Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance

Front matter

al Righis . $

Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance

This book addresses how sexual practices and identities are imagined and regulated through development discourses and within institutions of global governance.

Contents

Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations

Introduction: development, global governance, and sexual subjectivities AMY LIND

PARTI Querying/queering development: theories, representations, strategies

PART II Negotiating heteronormativity in development institutions

4 The World Bank’s GLOBE: queers in/queering development ANDIL GOSINE xvil

NGOs as erotic sites ARA WILSON

Promoting exports, restructuring love: the World Bank and the Ecuadorian flower industry KATE BEDFORD

“Headless families” and “detoured men”: off the straight path of modern development in Bolivia SUSAN PAULSON

PART III Resisting global hegemonies, struggling for sexual rights and gender justice No

Spelling it out: from alphabet soup to sexual rights and gender justice

SANGEETA BUDHIRAJA, SUSANA T. FRIED AND

ALEXANDRA TEIXEIRA

Disrupting gender normativity in the Middle East: supporting gender transgression as a development strategy PETRA DOAN

Behind the mask: developing LGBTI visibility in Africa ASHLEY CURRIER

Queer Dominican moves: in the interstices of colonial legacies and global impulses MAJA HORN

Bibliography Index

182 207

Contributors

Amy Lind (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Mary Ellen Heintz Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology and the School of Planning at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: women's movements, state restructuring and global development in Ecuador (Penn State University Press, 2005). Her current research addresses the transnational governance of intimacy and struggles for sexual rights in post/neoliberal Latin America. She 1s also an affiliated professor of Gender Studies at FLACSO-Ecuador.

Kate Bedford is a Research Fellow at the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Kent. She has worked on international development projects in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and she taught numeracy and literacy skills in England. Her current research focuses on the interactions between sexuality studies, development studies, and international political economy. She has just completed a book entitled Developing Partnerships: gender, sexuality, and the post-Washington consensus World Bank (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

Suzanne Bergeron is Director of Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Social Sciences at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She is the author of Fragments of Development: nation, gender and the space of modernity (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and various articles on gendered narratives of economic discourse in journals such as Signs: journal of women in culture and society, International Journal of Feminist Politics, National Women’s Studies Association Journal, and selected anthologies.

Sangeeta Budhiraja is Program Officer, Building Movements at the Ms. Foundation for Women. She has worked as a consultant on sexuality and human rights issues, and is working to advance the sexual rights framework at the local, national, and international levels. Formerly, she was the Regional Program Coordinator for Asia and the Pacific at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). Sangeeta holds a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law where she focused on International Women’s Human Rights Law.

xiv Contributors

Ashley Currier (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at Texas A&M University. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Becoming Visible: LGBT organizing in Namibia and South Africa, which explores how Namibian and South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organizations work to overcome their political and social invisibility. Her current research examines the origins and persistence of homophobia(s) in southern African political discourse.

Petra Doan (Ph.D., Cornell University) is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University. She has published numerous articles on economic development and planning in the Middle East. Her current research addresses LGBT perceptions of urban space in the United States and the Middle East, with an emphasis on transgender issues. Her article, “Queers in the City: transgendered perceptions of urban spaces” appears in Gender, Place, and Culture (2006).

Susana T. Fried (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Gender Advisor at the HIV/AIDS Group/BDP at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). With over 20 years of experience in gender, sexuality, and human rights issues, Susana authored “Show Us the Money: is violence against women and girls on the HIV donor agenda?” as part of the Women Won't Wait: end HIV and violence against women and girls. Now. Campaign. She was the Program Director at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and Program Director of International Policy and Advocacy at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership. She has consulted with many organizations, including Global Rights, Amnesty International, the Program on International Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Sexual Health and Rights Program (SHARP) of the Open Society Initiative (OSI). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Andil Gosine is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University (Canada). He is currently pursuing research on configurations of “race,” gender, and sexualities in “ethnic” sexual health promotion in countries of the North and South. His articles include “Marginalization Myths and the Complexity of ‘Men’: engaging critical conversations about Irish and Caribbean masculinities,” in Men and Masculinities, and “Sex for pleasure, rights to participation and alternatives to HIV/AIDS: placing sexual minorities in development,” IDS Working Paper #228, Sussex, UK.

