global-sexual-liberation

[global-sexual-liberation]

On the need for transnational intersectional analyses

Female, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming bodies are under constant attack in the land of the free.

While US citizens are extremely wary of government intervention into their personal lives when it comes to their ability to own or obtain guns, or wear a mask during a global pandemic, or fly a confederate flag, these same citizens largely welcome and condone government intervention as it pertains to the regulation and policing of the citizenry’s intimate sexual lives. In the US, the state regulates the sexuality of citizens both explicitly- for example, by attempting to dictate which sports trans folks can play or which bathrooms they can use, or by restricting a woman’s ability to make decisions regarding her reproductive health- and implicitly- for example, by attempting to coerce people into monogamous romantic partnerships by tying marriage (which was only seen as legitimate in its heteronuclear forms up until recently) to welfare benefits. Such regulation is accepted and seen as necessary because "sexual acts are burdened with an excess of significance": an examination of both legal systems and societal norms in the US demonstrates that anything even remotely related to sex is classified as inherently more sinful and dangerous than any other human behavior or activity.

Additionally, the neoliberal political elite in the US has appropriated the language, theorization, and organizing tactics of early radical queer and feminist activists and used it to grow the very carceral state that such activists adamantly opposed. By professionalizing movements which were initiated by individuals who understood the dire need to resist state violence in its many forms, neoliberalism has dramatically grown the prison industrial complex, which we know disproportionately targets BIPOC and immigrant communities-- especially those of whom have varied gender expressions or sexual orientations. In many instances, this appropriation and professionalization has caused movements which claim to protect women/queer/trans folks/sex trafficking victims to actually contribute to mass incarceration, hyper policing of BIPOC and other marginalized communities, and increased funding for the many arms of the carceral state (ICE, prisons, police forces, the US military, etc). Privileged (primarily white) folks have continued to rely on carceral, punitive, retributive solutions to the societal problems they see, failing to consider the extent to which their proposed solutions build the police state which will always be extremely detrimental to our nation's most marginalized communities. There is an urgent need for white activists to unlearn their personal notions of safety and justice and to allow those for whom the law has never been liberatory to lead movements towards feminist and queer liberation.

It is abundantly clear that the land of the free only affords freedom to individuals in certain groups, with certain identities. The US has the ability to police and regulate the sexual lives of its citizens, but it is primarily women and individuals with varied gender and sexual identities and expressions- especially those who are members of BIPOC or immigrant communities- who live under the constant threat of state infringement into their intimate personal lives. The extent to which the US state controls the sexual lives of its citizens needs to be extensively critiqued and ultimately undone.

The passages on this blog, however, aim to draw attention to similarly unjust situations which exist beyond our great nation's borders. On this page, I mainly seek to draw attention to the ways in which women, men, and gender nonconforming individuals in the Global South face sexual oppression and regulation while also dealing with the compounding effects of neocolonialism and imperialism. The sexual activities and identities of people in the Global South are not only controlled by the state-- they are controlled by the foreign, Western state. Both in conversations regarding neocolonialism and in conversations regarding the state control of sexuality, these are dynamics that I believe are often overlooked.

The extent to which I highlight the struggles of marginalized folks in the South is not meant to distract from the importance of gender and sexual liberation within the US-- it is instead meant to draw attention to some similarities in our struggles while also highlighting the ways that our privilege as citizens living in the West may at times compound the oppression faced by people in the South. All individuals in the Global South, regardless of whether or not they adhere to conventional gender/sexual norms, are constantly under the threat of being controlled by external, international forces. If one of the major factors which has inhibited progress towards sexual liberation within the US is the inability or unwillingness of privileged folks to fully incorporate intersectional analyses into their activism, by drawing attention to the need for transnational intersectional analyses here, I hope to highlight some ways we can achieve sexual liberation globally. If nothing else, I hope that these thoughts prove the potential for transnational alliances to resist state control of sexuality.

[global-sexual-liberation]

Sexual dangerousness: legitimizing colonial and neocolonial rule

Prior to the period of formal colonization, pre-capitalist indigenous communities around the world often had extraordinarily rich and varied sexual expressions, arrangements, and interactions. As colonial rule was imposed, indigenous sexualities were largely erased and replaced by a hierarchical system which highly privileged heterosexual monogamy. In Europe, the consolidation of heterosexuality and the nuclear family were central to the development of capitalism, and the social norms brought about by these processes were imported to the colonies through imperialism.

