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Governing Intimacy, Struggling for Sexual Rights: Challenging heteronormativity in the global development industry

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Abstract

Institutions in the global development industry play a pivotal role in governing people's sexual and familial lives. Amy Lind addresses how forms of intimacy are governed through national and global development institutions, both through the visibilization and invisibilization of lesbians, gay men and other individuals who do not fulfill prescribed gender and sexual norms in their societies, with the overall aim of challenging heteronormativity and gender normativity in development thought and practice.

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Notes

  1. Portions of this article stem from an earlier publication: ‘Querying Globalization: Sexual Subjectivities, Development, and the Governance of Intimacy’, chapter forthcoming in Marianne Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan (eds.), Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances (Routledge, second edition). Some of the findings in this article are also reported in Amy Lind (ed.), Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance (Routledge, in press; Lind, 2008).

  2. I recognize that the term ‘queer’ is contested, has multiple meanings, and is not used in all locations or linguistic contexts. In this article I draw from Suparna Bhaskaran's (2004) research on globalization and sexual subjectivities in India, in which she argues for using ‘queerness’ in a strategic sense. She defines the term in both ‘a broad and narrow sense’, in a ‘strategic, embodied, very much marked, and inventive manner’, recognizing that queerness can ‘flatten out differences’ yet also serve as a coalition-building mechanism to challenge various forms of normativities (Bhaskaran, 2004: 8–9). In this article, I use the term ‘queer’ to include a variety of non-normative gender and sexual forms of identification and practices.

  3. In general, Chávez's strategies to address the issues of homosexuality and gender identity have been contradictory at best. On one hand, Chávez has created an office that addresses homosexual issues, which thus far has been focused largely on gaining political support in a top-down fashion among gay men and lesbians for the Chávez government and has created great dissent and divisions among activists. Among others, this office now solely controls the organization of Caracas' large annual Gay Pride March, effectively preventing dissenters (i.e., anyone who does not support the Bolivarian revolution) from speaking at the rally (Adrián, 2008; Quintero, 2008). In 2007, the Chavista-controlled congress proposed a bill aimed at limiting parents of newborns to a list of 100 names established by the government, with one rationale being that it would prevent names that ‘generate doubts’ about the bearer's gender (Romero, 2007: 1). Currently, Venezuelan law does not allow transgendered individuals to legally change their name on official documents, and Chávez himself has spoken of transgendered people as socially deviant (Adrián, 2008).

  4. By ‘post-neo-liberalism’, I am referring to the shift taking place in some countries away from a neo-liberal development model, particularly in the context of the ‘new Left’ in Latin America in which Venezuela's Chávez is an important leader. In these contexts, I am by no means implying that neo-liberal policies no longer exist but rather that they have lost their ‘quasi-hegemonic position’, as new forms of collective action and articulations of economic and social policy have gained salience (Grimson and Kessler, 2005; Fernandes, 2007).

  5. South Africa was the first country in the global South to include anti-discrimination legislation on the basis of sexual orientation in its post-apartheid 1996 constitution, followed by similar constitutional reforms in Fiji (1997) and Ecuador (1998). In 2005, the South African state also approved same-sex marriage, and in 2008 Ecuador passed another new constitution with additional rights provided on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

  6. The Venezuelan sexual rights activists' proposal was similar to the Ecuadorian proposal, successfully passed in 1998. This legislation did not pass, however, due largely to growing discontent with Chávez's authoritarian form of governance, which caused people to vote against Chávez's proposed reforms overall in the 2007 constitutional referendum.

  7. This however has had important, even violent, implications, for local activists. Four years after helping to found the visible gay (male) rights movements in Bolivia, Timothy Wright himself was found badly beaten and amnesiac (Altman, 2001: 95).

  8. See the ‘Realising Sexual Rights’ conference website: http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/particip/workshops/rsexrights.html#srpapers. For an IDS statement on sexuality, power and pleasure, see http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/news/powerpleasure.html. For a review of debates on addressing the right to pleasure, see Jolly (in press).

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Challenges heteronormativity and gender normativity in development

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Lind, A. Governing Intimacy, Struggling for Sexual Rights: Challenging heteronormativity in the global development industry. Development 52, 34–42 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.71

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