Maja Horn (Ph.D., Cornell University) is assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College. Prior to joining Barnard, she was an Associated Researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Dominican Republic), where she undertook research for a project on the relation between Dominican public spaces and shame and how it regulates Dominican gender and sexual norms.

Contributors xv

Susie Jolly is Convenor of the Sexuality and Development Programme, Institute of Development Studies, UK. Her research focuses on the intersections between sexuality and development. Together with Andrea Cornwall and Sonia Corréa she co-edited Development with a Body: sexualities, development and human rights (London: Zed Books, 2008). She has organized several conferences and events enabling exchanges between sexual rights activists and researchers and sharing their insights with people in the development industry. She previously lived in Beijing for several years, managing poverty alleviation programs for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and joining in local women's rights and LGBT activism.

Susan Paulson is Director of Latin American Studies and professor of anthropology at Miami University. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. She has published numerous articles, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, in the areas of gender and development, sexuality studies, and political ecology in Latin America (especially Bolivia).

Jyoti Puri (Ph.D., Northeastern University) is associate professor and chair of sociology at Simmons College. She is the author of Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India: narratives of gender and sexuality (Routledge, 1999) and Encountering Nationalism (Blackwell Publishers, 2003).

Alexandra Teixeira is Philanthropic Partner Officer at the Astraea Foundation. Formerly she was Research and Policy Coordinator for Global Advocacy at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). Her work at IGLHRC focused on advancing sexual rights protection through United Nations human rights mechanisms and coalition work in other global fora. She holds a Master's Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University.

Ara Wilson is Director of Sexuality Studies and Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok. tomboys, tycoons and Avon ladies in the global city (University of California Press, 2004) and is currently working on her new book project, Sexual Latitudes: the erotic politics of globalization.

Acknowledgements

Like all anthology projects, this volume is the result of the collective energy and dedication of several individuals. It began with me recognizing the fact that among the small but growing group of scholars, activists, and policy-makers focusing on sexual rights and development in one form or another, there was yet to be a solid collection addressing the multiple issues involved in reframing sex through a non-normative lens. Thus this project began with this aim in mind, and with the goal of contributing to a broader global agenda linking sexual and economic justice. Many people contributed to this emerging vision of change. First and foremost, I thank Suzanne Bergeron for her involvement with this project from the start. Not only did she help me brainstorm at initial stages of the project but she helped in numerous other ways — too many to list here — and provided important editorial feedback and support throughout the process.

These chapters have been presented collectively in four venues: I thank Suzanne Bergeron (as principal organizer) and her colleagues at the University of Michigan at Dearborn and at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for supporting a panel in March 2007. Several chapters were presented at the 2006 and 2008 National Women’s Studies Association annual conferences and additional chapters were presented at the Rethinking Marxism conference, held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in fall 2006.

During this process, I have also had the opportunity to share thoughts and ideas from the evolving manuscript with colleagues in academic and NGO settings in Quito, Caracas, Brighton, Lima, London, Montreal, San Francisco, New York City, and Syracuse, and with students in my courses at the University of Cincinnati and FLACSO-Ecuador. I thank my friends, colleagues, and students for their critical and constructive input, and for their ongoing support for this project. I also thank Suparna Bhaskaran, Kate Bedford, Sonia Corréa, Susie Jolly, Jane Parpart, and Spike Peterson for their comments on the introduction as I presented it in multiple forms, at various venues. Finally, I thank the University of Cincinnati Friends of Women’s Studies and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for funding portions of the research and travel for this project.

At Routledge, I thank my editor, Heidi Bagtazo, for her support and encouragement. I also thank Jeni Jenkins for her help compiling the bibliography, and Jill Williams for her research assistance.