Colonial rule consisted of many overlapping forms of domination, but one way that colonizers exercised their control was by simultaneously racializing and sexualizing indigenous populations. Racialization and sexualization contributed to a naturalization of both whiteness and white practices, including white sexual practices. Marriage and anti-sodomy laws were imposed to refuse forms of sexual practice and family constitution that had been established by indigenous populations and to reconstitute their sex and sexualities in accordance with Western norms. Colonial law also legitimized violent colonial masculinity (which was never called rape) while criminalizing black and indigenous masculinity for the same offense. "Scientific" investigations carried out by the colonizers classified indigenous women's sexualities as untamed, wild and promiscuous, and indigenous men's sexualities as dangerous and predatory.

The regulation and policing of indigenous sexuality should not only be understood as one of the many components of the imperial order: the articulation of indigenous sex and sexuality as wrong, exotic, and in need of correction should also be understood as one of the factors which helped to authorize the barbaric colonial enterprise. By generating panic surrounding indigenous sexual practices, colonizers were able to convince other Westerners of the necessity to impose the civility of the white savior onto indigenous populations. This legitimized the dehumanizing and dispossessing processes of colonization.

Although colonization is often conceived of as a dark period in our distant past, it is clear that while formal colonization may have ended, neocolonialism persists today. Neoliberal globalization, development, and capitalism continue to underdevelop the Global South, keeping impoverished nations economically dependent on the wealth of the West which has been generated through their historical oppression. In this neocolonial global system, continued conceptions of sex and sexuality in the South as dangerous and in need of correction work to authorize Western control. In ways similar to how the creation of the "sexual monster" during the period of colonial rule authorized the project of colonization, the construction of sexuality in the Global South as overly procreative and disease ridden today works to intensify efforts to bring the sexualities of people of the Global South under the regulatory control of the state. Portrayals of sex in the South as problematic does not only work to validate the regulation of bodies and sexual practices-- it also "harnesses these anxieties about sex to further extend and advance imperialist ambitions." There is a continuing centrality of the control and regulation of sexualities to global capital accumulation.

The international development field- a field which consists almost entirely of educated professionals from the West who intervene to "develop" the backwards South- only engages with sex in the South in its problematic forms. Those who work in international development do not talk about sex except for when it is defined in terms of a social problem or health hazard. The development field first began to explicitly mobilize around sex in the mid-1980s, when there was a perceived need for Westerners to address problems related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Conservative Western forces adamantly pushed an HIV/AIDS control agenda which relied on the policing and regulation of homosexuality in the South. This agenda often worked to make life harder, rather than easier, for those with varying sexual identities in the South.

The AIDS epidemic initially fostered the sudden foundation of gay organizations throughout the South, which were largely centered around a Western understanding of queer identity politics. Clinics, service centers, and support groups which were established were rarely accessed by impacted people because of the extent to which these solutions reflected a US/European understanding of gay community and identity more than any local understandings of sexuality. In many regions, people who engage in varied sexual practices do not identify as "queer" in any form, so service provision targeted towards queer people was too culturally incongruent to be effective. In an attempt to overcome this incongruence in initiatives centered around controlling male sexuality in the South, the international development community started to refer to those implicated in the AIDS epidemic not as "gay" but as "men who have sex with men," or "MSM" for short. As Andrew Gosine astutely points out, the MSM term's "racializing imperatives, easy conflation of varied cultural practices, oversimplification, and sometimes negation of sexual desire, pleasure, and love, deflection away from women engaged in same-sex relationships, and failure to contest dominant heteronormative power relations, raise serious doubts about its universal and mostly uncritical application across health and development fields." The use of the term MSM makes implicit comparisons between the developed, modern, loving gay Westerner and the underdeveloped, backwards, passionless MSM Southerner. The positive or pleasurable aspects of homosexual sex in the South are invisibilized, and the practice is constructed as a dangerous force which spreads disease, causes death, and damages the economy.

Heterosexual sex in the South, on the other hand, is positioned as a force which results in too many children, causes poverty and damages the environment. "Third world women's" bodies, and specifically their fertility, have been targeted since the inception of post-war development by population control policies. Today, this population control is authorized as population growth in the South is linked to food crises and climate change, "shifting attention from the role of corporate capitalism and the fact that industrialized countries, with only 20 percent of the world's population, are responsible for 80 percent of the accumulated carbon dioxide rates in the atmosphere, while the few countries in the world where population growth rates remain high have among the lowest carbon emissions per capita on the planet."

