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...