Abbreviations

ABC AIDS ANC ASA BDS BtM

CD CDC CLIC CMAC CONAMU COPRESIDA CREA DAWN DC DFID EOHR EP

FEW FGM GAD GALZ GL

GLB GLBT GLIFFA GLOBE

GTZ HIV HR IASSCS

“Abstain, be faithful, use condoms”

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

African National Congress

Amigos Siempre Amigos

Blue Diamond Society compact disk

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

lesbian group in Thailand (see Chapter 5)

Centre for Media and Alternative Communication Consejo Nacional de la Mujer (National Women’s Council) Consejo Presidencial del SIDA (Presidential AIDS Council) Creating Resources for Empowerment and Action Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era District of Columbia

Department for International Development

Egyptian Organization for Human Rights

Equality Project

Forum for the Empowerment of Women

female genital mutilation

Gender and Development

Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe

gay and lesbian

gay, lesbian and bisexual

gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender

Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies

Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual Employees (of the World Bank Group)

Deutsche Gesellschaft fiir Technische Zusammenarbeit Human Immunodeficiency Virus

human resources

International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society xviii Abbreviations

IGLHRC ILGA

International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission International Lesbian and Gay Association

International Labour Organization

International Monetary Fund

lesbian, gay, and bisexual

lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender

lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersexed lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer

lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexed Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement)

men who have sex with men

men who have sex with men and women

Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa non-governmental organization

People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Karnataka

Servicio de Información y Censo Agropecuario (Agricultural Census and Information System Service)

Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency Sisterhood is Global International

South Indian Positive Network

sexually transmitted infection

transgendered and intersexed

United Kingdom

United Nations

Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS

United Nations Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual Employees United Nations Development Fund for Women

United States

United States Agency for International Development videocassette recorder

World Bank

Women in Development

Women Living Under Muslim Laws

women who have sex with women

Women for Women’s Human Rights — New Ways

Introduction

Development, global governance, and sexual subjectivities

Amy Lind

For too long, people who do not fit within socially prescribed sexual and gender roles in their societies have been seen as irrelevant to or “outside” the project of development. We hear accounts of how globalization affects local, typically impoverished, communities in the global South yet rarely if ever do we see any representations of sexual difference other than the heterosexual and “gender-appropriate” norms; norms typically defined in the global media by Western standards. If anything, queers are seen as “unproductive” to development or as destructive to the imagined national community and its modernization goals, and queer sexual subjectivities are rarely understood outside the purview of medical pathologies or criminal behavior. This is so, despite emergent forms of oppositional queer consciousness and political strategizing that we have witnessed, especially since the early 1990s, in many countries around the world. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual activists, along with gender-variant activists including cross-dressers, transsexuals, and transgendered individuals, have challenged post/neocolonial states and global institutions on a variety of grounds pertaining to their marginalized identities. Scholars have only begun to address how these emergent sexual subjectivities have provided important challenges to heterosexist bias and gender normativity in post/neocolonial state planning traditions and technologies. Queer activists have strategically engaged with the global development industry, most literally by seeking foreign aid for their struggles, yet also necessarily as they work in non-governmental, state, and transnational arenas, as a way to forge their political identities and challenge repressive state apparatuses, often countering imperialist logics as well.

Perhaps ironically, queerness on a global scale has come to be known largely in the neoliberal era, an era marked by the globalization of economic and social normativities. On an economic level, privatization, state deregulation, and free-market ideologies have helped shape an institutional context in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs), both for profit and non-profit, have had to pick up where the state left off. This has led among other things to the reprivatization of social welfare, with important consequences for non-normative families and households that do not “count” as the subjects of development aid, even within local grassroots efforts where people (necessarily) take planning for survival into their own hands. Many of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) groups that emerged during the past two decades have held ambivalent relationships to development, modernization, and modernity as they understand it. To begin with, the establishment of liberal human rights mechanisms and globalization has facilitated the rise of public LGBT identities and cultures, albeit in partial and fragmented ways. And LGBT groups have experienced the contradictory effects of globalization based on their own locations in new public-private relationships between civil society sectors and nation-states, which has affected their organizing strategies, funding opportunities, and political subjectivities in unforeseen ways, sometimes leading to their acquiescence, rather than opposition, to neoliberalism (Fernández-Alemany 2000; Lind 2007; Oswin 2007b). As queer studies continues to influence scholarship, advocacy, and policy-making in the area of development, we must take note of the disciplining and material effects on the most marginalized queers in any society, rather than succumbing to new forms of homonormative imperialism.

This collection of essays arose out of my perception that there is a great need for assessing the contributions of queer studies to the field of development and globalization studies. Likewise, it grew out of my preoccupation with the feminist scholarship on gender and development, which, while useful for examining normative family structures and patterns of gender relations, has rarely turned its attention to the study of heterosexuality as a social institution (Lind and Share 2003). By examining how notions of gender and sexuality are inscribed in development institutions, policies, and frameworks, often through a heteronormative and gender-normative lens, authors in this volume provide a critical querying of “development” itself, and explore the liberatory potential as well as the contradictions of any project that attempts “queer development.”

