Introduction: Sexualities

This issue of Gender & Development addresses Sexualities. Sexual health and rights have been prominent in the human rights and women's rights movement for decades. The Platform for Action from the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women highlighted the right of women to have control over and make decisions concerning their own sexuality, including their own sexual and reproductive health (Paras 92, 93 and 94)¹. Since then, the concept of sexual rights has gained broader acceptance; these are the rights of all human beings to have the possibility of pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence (WHO 2015).

This is real progress. The universal human desire to have good and pleasurable relationships – including intimate relationships - is echoed in songs, poetry and the performing arts all across the globe. But much remains to be done. Sex and sexuality continue to be widely seen by policymakers in governments and development institutions as topics that are irrelevant to development, and relegated to a private rather than a public sphere (Jolly 2006). Sexuality is still widely treated as a private matter, like intimate partner violence (IPV) and domestic violence. But we know that treating these issues in this way is highly problematic. Failure to acknowledge them as public concerns relieves the state from its responsibility to protect the rights of all its citizens. It also absolves other powerful actors - including (I)NGOs – from their moral responsibility to uphold, protect, and respect these rights. When sexuality is seen as private, hidden, and separate from development and humanitarian concerns, and vulnerable populations need to survive in contexts where governance and accountability are absent or fragile, this can create opportunities for abuses to take place.

As we write this, in February 2018, revelations of the abuse by powerful men in the aid sector of young women, at first in Haiti in Oxfam, and then much more broadly - both inside and outside INGOs - are reverberating around the world, and the problem of sexual harassment and assault in across the humanitarian and development sector is being acknowledged openly². It is clear that speaking out about such abuses is vital if things are to change for the better. The same applies to speaking out about sexuality and sexual rights. There is a clear need to put these discussions into a context of broader political and economic rights. The ten articles here show some of the many ways in which sexuality must move from the shadows to the spotlight, in development and humanitarian work, as elsewhere.

One of the areas that has traditionally been the most hidden is the sexual rights of minorities. This was the area which this issue of Gender & Development wanted to focus on. Our reasoning was that over the journal's 25 years, this would be the first issue to focus specifically on diverse sexual orientation and gender identities (SOGI)³. The Yogyakarta Principles (2017) is a document setting out the principles of human rights relating to SOGI, to address the abuse of LGBTQI+⁴ people. It was the product of an international meeting of human rights groups in Indonesia, in November 2006. The Principles were supplemented in 2017, expanding to include gender expression and sex characteristics as new grounds to be able to claim legal protection from abuse, using international human rights law.

The context in which the Yogyakarta Principles have been developed is urgent and threatening. Currently, 72 countries across the world criminalise same-sex sex (Carroll and Mendos 2017, 8). Our Fundamentalisms issue (Vol 25 No 1) of March 2017 highlighted the concerns of social justice activists over threats to sexual minorities from extremist political movements that invoke ideas of religion, tradition and culture to further their ends. The control of sex and sexuality, and the oppression of women and individuals with diverse SOGI, are distinguishing factors in these fundamentalist movements (Imam 2016).

Many individuals with diverse SOGI adopt the identities included within the categories LGBTQI+. Their struggle for sexual rights intersects with wider struggles for political, economic and social rights. As we go to press in February 2018, we read reports of trans women in Aceh Province, Indonesia, being stripped naked and beaten, and trained to lower their voices and behave in a more ‘macho’ way, by security forces, in a week in which Indonesia's national government has proposed criminalising all gay and extra-marital sex (Lamb 2018).

In the rest of this Introduction, we set the context for the issue, and introduce the articles to be read in this collection. Authors in this issue draw on their first-hand experience and research of work in development and humanitarian contexts. Nine of our ten articles focus on the rights of people with diverse SOGI. A further article focuses on transactional sex workers in Kolkata, India. Articles cover many geographical areas, ranging from South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Nepal, and Lebanon, Cuba, Swaziland, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the MENA region. Articles come from many different research institutions and organisations operating in the development and humanitarian arena, ranging from grassroots activist organisations to the UN arena in New York.

