SexPolitics: Trends & Tensions in the 21st Century - Contextual Undercurrents Editors: Sonia Corrêa and Richard Parker Volume 2 SexPolitics: Trends and Tensions in the 21st Century - Contextual Undercurrents - Volume 2 Editors: Sonia Corrêa and Richard Parker Copy editor: Seona Smiles ISBN: 978-85-88684-64-5 Published by Sexuality Policy Watch, a project based at ABIA Rio de Janeiro, April 2019 Graphic design: FW2, Rio de Janeiro ABIA - Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association Presidente Vargas, 446 / 13th floor Rio de Janeiro/RJ – 20.071-907 – Brazil Phone: +55.21.2223-1040 Webpage: http://www.sxpolitics.org Support SexPolitics: Trends & Tensions in the 21st Century - Volume 2 Table of contents Prologue ….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….…. 4 Part 1: Regional Spaces African Sexual Politics: A Pan-African Lesbian Perspective Varyanne Sika and Awino Okech .….…..…....….….….…..….….….….….….….….….….….…….….….…. 15 Sexuality Research, Sexual Politics and Sexual Rights in the Anglophone Caribbean Christine Barrow .….…..….…..…..….….….….….….….….…..….….….….….….…..…..…..….….….…. 41 EUrope: The Ups and Downs of Sexual Exceptionalism David Paternotte .….…..….…..…..….….….….….….….….…..….….….….….….…..…..…..….….….…. 72 Sexuality in Latin America: Politics at a Crossroad Gloria Careaga, Mário Pecheny and Sonia Corrêa .…..….….…..….….….….….….…..…..…..….….….…. 94 Sexual Politics in Post-Soviet Societies: A Preliminary Cartography Yana Kirey-Sitnikova and Anna Kirey .…..….….…..….…..…...…...…...….….….….…..…..…..….….….…. 118 Part 2: National Contexts Sexuality Research and Sex Politics in 21st Century of Mainland China Huang Yingying .….…....….…..….…..….….….….….…….……….….….….….….….….….…..….….…. 143 ‘SABSE BADTAR – TEEN-SO-SATATTAR!’ (THE WORST – 377!): Queer Mobilizing in India Against Anti-Sodomy Law Vivek Divan .…..….….….…….….….….….….….….…..….….….….….….….….….….….….….….…. 165 Authors and Editors .…..….….…..….….…..….….…..….…..…..….….…..….….…..….….…..….….…. 187 SexPolitics: Trends & Tensions in the 21st Century - Volume 2 Prologue With great pleasure, Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW) launches the fourth publication resulting from our most recent round of transnational analysis. SPW was created in 2002 under the name Working Group on Sexuality and Social Policy, which would be changed to our current denomination in 2006. At that point in time, the dynamics prevailing in our field of work remained connected with undercurrents of previous decades – democratization in the global South, the unexpected effects of HIV and AIDS, and the intense global debates on social issues and human rights that ensued at the end of the Cold War Era – which had enhanced the expansion of public discourses and research on gender and sexuality matters as well as their rapid transnationalization. But we had already entered the times when gender and sexuality conflicts were no longer played at the extremities, but rather in battles fought at the core of power dynamics, or of what we called “global sex wars”. As we know, since then this tendency has not exactly relented in its pace, but rather amplified its scale and effects. The aim of this new series of analyses is therefore to critically assess the transnational state of sexual politics in the mid 2010s. The new series started with the launching of Sex at Dusk and the Mourning After: Sexuality Policy in the United States in the Years of Obama authored by Susana T. Fried and Cynthia Rothschild, in May 2018. In August, 2018, a first edited volume -- SexPolitics: Trends and Tensions in the 21st Century – Critical Issues – was launched comprising four chapters: “Desert, Rainforest or Jungle: Navigating the Global Sexual Rights Landscape” by Sofia Gruskin, Alice Miller, Jane Cottingham and Eszter Kismodi; “Legal Developments in the Domain of Sexual Rights” by Laura Saldívia and Ryan Thoreson; “Legal and safe abortion: the Latin American Perspective, by Maria Jose Barajas and Sonia Corrêa; and “Mapping Trends: Power Imbalances and the Circulation of Information on Sex Work” by Laura Murray, Elsa Oliveira and Debolina Dutta. Then, in September, 2018, a second Working Paper – “The Catholic Church’s Legal strategies – The Re-naturalization of Law and the Religious Embedding of Citizenship “ – authored by Juan Marco Vaggione, was made public. Now we bring to you the second edited volume: SexPolitics: Trends and Tensions in the 21st Century – Contextual Undercurrents, which includes seven chapters organized in two parts. The first part charts sexual politics in five regional spaces: Africa, the English-speaking Caribbean, Europe, Latin America and Post-Soviet SexPolitics: Trends & Tensions in the 21st Century - Volume 2 4 Contextual Undercurrents Countries. In the second part, the undercurrents of