At least four sets of current concerns or issues have inspired this collection. First, some of us have become increasingly preoccupied with the entrenched nature of heteronormativity in development narratives, policies, and practices, particularly in the neoliberal era, where normative family models have been newly integrated into many international aid efforts and where the global governance of intimacy is unfolding in complex and contradictory ways (Buss and Herman 2003; Butler 2006; see also Bedford, this volume). Although many observers have noted the effects of global restructuring on heterosexual families and households and on an imagined heterosexual national community, few have begun to analyze how processes of neoliberal development and globalization themselves lead to new arrangements of heteronormative intimacy and to new classes of heterosexuality, let alone how these iterations of identity converge with new forms of hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity on a global scale.

Second, we are concerned about the increasingly globalized backlash against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people, including the re-inscription of heteronormative power in nationalist ideologies and the outright denial of full citizenship to homosexuals in various countries. As has been observed, this backlash that we are witnessing in several countries around the world is the result of a complex set of factors at play, including ongoing struggles concerning postcolonial nation-building and the debates on the effects of westernization on non-Western and poor countries in the western hemisphere; critiques of the US as empire and the accompanying notion of our world as unipolar (despite the fact that some countries are now shifting away from what was once perceived as a quasi-hegemonic neoliberal model; e.g. Venezuela); historical discourses positing homosexuality (and sometimes transgenderism) as either criminal or pathological;! and globalized struggles over the meaning of “the family” in religious doctrine and international law.

At the same time, significant advances have been made in some countries with respect to gay and lesbian rights and/or to gender identity claims, leading some to observe that nation-states sometime have strategic reasons tied up with nationalism or global market allegiances to become “gay-friendly” (Oswin 2007b). Interestingly, gayness and queerness have been used as barometers of national progress and development: some view the addition of gay rights as a sign of progress, as in the cases of neoliberal South Africa and Ecuador (Lind 2007; Oswin 2007b), whereas others view it as a Western imposition and/or as a deteriorating factor in their national identities (see Bhaskaran 2004; Hoad 2007). The inclusion of anti-discrimination clauses on the basis of sexual orientation in the new constitutions of South Africa (1996), Fiji (1997) and Ecuador (1998) offer hope for the possibility of sexual citizenship in the global South;? however, these legal accomplishments have been met with opposition, and the introduction of gay rights into formal politics and policy domains also raises important questions about the normalizing risks associated with making universal claims on the basis of the gay/ lesbian binary, when still many individuals remain outside the project of global gay rights.

Third, we are motivated by the transnational dialogues among scholars and activists about the globalization of sexuality and the queerness of globalization (Gibson-Graham 1996-7; Altman 2001; Bhaskaran 2004; Wilson 2004; Oswin 2007a and b). In an increasingly globalized, marketized context, heteronormativity as well as homonormativity have played roles in shaping global hegemonic expressions of capitalist power; in exoticizing the so-called Third World and queers within 1t; and in shaping queer consumer subjects in late capitalism who themselves consume and benefit from (typically racialized) images of queer people in poor and/or non-Western countries; for example, as sex tourists, pink travelers, human rights activists, Peace Corp volunteers, missionaries, or NGO volunteers (Hennessy 2000; Altman 2001; Alexander 2005). Needless to say, the relationships among capitalism, westernization, and emergent queer subjectivities are complex at best, and this project aims to contribute to debates on this topic.

Finally, we are inspired by the increased visibility of sexual rights and gender justice movements in the global South, many of which have provided intersectional critiques of the violence of Western normativities from the start. All of these processes combined have played important roles in shaping what we call the new sexual subjects of development: gay men; men who have sex with men, or MSMs; lesbians; women who have sex with women, or WSWs; transsexuals, and other non-normative identities now targeted as subjects in need of development aid or assistance. Of course, most development frameworks continue to rest on heteronormative imaginings of national progress and identity and, more often than not, non-normative individuals are left out of the picture. However, as recent constitutional, legislative, and market victories attest, some nation-states and public cultures in the global South are increasingly “gay-friendly,” creating the possibility of sexual citizenship for some. The emergence of the new sexual subjects of development is also related to the fact that gays and lesbians have “come out” within the development industry and challenged its heteronormative premises, at least for their own benefit, if not for those who are the targets of their development interventions. “Coming out” within the development industry may lead to its queering, yet further queries into the cultural, political, and economic effects of development itself, including development efforts to address the needs of lesbians, gay men, and/ or gender-variant people, have yet to be fully addressed or understood, particularly as they may contribute to producing new forms of homonormativities.

