the Department of Sociology and the School of Planning at the University of Cincinnati, USA.

"Sexual desires, rights and regulation," Caribbean Review of Gender Studies

The "Sexualities" edition of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies has just been published online, and features original contributions from:

GLORIA WEKKER

JASBIR PUAR

YASMIN TAMBIAH

DAVID MURRAY

TARA ATLURI

MICHELLE MOHABEER

CAE JOSEPH MESSINA

ANTHONY LEWIS & ROBERT CARR

and many others!

Check it out at http://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/

From the Editorial:

The essays collected in this volume provide an indication of some of the activities, insights and questions disturbing the often quiet compliance with the heteronormative models of citizenship and social organization that were introduced at and have been institutionalized since the beginning of colonization of the Caribbean region. Contributors from English-, Dutch-, Spanish- and French-speaking parts of the region turn their attention to a number of events and issues in the collection. Yasmin Tambiah recalls Alexander’s seminal examination of sexual citizenship in Trinidad, and uncovers new insights into how post-colonial states use law to refine sexual norms in their constitution of nation. Some scholars provide glimpses into the complex sexual cultures of Caribbean communities, such as David Murray’s examination of Barbados’ “nebulous queens,” and Dwaine Plaza’s and Amar Wahab’s ethnography of queer-identified Caribbean immigrants in Canada. Four contributors—Tara Atluri, Tanya Saunders, Robert Carr and Anthony Lewis—reveal how nationalist struggles about sexuality inhabit and are negotiated in forms of Caribbean popular culture, and two activists—Colin Robinson and Akim Ade Larcher—weigh in on controversial transnational campaigns targeting one form claimed to be particularly productive of homophobia, Jamaican dancehall. Vanessa Agard-Jones and Rinaldo Walcott trouble disaporic claims for sexual rights being made on behalf of Caribbean people, from outside the region, while Jasbir Puar revisits her previous fieldwork in Trinidad, and many of the questions outlined in this volume, to consider how certain queer subjectivities may be induced through tropes of nationalism. Finally, Gloria Wekker shares her frank and compelling insights about some of the core matters underlying all these discussions: pleasure, desire, happiness, love.

Throughout the volume, authors face and engage multiple tensions that surround the production of sexual identity and the regulation of sexual practices, and critically consider some longstanding, but problematic claims about these processes in the contemporary Caribbean. Although the original call for papers was broadly defined, all contributions published here share a strong focus on transnational circuits of exchange. Many of them consider how “local” struggles for sexual rights and “local” ideas about liberty and personhood in the Caribbean interact with, inform and are also informed by Euro-American-centered concepts of identity. As gay activists, Robinson and Larcher, for example, share some important political commitments but hold quite different attitudes toward the engagement of North American and European gay activists in Caribbean struggles; where Larcher sees promise in deepening international collaboration, Robinson warns against what Walcott refers here to as their “white queer homonormative racism.” Agard-Jones, too, is similarly suspicious of some forms of transnational activism in French Caribbean territories. Murray’s study of Barbados queens offers us perhaps the most telling truth about the Caribbean’s sexual cultures and modes of sexual regulation. Contesting dominant depictions of the region as a uniformly homophobic space, or as one that merely takes cues from outside in negotiating sexual cultures, he concludes that Barbados’ ‘sexscape’ “is neither an illustration of a ‘creolized’, ‘hybrid’ culture, nor is it a ‘pluralistic’ compendium of multiple, discrete cultures,” but rather “illustrate[s] the ongoing tension between differentially located and produced subjectivities and values, which are pieced together in myriad, contextually shifting ways.” We must foreground this complexity if we are to deepen knowledge and analysis of Caribbean sexualities.

- Andil Gosine

Sexuality, Social Exclusion and Human Rights

Sexualities in International Development: New Journal Issue

Issue 52.1 of The journal Development collects essays on sexual rights and regulation.