Population control has often involved forcible and coercive sterilization of impoverished women in the Global South: just one example of this practice can be found by looking to Bangladesh in the 1980s, where sterilization was in many cases made a condition for food relief from "developed" countries. More commonly, however, population control has taken place through a framework of reproductive and sexual rights. Such policies are both gendered and racialized, and they have problematically appropriated and transformed radical feminist ideas to serve the neoliberal development agenda.

This appropriation is evidenced by 21st century responses to the development "challenge" of population growth which center feminist notions of reproductive rights and choices. By mobilizing feminist discourses, Western nations are authorized to control the intimate sexual lives of women in the South by imposing Western led "family planning" initiatives and by dumping unsafe and expensive contraceptives which have been banned in the West in Southern countries in order to make a profit (the preferred tactic of Seattle's own Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

The renewed emphasis on population control which can be witnessed today is not only geared towards shifting attention away from global capitalism's responsibility for poverty, climate change, and food crises-- it is also a component of attempts to intensify women's labor. In many initiatives launched in countries in the South, a reduction of women's fertility is being promoted within a "smart economics" framework, primarily as it is regarded as facilitating women's entry into labor markets and enhancing their productivity to advance global capitalist interests and integrate Southern countries into the world's economy. Feminist discourses surrounding reproductive and sexual rights have been appropriated not only to drive population control methods but also to intensify the labor of disadvantaged women in impoverished households in the South.

Why are Westerners so compelled to demonize and dehumanize the sex and sexualities of folks in the South? Are powerful Westerners afraid that if they recognize the pleasurable, loving, positive aspects of sex in the South, this may diminish the necessity that they've established to control and dictate Southern states and populations?

[global-sexual-liberation]

Regulation through heteronormativity

Very similarly to the ways in which the US government attempts to control sexuality discretely by tying welfare benefits to marriage (which was only considered legitimate for heterosexual partners up until recently), the West implicitly regulates the sexualities of the Rest through a number of different means. Countries in the Global South largely remain under the control of Western forces: perhaps the most notable force which exerts control over these countries is the Western-led global development industry. Due to the influence that the global development industry has on nations in the South, Western multilateral institutions, bilateral aid agencies, state agencies, and NGOs play a pivotal role in governing Southern citizens' sexual and familial lives.

This sexual governance happens primarily as the global development industry institutionalizes heterosexuality as it plans the development of communities and nations and targets individuals as recipients of aid. Heterosexuality is institutionalized, naturalized and regulated both explicitly and implicitly: explicitly by excluding any mention of people with varying sexual or gender identities or expressions, and implicitly by assuming that all people in the South are heterosexual, that marriage is a given, and that all men and women fit into more or less traditional gender roles. Both of these strategies serve to govern intimacy and reinforce the heterosexualization of nation-states. Because the global development industry holds so much power in determining the political, economic, and social trajectories of nations in the South, the regulation of sexuality and the reinforcement of heterosexual privilege by the global development industry is in many ways comparable to the power that the US government wields over its citizens' sexualities. This regulation and control is even more unjust, however, when we consider how citizens in the South do not even have the power to democratically oppose this control, as it is being leveled by Western entities beyond their borders.

The institutionalization of heterosexuality has serious and grave implications, both for those who do not adhere to sexual/gendered norms and for those who do. As imposed neoliberalism has shrunk the size and capacity of Southern states, global development actors have increasingly taken over as some of the most prominent service providers in the South. The extent to which people with queer or other non-normative identities may be restricted from accessing services provided by the heteronormative development industry is highly troubling. Even those who are heterosexual are often implicated by the heteronormativity of the global development industry: for example, women who are heterosexual but not reproductive are largely excluded by initiatives which target women as mothers (which is a great deal of initiatives, considering the global development industry can hardly conceive of women as existing beyond their procreative and motherly roles). Additionally, official development policy is very often centered around household interventions, as Westerners see the heteronuclear family as a useful contributor to (and beneficiary of) market based growth. When citizens in the Global South live outside of the heteronuclear household arrangement which is privileged by the West, they are also restricted from accessing specific resources.

When non-normative individuals or family units are left out of policies and programs, their invisibility on paper translates into myriad forms of symbolic and material violence against them. This invisibility also serves as a mechanism to control their lives and to discipline them as sexual subjects. The privileging of heterosexuality, and the privileging of one form of heterosexuality above all others, obscures the broader range of sexual and gender expression that people actually experience, and may restrict the extent to which individuals in the South can envision or organize their lives in alternative ways.