A range of common themes emerge from this issue. These include the critical importance of understanding the history and location of struggles for the rights of people with diverse SOGI. In that struggle, international development itself has harmed and oppressed people with diverse SOGI, through processes including conquest, migrations, colonialism, and economic globalisation. Another theme is about naming and framing. A number of articles highlight the risks to people with diverse SOGI of adopting the LGBTQI+ terms and identities that simultaneously open opportunities for dialogue, solidarity and protection from international allies, yet can increase risks of ostracism and violence in their immediate communities. Such decisions have obvious practical, as well as strategic, implications for individuals living in contexts where their security and wellbeing is not guaranteed.

Another key theme that emerges for us is the resonances and links between the agendas of integrating sexuality into development, and integrating gender in development. These appear to have evolved into distinct areas of activism, even while they complement each other and intersect in many ways. The sector has made only limited progress in engaging with gender issues and women's rights. Its engagement with sex and sexuality – central to development and humanitarian work - has perhaps been even more implicit, assumed and unexamined. Action is critically needed on both.

Setting the context: sexuality and development

International development has always engaged with issues around sexuality, as evidenced by programmes of population control, disease and violence including HIV and AIDS (Jolly 2006; Cornwall and Jolly 2009). But in these programmes, aspects of sexuality have typically been addressed in a negative way often focused on specific public health problems such as reducing maternal mortality, rather than on the relation between sexuality and poverty (Oosterhoff, Waldman and Olerenshaw 2014).

Yet the entire range of development and humanitarian concerns – ranging from economic policies on employment and entrepreneurship, through healthcare, housing policies, refugee responses, and citizenship including inheritance and family law - needs to be examined from the point of view of sexuality, to realise sexual and human rights for all. Just one example comes from housing and urban development. How many architects and city planners consider the fact that in high-density, poor quality housing, privacy can be impossible, and the inability to find it can shape when, where and how people feel comfortable having sex? For heterosexual people living in poverty with little choice around habitation, managing their sexual relations can feel as if they ‘have to be like thieves in the night’, with child sleeping arrangements as a de facto form of family planning (Oosterhoff, Dkhar and Albert 2015, 1113). For people with diverse SOGI, often living hidden lives with a threat of stigma, abuse and violence, such unmet domestic needs for security and privacy are obviously far worse.

Rights-based approaches to development have also been slow to address the rights of sexual minorities. There is currently some evidence of progress to advance the sexual rights of minorities and acknowledge sexuality as a social construct that is fluid, diverse, and open to change. The global declarations cited above, and national equalities legislation in some countries, help challenge the idea that heterosexuality and the idea of the sex binary is the only natural and normal way to be. Tolerance – and even acceptance - of people with diverse SOGI appears to be winning the day in many communities worldwide. International development is also increasingly recognising the existence of people ‘not fully committed to heterosexual procreation’ (Gosine 2015, 3), and the idea of sexual rights as a part of a range of rights that need to be guaranteed by society and the state is rising up the human development agenda. At national level, some evidence suggests that countries that are both more affluent and more secular apparently more likely to be receptive to the idea of sexual rights (see www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on-homosexuality, last checked 26 February 2018).

But the idea that Western ‘development’ correlates with tolerance for sexual diversity and rights is mistaken. Worldwide, social norms, values and practices on families, gender and sexuality are as diverse as humankind (Herdt 1994; Murray and Roscoe 1998; Diamond 2003). This diversity was challenged in the colonial era and since, with sexual norms that challenged patriarchal Christian values being seen as evidence of backwardness, and often used as justification for the civilisation projects of empires.

Ironically, today's assessments of the ‘progress’ of countries towards Western liberal democracies often now focus on their record on LGBTQI rights (Gosine 2015). In 2011, the government of the UK suggested that British aid might be withheld from those governments that retain anti-homosexuality legislation (BBC 2011). The government of Bermuda is repealing same-sex marriage at the time of writing, and activists are mobilising to resist this⁵. Responses by Northern policy makers to countries that have recently criminalised same-sex sex, stating that this is a human rights violation, have been poorly received⁶. Reverse movements and actions against sexual minorities often use notions of self-determination and freedom from external influences.