sexual politics underway in two large Asian countries, China and India, are also examined. This uneven composition reflects, on the one hand, the contours of SPW’s transnational partnerships. But, on the other, it also illustrates how difficult it is to inscribe Asia as a regional space. This difficulty is also a reminder that even regional spaces that are addressed as such in the pages that follow do not necessarily reflect the heterogeneities implied in the large geographical areas covered by the chapters. “Region”, as we know, is a problematic unit of analyses – but the same applies to spaces defined by national boundaries. Having performed transnational analyses for fifteen years, while recognizing these caveats, we also consider it very hard to escape from these conventional geopolitical frames. What compensates for that is that the standpoints and analytical frames used in each chapter are quite distinctive and, consequently, as a whole they offer a highly varied mosaic panel of sexual politics worldwide. Regional Spaces: Africa, the English-speaking Caribbean, Europe, Latin America and Post-Soviet Countries The first chapter of the section on regional spaces is remarkably political. “African Sexual Politics: A Pan-African Lesbian Perspective” written by Varyanne Sika and Awino Okech, on behalf of the Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL), begins with a re-capturing of an African Queer Manifesto, written in 2011 that develops a sharp critique of neo-colonial categories of identity and power, and ends by making explicit the position on sexual politics articulated by CAL. This standpoint squarely places struggles for sexuality rights within a Pan Africanist frame of self-determination in sexual, social, economic and political terms. This chapter also offers a concise but rich overview of African feminist writing on sexuality and identity that goes beyond social science bibliography to also give visibility to literature (poetry as well as fiction). In this section, Sika and Okech show how contemporary African feminisms, while investing in theory and ground-level politics, are also engaged in exploring and valuing joy and pleasure as expressions of queer livelihoods and resistance as made explicit in one of the books examined in the section: [W]e each experienced moments when our ‘profane’, leaky, curvy, mother/sister/daughter/macomère bodies, bound up in the polities of our national and ethnoracial identities, unsettled the ‘sacred’ spaces of our field sites and academies, often in unintentional and unexpected ways (The Quilt, p. 55). Then the authors push further the critique of global LGBTI politics framed on the basis of identity and the biases that it implies. They scrutinize how the insistent Western gaze on what is described as African homophobia provides SexPolitics: Trends & Tensions in the 21st Century - Volume 2 5 Contextual Undercurrents North American and European LGBT subjects with an ideational platform to praise “their own emancipation against the foil of the subaltern other”. They also identify and analyze how the narrow focus on state recognition upon which identity politics is based leads either to normalizing effects (homonationalism) or continuing patterns of queer exclusion. The analyses also shows how the obsessive attention to violations of the human rights of LGBTI persons in Africa – in the Western media, but also in the discourse of international organizations – contributes to erase positive legal and policy gains achieved in recent years and, most principally, undercuts the agency of African queers in resisting various forms of oppression. In respect to organizing, Sika and Okech address the always difficult question of how funding can be de-politicizing and call for an intersectional politics on gender and sexuality that does not leave aside the economic and social dimensions of queer livelihoods. The second chapter, “Sexuality Research, Sexual Politics and Sexual Rights in the Anglophone Caribbean”, authored by Christine Barrow, offers a rich and extensive overview of the state of art in gender and sexuality research. It examines a number of specific areas such as gender-based violence, abortion rights, adolescents, LGBT rights, HIV/AIDS and sex work. It charts research gains and gaps, but also connections and fissures between research and activism. These clusters of analysis are fundamentally framed around stigmas that derive from dominant constructions of gender and sexuality. As in Africa, coloniality is key to understand current sexual politics dynamics in the English-speaking Caribbean. In that regard, Barrow retraces how imperial imprints of racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity “drove post-Emancipation and post-Indenture nation-building designed to ‘civilize’ Caribbean men