Points of departure

In this volume, authors query development, globalization, and global governance through a range of approaches and on various scales. Some utilize political economy as their primary methodological tool; others draw from ethnography or cultural studies. Most draw from poststructuralist and postmodernist thought to address the historical genealogies of queers in development and sexual rights and gender justice struggles. Genealogies of gayness, queerness, and LGBT rights have, in many ways, informed the geopolitical landscape within which we can (or cannot) imagine queerness and various forms of normativities associated with neoliberal forms of global governance. Given how discrimination against LGBT people has long been justified on the basis of its purported relegation to the private realm of our “intimate” lives, here I propose a notion of “global governance” that captures how intimacy and community are equally regulated and disciplined alongside formal citizenship and state development models. An important aspect of my own understanding of global governance, then, involves how people”s intimate lives are tied up with state and neoliberal governmentalities; that is, how axes of “personal life” are organized in such a way in modern nation-states that queers are legally excluded from their full citizenship rights and spatially excluded from public life. Ken Plummer refers to this as the realm of “intimate citizenship,” which for him includes “... rights, obligations, recognitions and respect around those most intimate spheres of life — who to live with, how to raise children, how to handle one”s body, how to relate as a gendered being, how to be an erotic person.” (Plummer 2001: 238).

As many observers of development and global restructuring have noted, as non-state institutions have increasingly played interpretive roles in defining citizenship and what constitutes “proper” citizen practices in the neoliberal era, so too have people’s subjectivities changed as a result (Ong 2006). Importantly, sometimes people have learned to “speak back” rather than merely absorb the dual effects of this broad set of structural reforms and the scholarly understandings of them as linear, unidirectional, penetrating, and omnipresent (Oswin 2007a; see also Gibson-Graham 1996—7). From my perspective, addressing neoliberal governmentalities in this broader sense captures the layers of institutions that are involved in defining and regulating our intimate lives. Seen through this lens, development policies, practices, and institutions work as instruments of governance and as methods of constructing and legitimizing subjectivities (Shore and Wright 1997; Bondi and Laurie 2005). Thus, struggles for interpretive power over policy definitions are not trivial conversations that take place within governing institutions; rather, they represent broader struggles over cultural representation, or recognition, and access to material resources, or redistribution (Franco 1989; Fraser 1997). It is important to point out, however, that while neoliberalism in its multiple iterations has brought with it these new understandings of governance and citizenship, many queers have long been critical of their literal and figurative relegation to the private realm, well before the Washington consensus neoliberal orthodoxy came into being and well before the global justice movement began to visibly push for a shift away from neoliberal economics and from the identity politics models emanating from the philosophical school of liberalism. Thus, the multiple forms of market-led development that we now see around the world represent new challenges to long-standing forms of discrimination and, paradoxically, potential spaces for a queer liberatory politics, as several contributors point out. Combined, the chapters in this volume query development frameworks, policies, and processes that privilege normative genders and sexualities over all others, including those promoting neoliberal ideals, with the ultimate goal of rethinking heteronormativity and genderism (i.e. hostile readings of gender-ambiguous bodies — see Browne 2004) in development and constructing sexual rights, gender justice, and decolonization strategies in the global South and transnationally.