Clearly, sex and sexuality are powerful symbols to mobilise public opinion, and can be used with great effect by the powerful to push other agendas (Grau 2016). Today, ‘homonationalism’ (Puar 2007) is also linked as a movement to the rise of the Altright movement, whose support to the LGBT and women's movements needs to be firmly understood in the context of the same movement's commitment to anti-Muslim and nationalist agendas. The homonationalist agenda is appropriating and using equality narratives that serve xenophobic and Islamophobic ends.

With these complex political realities in mind, all the authors in this issue consider the importance of location and history in shaping the experiences of individuals with diverse SOGI – and their groups, organisations and movements - in different parts of the world, and how they are affected by local, national, and international events and agendas. Through their own activism on different levels, in collaboration with allies in social justice movements, positive change can be effected.

For example, in her article in this issue, Evie Brown focuses on lesbian and bisexual women's lives in Havana, Cuba, a place where traditional non-nuclear family forms provide a historical background and current –in some ways supportive- context for LGBT parents and queer families. In turn, in their article, Rinaldi Ridwan and Joyce Wu's article highlights Indonesia's history of diverse sexual orientation and gender identities. The colonial era criminalised sex for young men aged under 21, though it did not criminalise all sex between men as British colonial rule did. Yet Rinaldi Ridwan and Joyce Wu highlight rising intolerance towards LGBT communities in Indonesia, and a rapidly shrinking space for them to live as they desire. The rise of political Islam is seen by the authors as a key issue for rising political hostility to LGBT communities, and an atmosphere of homophobia.

In turn, the article in this issue by Carmen Logie, Amaya Perez-Brumer, Emma Woolley, Veli Madau, Winnie Nhlengethwa, Peter A. Newman, and Stefan D. Baral focuses on the day-to-day experiences of LGBT individuals in Swaziland, a country influenced profoundly not only by British colonisation but also by its history before, during and after the apartheid era in neighbouring South Africa, when male migration to the mines played a major role in shaping gender roles, relations, and social norms. Here, Christian belief is described as a major and active influence in the lives of most respondents, who find their faith a source of resilience, and seek full inclusion within faith communities. Yet at the same time, they experience discrimination within their faith, finding prejudice against them that is justified by literal interpretations of the Bible. Participants in the research discussed in this article say they find acceptance is often only possible if they hide their sexual orientation.

Language, location and the power of naming

A striking theme of this issue is the impact of international sexual and gender based identities and definitions on the local rights and struggles of people with diverse SOGI. Adopting LGBTQI+ identities can open doors to international struggles to secure the full and equal human rights of individuals identifying themselves with these categories. Clearly it is important to have a language to begin a dialogue with others, to discover shared interests and priorities and to take action. Indeed, some form of framing is essential if people are to take action as a group to effect change. Yet, as authors here reflect in their case studies from many different contexts, this is not a neutral but rather a political process. Local fluid identities can be lost and altered in translation to fit with international legal and political terminologies, for example in asylum-seeking procedures. This process can carry unexpected risks for individuals.

There are many different terms coined to describe groups who share particular sexual desires and preferences. But who does the naming and categorising, and who is named? What risks does adopting a name or a category carry, for whom and in what context? The impulse to use terms to label and name is a very human desire to understand – but also, to control. Language is imbued with power, and potentially limiting when terms coined in specific social contexts are used in other contexts with different histories and different systems of power and inequalities.

In his article in this issue focusing on the experience of LGBTQI human rights activists working within the UN, Nick Mulé argues:

it is important to note that terminology has its limitations, especially with regard to gender and sexual diversity, in capturing … complexity and fluidity … Further complicating such terminology is the nonexistence of language in many cultures to name or define such desires, identities and expressions.

(this issue, 91). 

