Development with a Body

Sexuality, Human Rights and Development

By Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Corrêa, Susie Jolly

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2008 EGDI
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84277-891-3

Contents

Abbreviations, vii,
Acknowledgements, x,
Foreword by Paul Hunt, xi,
1 Development with a body: making the connections between sexuality, human rights and development | ANDREA CORNWALL, SONIA CORREA AND SUSIE JOLLY, 1,
2 Development’s encounter with sexuality: essentialism and beyond | SONIA CORREA AND SUSIE JOLLY, 22,
ONE | Sexual rights/human rights,
3 Sexual rights are human rights | KATE SHEILL, 45,
4 Sex work, trafficking and HIV: how development is compromising sex workers’ human rights | MELISSA DITMORE, 54,
5 The language of rights | JAYA SHARMA, 67,
6 Children’s sexual rights in an era of HIV/AIDS | DEEVIA BHANA, 77,
7 The rights of man | ALAN GREIG, 86,
8 Human rights interrupted: an illustration from India | SUMIT BAUDH, 93,
TWO | Gender and sex orders,
9 Discrimination against lesbians in the workplace | ALEJANDRA SARDÁ, 107,
10 Ruling masculinities in post-apartheid South Africa | KOPANO RATELE, 121,
11 Gender, identity and travestí rights in Peru | GIUSEPPE CAMPUZANO, 136,
12 Small powers, little choice: reproductive and sexual rights in slums in Bangladesh | SABINA FAIZ RASHID, 146,
13 Social and political inclusion of sex workers as a preventive measure against trafficking: Serbian experiences | JELENA DJORDJEVIC, 161,
14 Confronting our prejudices: women’s movement experiences in Bangladesh | SHIREEN HUQ, 181,
15 Sexuality education as a human right: lessons from Nigeria |ADENIKE O. ESIET, 187,
16 Terms of contact and touching change: investigating pleasure in an HIV epidemic | JILL LEWIS AND GILL GORDON, 199,
17 A democracy of sexuality: linkages and strategies for sexual rights, participation and development | HENRY ARMAS, 210,
18 Integrating sexuality into gender and human rights frameworks: a case study from Turkey | PINAR ILKKARACAN AND KARIN RONGE, 225,
About the authors, 243,
Index, 249,

CHAPTER 1

Development with a body: making the connections between sexuality, human rights and development

ANDREA CORNWALL, SONIA CORRÊA AND SUSIE JOLLY

‘We used to talk about development with a human face. We should be talking about development with a body.’ Arit Oku-Egbas, Africa Regional Resource Centre, Nigeria

In Stockholm, in April 2006, an unusual combination of people gathered together with considerable excitement: an Argentinian lesbian activist, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation, a South African sexuality researcher, a Turkish sexual rights NGO organizer and a UN Special Rapporteur, among others. This exceptional get-together, hosted by Sweden’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Expert Group on Development Issues (EGDI), was the first of its kind, a seminar on making the linkages between sexuality, human rights and development.

The seminar provided a precious opportunity for exchange between sexual rights activists and government policy-makers, and for exploring the intersections between sexuality, human rights and development. It came soon after the adoption by the Swedish Foreign Ministry of a new policy on sexual and reproductive health and rights, which is the most comprehensive and far-reaching policy on sexual rights adopted by any development cooperation ministry so far, and a laudable move in the current climate of conservative backlash. Out of these discussions came this book, which draws together contributions from participants at the Stockholm seminar and from others who participated in a workshop entitled Realizing Sexual Rights, which had been held at the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton some months previously.

This introduction opens by briefly reporting on some of the ‘sex wars’ currently under way at local, national and global levels. These realities compellingly portray how sexual matters are key factors behind discrimination and injustice, and demonstrate how policy debates on sexuality are increasingly captured by conservative positions and ideologies that often escape the radars of progressive development actors. Then it moves towards a brief reminder that what is witnessed in today’s world has many parallels with other times and places. This is followed by an examination of how the lack of critical systematic reflection about dominant conceptions of sexuality and gender – in particular heteronormativity – explains the silences and resistances observed in the development field in relation to ‘sex’. Novel conceptual paths that may lead to a virtuous reframing of these connections are also explored, with a particular emphasis on the possibilities opened by a more consistent articulation of development and human rights. These new conceptual paths are not, however, exempt from paradoxes and challenges. While one example is the binary logic that still prevails in mainstream approaches to gender and development, another concerns the complexities of articulating rights and sexual identities. In a further step the pervasiveness and detrimental implications of existing sex and gender orders, as deployed in discourses and translated into realities, are scrutinized. The last section calls for the transformation of mindsets and provides inspiring illustrations of how this can be done.