Sex, Power and Taboo

Global Arc of Justice, DAY 4

Joel Simpson

For the first concurrent session of the day, we went to the issue track on “Combating Stigma, Preventing HIV, and MSM Populations”. The presentation from Italy on “HIV and the Workplace: New Challenges for Trade Unions” was quite interesting as it highlighted a comprehensive approach in protecting workers from discrimination, harassment and prejudice based on sexual orientation, gender identity and HIV status. There were two other substantive presentations from Australia and Nigeria.

In the next set of concurrent sessions, after the break, we went to the global track on “The Law of Small Change in the New World”. This was a panel that combined the disciplines of law and economics to determine whether there is a formula for change. According to the abstract, “the idea is that a series of incremental advances in the treatment of homosexual behaviour, LGBT persons and same-sex relationships paves the way for further legal recognition to appear as just a ‘small change’.” One presenter was very upfront in saying that the concept was developed by a European based on European experiences. As may be expected, presentations were filled with graphs and charts attempting to measure ‘determinants’ of legal/policy change on LGBT issues in countries. One presenter concluded from his analysis that we sometimes have to make concessions so that we achieve ‘small change’ which is gradual and incremental, as opposed to shooting for monumental wins, I guess. In his words, “any change in the law with respect to homosexuality will only happen if accompanied by some exception, something else, amounting to ‘small change’.” This may seem like a reasonable assertion on the face of it but I for one am not sure that all the graphs and charts taught us anything that we could not learn without them.

After lunch now, it was time for the plenary of the day but before we delved into the “California Marriage” situation, outgoing President of the then International Lesbian and Gay Law Association (ILGLaw), Prof. David Cruz from USC, announced the outcomes of the ILGLaw board’s early morning meeting and elections. He was re-elected, now with the Prof. Tamara Adrian Hernandez from Venezuela as Co-Presidents, and Justice Kirby serving as Honourary President. The board also decided to re-name to the International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Intersex Law Association (ILGBTILaw is the new acronym I guess?), as well as appointed new sub-regional representatives.

As for “California Marriage” plenary, I did not realize that Prop. 8 left such a dismal mood until this panel. In previous panels, California presenters had said that they were hoping this conference would re-inspire and re-energize them, especially all the recent progress in Latin America. And that the California judiciary was going through a “crisis of courage”. It was all starting to add up now. The first two presenters were from the state’s leading LGBT litigation NGOs working on the marriage equality cases. They talked about their case in court to overturn Prop. 8. There seminal argument was that it is unethical to allow minority rights recognised by the judiciary to be eroded by a simple majority vote at the hands of the electorate. They make a strong case of what they call the “tyranny of the majority” by saying that what prevents it is that whatever restrictions the majority imposes, they must be able to accept for themselves. One presenter described this as the “salvation of our [US] democracy.” Two professors from the UCLA law school Critical Race Studies Programme deconstructed the Prop. 8 aftermath of blaming ethnic/racial, religious and other minorities. These presentations were very frank and unapologetic on confronting issues like racism in LGBT communities (where examples were quoted from adam4adam like, “no Blacks, no Asians please. I’m not racial; it’s just my preference.”), failure to sufficiently involve Black LGBT communities and engage Black, Asian, faith, immigrant and other communities in the state, etc. A leading member of the Asian community in California also presented on the community organizing and education work Asian organizations which are not LGBT focused have been doing in their communities post- Prop. 8. We also heard a sober analysis of how different demographics and groups voted on Prop. 8. After all these extensive presentations, there was very little time left for Q&A but it was still a very rich panel. After this, we called it a day and end of the conference.

The entiring 4 days, though tiring, was very thought-provoking. It was an invaluable opportunity to participate in movement-building conversations across various borders, - geographic, language, religion, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc - share knowledge and experiences and inspire and ecourage each other. The linkages served to cystalise our similarities, rather than our differences, no matter where on that global arc of justice we are!