Wieringa Saskia Eleonora - The sexual history of the global south : sexual politics and postcolonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America

About the editors

Saskia E. Wieringa is honorary professor at the University of Amsterdam, holding the chair in Gender and Womens Same-Sex Relations Crossculturally. She has a long experience of activism in both the womens and Third World solidarity movements. Since the late 1970s she has done research on womens movements and same-sex relations in many parts of the world, particularly in Indonesia. Her latest books include: Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures ; Sexual Politics in Indonesia ; Lubang Buaya , a novel; Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Womens Same-Sex Experiences in Southern Africa ; Engendering Human Security (co-edited with Thanh-Dam Truong and Amrita Chhachhi); Womens Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia (co-edited with Evelyn Blackwood and Abha Bhaiya); Traveling Heritages and the Future of Asian Feminisms (with Nursyahbani Katjasungkana). She has received various awards for her scholarly work, most recently the 2011 award for Best Paper from the Journal of Contemporary Asia .

Horacio F. Svori , PhD, is an Argentinean anthropologist, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro, and the regional coordinator for the Latin American Center on Sexuality and Human Rights. He trained in Argentina, the USA, and Brazil and taught in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. He is the author of Locas, chogos y gays , as well as journal articles, book chapters, and collective volumes on gay sociability, sexual rights, and AIDS activism. He is co-editor of Sexualities , a working paper series by CLAGS/CUNYs International Resource Network, and has acted as co-chair for the Sexuality Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association. His current research looks at LGBT rights activism in Argentina and Brazil.

The sexual history of the global South

sexual politics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

EDITED BY SASKIA WIERINGA AND HORACIO SVORI

Zed Books

LONDON | NEW YORK

The sexual history of the global South: sexual politics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America was first published in 2013 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

This ebook edition was first published in 2013

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Editorial copyright Saskia Wieringa and Horacio Svori 2013
Copyright in this collection Zed Books 2013

The rights of Saskia Wieringa and Horacio Svori to be identified as the editors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available

ISBN 978 1 78032 405 0

Contents

SASKIA WIERINGA AND HORACIO SVORI

HUANG YINGYING

HARDIK BRATA BISWAS

ABEL SIERRA MADERO

MUSA SADOCK

DIEGO SEMPOL

BASILE NDJIO

IMAN AL-GHAFARI

NITYA VASUDEVAN

ALBERTO TEUTLE LPEZ

RAJEEV KUMARAMKANDATH

FABOLA CORDEIRO

TSITSI B. MASVAWURE

Foreword

This book is the outcome of a long-term program focused on a historically grounded and comparative analysis of sexualities in the South. It was carried out by the Sephis program, the SouthSouth Exchange Programme for Reserach on the History of Development, a research initiative aimed at stimulating the critical study of development in the global South within a comparative framework.

The Sephis program was established in 1994 and financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its main objective is to reinsert a historically grounded perspective into the thinking about the development of the global South (to employ the term developed by recent critiques of colonial geopolitics to depict countries struggling in different ways with problems of colonialism and underdevelopment). It aims at fostering dialog and collaboration between researchers with diverse visions of development and history, to encourage comparative research, and to strengthen research capacity in the South.

In 2007, Sephis received a grant from the Ford Foundation to support a research program on the History of the Sexualities in the South that could take advantage of the experiences of the Sephis program in SouthSouth academic exchange. In addition, it allowed for the training of a new generation of researchers in comparative and historically grounded approaches to practices and ideologies surrounding sexuality in different parts of the global South. The objective of this program was to allow young scholars in the humanities and social sciences to engage in new field research and link it with national and international debates and advocacy for sexual rights.

The ultimate aim was to gain a deeper historical understanding of the complex interplay between cultural genealogies and the politics of gender relations and sexual behavior. Related themes of interest to the program were the legal regulation of and public policies on sexuality, sex- and gender-based claims of identities, sexual expression, and sexual knowledge. These claims are located within wider processes of state formation and global transformations and are often connected to a strengthening of patriarchal relations, heteronormativity, and conservative control in many parts of the world. The program also aimed to stimulate linkages between social science research and advocacy on sexual rights, working from a human and sexual rights perspective.

The program was designed to train a relatively small group of sexuality researchers from different countries of the global South, stimulating them to compare their different experiences and conceptual frameworks. Most of them were pursuing graduate studies and conducted their field research in specific countries within the global South. A related goal was to build an international community of researchers around these issues with the objective of fostering the exchange of information on research and advocacy and of encouraging high-quality research through enhancing the research capacities of all involved.

These cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary conversations took place in the individual projects of the participants and in the virtual contact that is part and parcel of todays academic work. They were especially intensive during a number of academic encounters organized in different parts of the world. An expert meeting was organized at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in February 2008. The first training workshop for the selected grantees took place in September 2008 at the Latin American Center on Sexuality and Human Rights (CLAM) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The second workshop, for a second batch of grantees, was organized at the Institute of Womens Studies of the University of Dhaka, in Bangladesh, in March 2009. A peer review workshop took place in Cairo and was organized in collaboration with the Institute for Gender and Womens Studies of the American University in Cairo in May 2009. The program ended with an international policy dialog at the Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, co-organized with the Kartini Asia Network for Womens/Gender Studies in August 2010.