The heteronormativity of the international development industry is especially peculiar when we consider the fact that many LGBTQIA+ folks work within the international development field. Some preliminary research has been conducted on the impact of LGBTQIA+ employees at the World Bank and United Nations, which pointed out that while these employees have fought for their own rights within their organizations, they have generally failed to integrate insights from their own institutional struggles into broader development and restructuring initiatives. My guess is that this probably occurs because these Westerners see queerness as something which is reserved for the wealthy, "progressive," and "developed" countries of the world. As Kate Bedford points out:

"Western narratives of the poor and underdeveloped do not seem to cover the possibility of varied sexual identities and subjectivities. The poor simply can't be queer, because varied sexual identities are seen as one unfortunate result of Western development and are linked to being rich and privileged."

[global-sexual-liberation]

Resisting homonationalism

The divisive societal structure which privileges monogamous heterosexuality was imposed on the Global South through colonization. Colonial rule erased indigenous sexual cultures around the world by imposing regulatory legal systems to ensure that populations adhered to the norm of the heterosexual nuclear family arrangements-- arrangements that consisted of a man who labored and a woman who carried out the work of social reproduction. The institution of a hierarchical system which privileged a specific type of heterosexuality was central to the advancement of capitalism, and the construction of indigenous sexuality as dangerous and in need of correction was one factor that legitimized the project of bringing indigenous communities into the oppressive global capitalist system. After formal colonization ended, an enduring desire to adhere to colonial respectability coupled with a need to prove legitimacy and authority has led many Southern states to more strictly regulate and police the sexuality of their citizens.

Global development agencies and organizations continue to institutionalize heterosexuality by positioning it as the only form of functional sexuality and denying the possibility of any other arrangements or preferences.

The lower levels of working class wages, weak welfare states, and high levels of inequality that have been brought about by Western-imposed neoliberal development have helped to ensure a great variety of forms of heteronormativity and sexual stigma throughout much of the Global South. Neoliberal development, with its integration of Southern countries into the global economy, privatization, economic liberalization and decentralization (coupled with ideologies of individualism and competition), has increased cultural and class tensions within existing queer communities in many countries throughout the South.

Despite the monumental role that the West has played in institutionalizing heterosexuality and creating the conditions for sexual oppression in the Global South, "developed" countries regularly demonize the "underdeveloped" for their perceived homophobia. Western development institutions and Western queer organizations are beginning to highlight the need to "teach" Southerners about the morality associated with accepting LGBTQIA+ people. It's important to note that in the US and in other Western countries, it is primarily privileged LGBTQIA+ people who have been afforded increased respect and acceptance. Despite this fact, the West continues to reproduce radicalized and necolonial images of the homophobic "other" while upholding Western moral exceptionalism regarding beliefs surrounding sexuality.

A few years back, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron considered making development aid/funding conditional upon adherence to human rights law for LGBTQIA+ individuals. African social justice activists responded with the following statement:

"The imposition of donor sanctions... does not, in and of itself, result in the improved protection of the rights of LGBTI people. Donor sanctions are by their nature coercive and reinforce the disproportionate power dynamics between their donor countries and recipients. They are often based on assumptions about African sexualities and the needs of African LGBTI people. They disregard the agency of African civil society movements and leadership... The history of colonialism and sexuality cannot be overlooked when seeking solutions to this issue. The colonial legacy of the British Empire in the form of laws that criminalize same-sex continues to serve as the legal foundation for the persecution of LGBTI people throughout the Commonwealth. In seeking solutions to the multi-faceted violations facing LGBTI people across Africa, old approaches and ways of engaging our continent have to be stopped."

When the West tries to impose the acceptance of LGBTI people onto the Global South, they are oftentimes minimizing the work being done by queer people in a number of regions while also making assumptions about the forms of advocacy that would be most liberating to queer people in the South.

In imposing the Western model of LGBTQIA+ rights, which mostly resembles individualized identity politics and progressively moving marginalized folks up the societal ladder of power and respectability which was created by neoliberal capitalism, the West is likely doing more harm than good. If powerful Westerners truly want to see more justice for sexual and gender diversity in the South, they should start by interrogating the ways in which the West continues to normalize heterosexuality in a number of ways and also by allowing Southerners to take the lead in working towards further inclusion. Southerners may be more critical of liberal rights approaches to justice, and therefore may be able to foster more imaginative approaches to reach acceptance for variance in sexuality and gender.