This project is both normative and anti-normative in nature. Authors query development frameworks as a way to rethink and reprioritize global and national development agendas, with the aim of bringing visibility to and providing citizen rights for people who do not have the same rights as “gender-appropriate” heterosexuals. This includes women who love women, men who love men; self-defined gays, lesbians, and bisexuals; heterosexuals who do not fit prescribed gender roles; cross-dressers; transsexuals; and the many other local and regional iterations of non-normative genders and sexualities that the terms “queer,” “genderqueer,” and “transgender” aim to include (Morton 1996; Nestle, Howell, and Wilchins 2002; Currah 2006; Stryker and Whittle 2006). At the same time, many contributors point out that they are acutely aware of the limitations of normative politics, particularly when one’s identity is defined as deviant, pathological, and criminal from the start, where political reform can only improve their secondary status rather than invert or transform the identity model in any substantive way. While some argue that it is difficult to imagine queer possibilities outside the hegemonic monocultural, uniworld vision of neoliberal discourse, many others are optimistically pointing toward the new instances of transnational social justice movements that we have begun to witness in the post-Washington Consensus era — and for some countries, arguably a “post-neoliberal” moment — in which we live (Vargas 2003; Grimson and Kessler 2005; Fernandes 2007; Lind 2007).* Authors in this volume are doing just that: providing alternative readings of global normativities reinforced by development policies and suggesting new ways of thinking about queerness and identity in the context of neoliberal governance and governmentalities. Below I outline three general areas of inquiry that inform this scholarship: views on queerness, querying development, and queers in development.

Views on queerness

“Like size, definitions matter,” as International Labour Organization (ILO) economist Guy Standing states in an anthology chapter devoted to the social effects of globalization, leaving the reader to decide if his reference is to the phallus, globalization or both (2004: 111). Indeed, when discussing “queerness” in transnational context, definitions matter. Certainly “queerness” has been interrogated by queer and postcolonial studies scholars for its usefulness (or lack thereof) in understanding genders and sexualities in the global South; and contributors to this volume hold a range of views on its usefulness or lack thereof. Suparna Bhaskaran (2004) offers a useful definition of the strategic usage of queerness. 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 normativity (Bhaskaran 2004: 8-9).

Just as the term “gay” was introduced in many countries of the global South in the 1970s, a topic historically addressed by LGBT studies scholars (Murray 1995; Fernandez-Alemany 2000; Altman 2001), the term “queer” began to circulate among scholars and activists in southern countries in the 1980s and 1990s; this, of course, varies by region and by their geopolitical relationship to English-speaking, colonizing nation-states. The circulation of these terms, which involves complex transnational exchanges rather than mere impositions from North to South, have allowed for new ways of examining “gayness” and “queerness” in Western as well as non-Western countries. Some contributors choose to use the term to connote the multiple forms of sexual and gender identities that exist, although with the understanding that this term, too, needs to be problematized. Drawing from queer theory, we suggest that this framework of sexuality is more appropriate than a dualistic framework of homosexuality/heterosexuality (Butler 1990; Sedgwick 1990). As opposed to definitions of homosexual and bisexual, the notion of “queerness” helps us to rethink dualisms in Western thought and in development discourses, which tend to universalize Western definitions — about “good” versus “bad”, “normal” versus “abnormal” genders and sexualities. Volume contributors address a wide range of identities that are non-normative or anti-normative, including men who have sex with men, gay men, lesbians, gender-variant individuals, and heterosexual female single-headed households. While contributors do not claim “queer” to encompass “all that is not normative,” as some US-based queer theorists have done (in fact, some choose not to use the term at all), they demonstrate how heteronormativity has negative effects not only for self-defined queers (e.g. individuals who do not fit within culturally prescribed sexual and/or gender norms) but also heterosexual individuals who do not fit within prescribed gender roles and therefore do not benefit from development initiatives as their gender-normative counterparts might.

Queerness can flatten out differences among locally understood identities, such as moffies in South Africa; desi dykes and desi gay men in India; tortilleras, trasvestis, chitos/femmes, or maricones in Spanish-speaking Latin America and the Caribbean; or toms in Thailand, to name only a few. Queerness, like gayness, when it tends to flatten out differences, is often associated with westernization, universality, hegemonic knowledge production, or epistemic privilege. If and when queerness is viewed as adequately encompassing the numerous forms in which individuals define themselves in their daily lives throughout the world, then queer studies has failed to grasp how the field itself contributes to normativizing gender and sexual variance. Thus this volume addresses both heteronormativity in development thought and institutional practices, as well as the potential homonormalizing effects of mainstreaming gayness in the development industry. “Queering development,” or the effort to bring sexual rights and gender justice agendas to the forefront of development thought and practice, is necessarily a paradoxical process from the start, one that is imbued with hegemonic as well as oppositional forms of knowledge, consciousness, and experience.