In their article, Nof Nasser-Eddin, Nour Abu-Assab, and Aydan Greatrick of the organisation CTDC (Centre for Transnational Co-operation and Development), working in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region with refugees, argue that there are significant problems with the terminology most frequently used internationally to refer to people with non-normative gender and sexual identities: LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex). In order to get access to protection and to essential resources and services on grounds of persecution because of their sexuality people have to pass an identity test. They are required to adopt an identity label that is culturally alien in order to pass making individuals who adopt it highly visible within the refugee system, and placing them at risk of stigmatisation and persecution as soon as they step outside. This eequires people to take a great leap of faith and trust in the international system. It also requires significant knowledge and commitment from officials about local sexual identities to judge whether people are persecuted.

Reflecting these sensitivities, the various authors featured have used a range of chosen terms to refer to the SOGI of the individuals and communities they discuss. Each article explains and defines the terminology used. We took the decision not to suggest a single set of terms across the board because we recognise that terms are historically and socially fluid. Thinking of the need to see sexuality as fluid rather than fixed is challenging for some - but for others, freedom from fixed definitions and categories can be liberating, enabling people to shift and act on their desires more freely, throughout their lives.

In their article, Nof Nasser-Eddin et al. suggest that understanding sexuality as a performance – that is, as an act or way of behaving that does not necessarily create a need to define oneself in a different way – offers a fruitful way of progressing, at least at the level of fostering greater tolerance and acceptance of same-sex sex at community level in the areas of the MENA region where they have worked and researched.

Echoing this message in their article are Megan Daigle and Henri Myrttinen of International Alert; their experience is that:

identifying – or being identified – as LGBTIQ+ or other identity related to SOGI can dramatically heighten vulnerability amongst people affected by conflict. This … current lack of attention to SOGI issues sit quite uneasily with the kind of inclusive and rights-based approaches put forward by peacebuilders today

(this issue, 104).

The importance of the words we use is also critical when we look at the politics and power around sex and sexualities and how these are taken up by the international community. An example of this here is given by Mirna Guha's article which discusses sex work, and highlights the dangers of conflating sex work with trafficking. In turn, in her article on Christian Aid's attempts to integrate sexuality and gender into its work, Clare Paine highlights the need to break the silences that often exist around both these sets of issues. Rinaldi Ridwan and Joyce Wu's article explore the need to find words to include young people in activism around LGBT rights. Finally, in Nicolette Matthijsen's article, we see the importance of using silence and avoiding words altogether, to allow people to come together in solidarity around shared issues.

The importance of difference: feminist insights and critiques of development

The struggle for social justice for people who are discriminated against because of their perceived failure to fit into the straitjacket of gender and sex binaries has overlapped with struggles for social justice for women – and other struggles to further equality raging around many different identities.

In different contexts throughout the world, women's rights activists and feminist movements draw attention to the social norms that require individuals with bodies seen as female to behave in specific ways, and to submit to unequal gender power relations. In societies run along patriarchal lines, both women and men are required to play particular roles within a social and economic system that sees women as wives and mothers, and men as household heads and leaders in public life. They are required to express their sexuality within heterosexual marriages, which vary in detail in different patriarchal cultures, but which require the women, at least, to be monogamous.

Feminist perspectives on development have stressed the critical importance of challenging the idea of the ‘private sphere’ of marriage, family and household, and the importance of intra-household economics to development (Kabeer 1994). Feminist anthropologists (for example, Henrietta Moore, in her classic A Passion For Difference [1994]) have drawn attention to the variety of different notions of gender and sex, and the wide variety of SOGI that exists across the world, in particular to the existence of diversity in cultures before Western influence in the colonial era and since. They provide fascinating and inspiring accounts of the many different ways it is possible to live a human life, and the family and household forms that have evolved in response to different economic, social and political factors.

Yet despite these powerful messages about the importance of understanding plurality and diversity of family and household form, development policy and practice still fails fully to consider this. Normative ideas about households and families are still embedded in development policies and programmes in ways that can deeply affect people's lives and access to the resources they need for wellbeing and security. Development programmes aiming to reduce poverty or boost livelihoods often focus on households relying on married couples (Cornwall and Jolly 2009), in a ‘two-earner, two-lover model of partnership’ where wives and husbands share the labour of work and of social reproduction (Bedford 2005: 296). Yet millions of people live in households where these very specific gender and sexual relations are absent, and these are too often invisible to the planners and staff of government and NGOs involved in programming.