Contexts and histories

Today’s ‘sex wars’ – to use a phrase coined by Gayle Rubin (1984) – have a long history. In the current geopolitical order, they have taken on a new intensity. These wars have emerged acutely on the stage of the United Nations, which has become a veritable battleground (Girard 2001; Corrêa and Parker 2004; Sen and Corrêa 2000, among others). As Gita Sen (2005) observes, for all the talk of a ‘clash of civilizations’, there is little clash among those who for reasons of politics or religion oppose the possibility of granting sexual rights and freedoms to those who fail to conform to their prescribed norms. Faced with a perverse confluence of powerful reactionary actors, advocates of sexual rights reckon with an ever more hostile climate at the international level. Yet sexual rights activism has reached unprecedented levels of international connectivity, and continues to make advances in a number of settings.

While this book was being edited, hundreds of episodes took place throughout the world which illustrate the breadth and complexity of issues of sexuality. They also highlight the importance of addressing these through a human rights and development lens. A few are outlined below:

• In Lucknow, India, NGO activists doing HIV prevention work in a public place were caught by police and imprisoned, accused of infringing Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code – inherited from British imperial law – which criminalizes sodomy. In Nepal, the Blue Diamond society struggled for some days to secure the release of a group of Metis (transgender people) caught and abused by the police. They subsequently organized a demonstration in front of the Indian embassy to protest against the Lucknow arrests. Later in 2006, Indian debates gained greater global visibility, as a number of celebrities, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, raised their voices in support of ongoing struggles to repeal Article 377.

• In Brazil, a sex workers’ association launched a new fashion label with great media impact, in order to ensure its financial sustainability, which had been affected by the refusal of the Brazilian government and NGOs to sign the anti-prostitution clause attached to USAID funds for HIV prevention. In Italy, feminists and LGBTQ organized a big demonstration in Milan to contest the decision by the Berlusconi government which allowed right-to-life activists to become counsellors in abortion clinics, and in protest against the delays in approving same-sex marriage. This demonstration was particularly meaningful when we bear in mind that a few months earlier, in December 2005, Pope Benedict XVI had launched his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is love), which, once again, conflates human love (Eros) with heterosexuality, marriage and procreation. In May 2006, the Pope would morally condemn same-sex marriages and portray same-sex relations as ‘weak love’ because they do not fulfil the ‘divine purpose’ of biological reproduction.

• Meanwhile, in other parts of the world the abortion debate was heated. In Uruguay, the president kept refusing a provision legalizing pregnancy termination to be retabled in the parliament. Later in the year, in Nicaragua, a total ban on abortion, even if the mother’s life is at risk, was imposed. But six months earlier, the Colombian Supreme Court had issued a decision that grants access to abortion under certain circumstances, including health risks. And in early 2007, in Portugal and the Federal district of Mexico, abortion was legalized and the European Court of Human Rights condemned Poland for its restrictive legislation.

• Last, but not least, when we started work on this book, the Nigerian government had moved to pass legislation to ban same-sex marriages, which included extremely repressive provisions regarding LGBT identity expression and social interaction. As a result of the unrelenting advocacy of Nigerian LGBT and human rights groups, by the time the book was being completed this provision was considered dead, at least for the time being. At the same time, calls came from Pakistan for international solidarity in support of Shahzima Tariq and Shamial Raj, who were sentenced to three years each for committing ‘unnatural acts and perjury’, because they supposedly lied about Shamial being a transgendered male. Meanwhile, in Colombia, landmark legislation legalizing gay partnerships was passed and information and images came from Turkey telling of the marriage of two women in a distant rural area, which followed the local tradition in regard to ritual and clothing.

These flashpoints illustrate not only today’s ‘sex wars’, but a pattern that can be observed over the course of centuries, intensifying whenever rapid reconfigurations of the economy, the state and private–public boundaries take place. The transition to modernity in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries – in particular the second half of the so-called Victorian era – is the most extensively scrutinized (Foucault 1980; Laqueur 1992; Weeks 1985, 2003). The reshaping of gender and sexuality in colonial and post-colonial non-Western contexts has also been extensively studied, as in the case of Gupta’s study of 1930s Uttar Pradesh, India, Rago’s (1991) analysis of prostitution in Brazil in the early twentieth century, and in Delaney’s (1995) account of the transformation of the gender imaginary at the birth of the modern Turkish nation-state. Historical studies describe the control and punishment of ‘loose’ female sexuality and homosexuality in Europe long before the transitions to modernity in Europe and Asia (Crompton 2003; Van der Meer 2004), including of the part played by the Catholic Inquisition (Castañeda 1998; Mott 1992).

