Abstract
Andil Gosine asks whether sex and sexuality have been left unconsidered in international development or not. Sex and sexuality he argues have always been at the heart of development. Three figures have haunted the project of international development: Monster, Womb, MSM (‘Men who have sex with Men’). Anxieties about the sexual proclivities of these figures have driven and shaped the project of international development, both as a teleological metanarrative and in its material application. He proposes that neither silenced nor neglected, sex works in service of development, providing both the rationale and means through which to authorize and institute heteronationalism.
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Notes
One such force, the Christian Legal Fellowship of Canada, has been actively involved in fighting efforts to secure sexual rights in the Caribbean through well-funded campaigns to ‘preserve and defend the historical understanding of law, values, Biblical principles, marriage and family’ (See Executive Director Ruth Ross on ‘Protecting Society, Marriage and Family’, http://www.christianlegalfellowship.org/contact.htm.
The ‘development industry’ includes multilateral institutions, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, researchers, activists and others engaged in transnational activities geared toward social and economic transformation in the global South.
Quotation from Alexander B. Grosard (ed.) The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, 6 vols. (London and Aylesbury, 1883–1885), I, 160: Aristotle, Historia Animalium, trans. D'Archy W. Thompson, in J.A. Smith and W.D. Ross (eds.) The Works of Aristotle, IV (Oxford, 1910), 606b; Bodin, Method of Easy Comprehension of History, 105.
Bodin, Method for Easy Comprehension of History, 103–106, 143.
Quotations from Herbert, Some Years Travels, 18; Montague, Edward Tyson, 250–252; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols. In 1 (London, 1721), II, 53 (Bk. III. Chapter 6, Sec. 23); Phillips, Journal, Churchill, comps., Voyages, VI, 211; William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea… (London, 1744), 52; Kirle, ‘Knowledge of Heredity,’ Dunn (ed.) Genetics in the 20th Century, London, 39–40; Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 267–276.
Smith, New Voyage to Guinea, 146; Barbot, Descriptions of the Coast, Churchill, comps., Voyages, V, 34.
The civilizing work of colonialism in regard to sex was doubly intentional, seeking sexual discipline of the conquered and the colonized in the same moment. Pigg and Adams explain, ‘[C]ontrastive cases – the berdache; ritual homosexuality in Melanesia; the active and the passive partner in Latin America, and so on – are used to present “alien” forms in contrast to Western “commonsense” forms. In order for “other cultures” to function as the contrastive background that makes “our own culture” visible, these lifeworlds are often dehistoricized so as to maximize a sense of difference’ (Pigg and Adams, 2005: 6). ‘The very categories of “colonizer” and “colonized”’, they observe, ‘were secured through forms of sexual control that defines domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments through which they identified themselves’ (Pigg and Adams, 2005: 6).
Keynes, a self-professed Malthusian and a member of two birth control organizations, including Marie Stopes’ Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, believed that the working classes bred too much and saw deaths from famine, war and pestilence as the most effective means of raising living standards in ‘overpopulated’ Third World countries.
Although this is rarely explicitly stated, MSM is a term that is applied exclusively to describe non-white men in the global North and South.
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Asks whether or not sex and sexuality have been left unconsidered in international development
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Gosine, A. Monster, Womb, MSM: The work of sex in international development. Development 52, 25–33 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.82
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.82