In their article in this issue, Pauline Oosterhoff and Tu-Anh Hoang explore Vietnamese transgender people's employment options in a socialist-oriented market economy where the state sector plays a decisive role in directing economic development, but where private entrepreneurship is also increasingly accepted as an important development strategy. In their study in Vietnam, small enterprises are commonly run by families, formed around the union of a husband and wife. Ability to conform to the social expectations of one's family – whether this is to be able to participate in a family enterprise or not – is critical for wellbeing but also security, and even economic survival.

A particularly interesting aspect of Pauline Oosterhoff and Tu-Anh Hoang's article is the difference they find in economic and social outcomes for transgender men, and transgender women. The relative freedom to come out as trans is different for transmen and transwomen. Fulfilling the expectations of the family that they should fulfil a gendered economic and social role is a strong determinant of the extent to which a transperson will gain acceptance. The inability of many with diverse SOGI to live their lives freely and openly, and claim their rights as citizens and as family members, can lead many of them to create peer-based social networks and countercultures that can provide alternative support.

Case studies like this show clearly how important it is to place sexuality where it needs to be – at the centre of gender and development policy and practice. It also shows that achieving economic justice for sexual minorities requires a conscious challenge to economic policies that only work for, and with, nuclear families and (married) heterosexual couples. It is high time for development policymakers and practitioners to see sexuality and the struggle for sexual rights as a priority throughout their work, and for humanitarian responses to also place them at the centre.

Gender and development policy and practice has stressed the critical importance of seeing sex and sexuality as connected to economic justice. For women, marriage is a livelihood strategy in contexts where economic wellbeing and social security depends on access to a male wage. Feminists, too, have highlighted that transactional sex work can enable survival for people who are excluded from mainstream economic options. In Mirna Guha's article, in the context of Kolkata, India, women give their accounts of their trajectories into – and out of – sex work. These stories include accounts of women being sold into sex work, in a life-cycle of gender-based violence (Ellsberg and Heise 2005). The unequal power that creates a world where it is poor women, men and individuals with diverse SOGI who sell sex to privileged and powerful men is unjust, and makes a nonsense of any meaningful conception of choice.

In their article, Pauline Oosterhoff and Tu-Anh Hoang highlight that in the absence of other alternatives, young transwomen in Vietnam find sex work offers them a chance to earn income. They did not meet transgender men who reported earning a living from transactional sex. Patriarchal society is a particularly hostile place for transgender women who find that many other occupations are closed to them, because their physical appearance flouts social norms, or because the usual social networks and relationships that are open to women and men who conform to gendered expectations are hostile.

SOGI and access to health services

A greater focus on sexuality, sexual politics and the economic implications of sex emerged in development in the wake of the HIV pandemic from the late 1980s, but this has not carried through and morphed into the wider-ranging policy approaches that are needed. HIV programming did not necessarily engage with the issues raised by feminists about power relations in intimate relationships and the need to challenge and change these, to expand reproductive and sexual choices (Baylies 2001). While hostility to homosexual men was a key aspect of the first stages of the pandemic, with it being dubbed the ‘gay plague’ in some quarters, it sparked a focus on sexual health aiming to prevent new infections and support those living with HIV, including work to destigmatise HIV itself, and bring the issue of sexuality – and in particular, same-sex sex - into the open.

HIV-focused programming in the global South initially primarily focused on heterosexual couples, and also on sex workers – who were often blamed for HIV, as gay men had been in the global North, but has expanded to other groups who are considered at risk such as men who had sex with men. There was emphasis on disease prevention, including the ABC method: Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom. Programming then received generous funding notably through the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) of 2003. However, the approach failed, partly due to its lack of attention for sexual and reproductive health rights for young people (Kent, Hildebrand, and Hawkes 2016). The negative focus on sexuality through focusing on the risks of sex, including sexual abuse rather than pleasure and the need to abstain was ideological. Unlike comprehensive sex education which puts relationships and mutual consent at the centre, it was ineffective in HIV prevention. The idea that women and men have a right to live free from sexual violence and coercion, and to enjoy fulfilling sexual relationships, was not part of these approaches.