Parallels can, therefore, be drawn between what we are experiencing today and other historical realities. Practically all progressive political and social thinkers devoted to analyses of ‘globalization’ or ‘late capitalism’ identify shifts in gender and sex orders as one main feature of great transformations under way, even when their conclusions about the direction these shifts may take differ (Altman 2001; Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Giddens 1991, 2000; Held et al. 1999). The current scenario, however, also presents some quite distinctive features. One is the implications of ever-increasing connectivity. The sparks generated by the episodes described in the brief list of events above flow around the world through electronic and other media, creating both connections and disjunctures across cultures and between global and local realities. The other feature is religion. Theorists of modernity have largely focused on the instrumental power of the secular state and its regulatory efforts, through the deployment of biomedicine and the law. Yet the resurgence of religion and the repositioning of religious discourses on sexuality at the very heart of today’s contests over sexual rights and wrongs provide a very different landscape on which battles for equality and justice now come to be waged.

Sexuality and development: making the connections

So in today’s context, how does development connect to sexuality? Mention the word ‘sexuality’ to people involved in development policy and practice and the reaction is often one of puzzlement – what does sexuality have to do with development? There are those who see sexuality as a private affair, something from which development should keep an appropriate distance – apart from helping to reduce the incidence of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. There are those who find the whole subject plain embarrassing. There are those who regard mention of sexuality and sexual pleasure to be a distraction from the ‘real issues’ of development, as a kind of frivolous add-on rather than something that is intimately entwined with core development concerns of poverty and marginalization.

Few of the development practitioners we have interacted with grasp the significance of sexuality for development. Yet while the word ‘sexuality’ barely makes an appearance in development policies, mainstream development agencies have always implicitly concerned themselves with issues of sexuality: with population, and, since the 1980s, with HIV/AIDS. For mainstream development sex is treated as a health issue, to be dealt with by experts in disease prevention and health promotion. The reasons why many people choose to have sex in the first place – for pleasure, as well as for the many other affective dimensions of intimate relationships – barely make it into the frame (Gosine 2004).

A positive approach to sex education or HIV/AIDS prevention that emphasizes the rights of women, men and transgender people to a pleasurable and safer sex life free of prejudice, risk or censure is one of the connections that might be made between sexuality, human rights and development (Corrêa and Jolly, Esiet, Ilkkaracan and Ronge, Lewis and Gordon, this volume). But the connections go further than this. For sexuality is about a lot more than having sex. It is about the social rules, economic structures, political battles and religious ideologies that surround physical expressions of intimacy and the relationships within which such intimacy takes place. It has as much to do with being able to move freely outside the home and walk the streets without fear of sexual harassment or abuse as it has to do with whom people have sex with. It is as much concerned with how the body is clothed, from women feeling forced to cover their bodies to avoid unwanted sexual attention to the use of particular colours to mark the gender of infants and begin the process of socialization of boys and girls as different, as what people do when their clothes are off. And, where society and the state collude in policing gender and sex orders, it can be about the very right to exist, let alone to enjoy sexual relations.

Reframing the linkages

The perspective from development is that sexuality is a problem. Recasting sexuality as a positive force (Runeborg 2002; Jolly 2007), a source of pleasure and joy, or an embodiment of the rights that most development actors now profess to promote, is profoundly counter-cultural. For development thinkers and practitioners, engagement with sexuality as a development issue requires critical self-reflection in respect to deeply rooted assumptions. Nevertheless, several productive points of entry for making explicit the connections between sexuality, human rights and development can be identified.

Against a backdrop of the near-hegemonic hold of neoliberalism on mainstream development thinking, three significant shifts took place in the 1990s. The first was a move within mainstream development thinking beyond narrow income and consumption-based measures of poverty towards a more multidimensional approach to the analysis and measurement of poverty. This came as influential development theorists persuasively argued that poverty should be redefined in terms of lack of opportunities, capabilities and freedoms (Sen 1995; Chambers 1997; Nussbaum 2000; Kabeer 2006). Many development agencies have come to adopt a more sophisticated approach to poverty analysis and measurement in the wake of this shift. Although sexuality is not mentioned in most policies and programmes on poverty, these broader understandings of poverty make possible considerations of how violence and discrimination around sexuality can intensify poverty, and how sexual fulfilment and autonomy can contribute to well-being.

The second shift was the rise of rights talk in development. Until the 1990s, human rights advocates themselves had little interaction with development agencies or practitioners (Uvin 2002). Most human rights work was concerned with the defence of civil and political rights, and efforts were primarily oriented at the legislative rather than the economic or social arenas. In the same manner, development thinkers and practitioners did not closely interact with the human rights field. But development and rights thinking increasingly converged around the post-cold war conferences: Vienna (1993), Cairo (1994), Copenhagen (1995) and Beijing (1995). The third shift was the increasing attention given to issues of gender by development actors, which was given impetus by the Beijing conference and the commitments made there. Gender advocates put questions of power firmly on the development agenda, and have prompted development thinkers to pay closer attention to the persistent inequalities that gender and sex orders produce.

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