Authors here focus on contemporary denials of the right of people with diverse SOGI to access the health services they are entitled to expect from the state. In addition to the wider health concerns that they share with others, people with diverse SOGI typically cannot access the range of sexual and reproductive health services they require. In their article in this issue, Carmen Logie and her co-authors offer accounts of lesbians in Swaziland who visit medical facilities and encounter disbelief that they have not had sex with men. This, in combination with invasive physical tests to establish ‘virginity’, highlights the extremely patriarchal nature of the health care system. This leads one speaker in the article to say she will no longer use the health services available. In her article, Evie Browne focuses on the unmet reproductive rights of lesbians in Cuba who seek to start families in a context where new technologies could offer them the prospect of parenthood. Rinaldi Ridwan and Joyce Wu's article also focuses on the issue of unmet health needs of LGBT individuals, this time in Indonesia.

Realising rights and articulating interests: activism and diverse SOGI

Heterosexual institutions including marriage and the family confer a range of rights and a sense of security on cisgender women and men. The right to have a family that is recognised in law and society is important to many LGBTQI people. In her article focusing on lesbian and bisexual women living in Cuba, Evie Browne explores their attitudes to same-sex marriage and their activism to ensure the Cuban state supports this aim, together with a range of policies that will support alternative family forms, in particular focusing on LGBT and queer parenting.

A range of articles in this issue – including Evie Browne's – find strong belief in the power of law to guarantee resources, rights and protections. It is obviously not able to do this on its own, but it is important. Cuba was a leader in the region – and the world - on legislating for women's rights, first to sign and second to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1980, and has good scores on gender equality indicators, but traditional gender norms thrive, and women who have non-normative gender and sexual identities raise a range of issues important to them but as yet unmet. An important issue is the denial of same-sex marriage, as a way of becoming ‘kin’: important to guarantee the rights associated with heterosexual marriage.

Rinaldi Ridwan and Joyce Wu perceive a rising interest in supporting and furthering LGBT rights in Indonesia. The need for practical changes like being able to get an identity card is a motivating aim for trans women in Indonesia to group around, since they face particular gendered dynamics of discrimination and violence. These ID cards are essential to enable them to secure a range of social welfare services and realise citizenship rights. Without them they cannot obtain other critical documentation, including driving licenses and passports.

These issues of exclusion from citizen rights, and the struggles of activist groups against state repression are motivations to link up with international actors. As signaled earlier, there is currently interest in supporting activists in countries, at a range of levels: in institutions including the UN and international financial institutions, as well as international NGOs and national governments, where the continuing progress to evolve a rights-based vision of human development has moved – at least at a level of language, research and policy documents – to consider issues of alternative sexualities.

In Nick Mulé's article in this issue, focusing on the experience of LGBTQI-identified human rights activists working within the UN system, it is clear that a key reason for this increased focus on gender- and sexually-diverse individuals and communities and their rights is the activism of these individuals and communities themselves. The struggle to gain recognition and to ensure their perspectives and priorities gain visibility has been, as Nick Mulé states in his article, a ‘particularly difficult challenge over the past thirty or more years’ (this issue, 90). It has involved struggles by activists to ‘attain official status at the UN, issuing reports, advocating and contributing to the development of policy and treaties’ (ibid).

Clare Paine's article reflects on the experience of integrating SOGI into the work of a large and influential INGO actor in the international development space. Her article focuses on the progress made by Christian Aid. She states her personal stake in this issue as a bisexual woman, and this link between her own identity and her work echoes the experience of feminists in development. Becoming a change agent in a development organisation is part of recognising and acknowledging development as a political process – and transforming the organisations that exist and are responsible for policymaking and programming so that they become a (pragmatic and thoughtful) part of the solution, playing a role in furthering social justice. In her article, Clare Paine attributes a growing sense of concern in the organisation to respond to SOGI and rights violations since 2014, when:

the governments of Uganda, Nigeria and India decided to re-criminalise same-sex relationships, and reinstate legislation introduced by British colonial governors. In addition, Christian Aid was becoming increasingly aware, through reports from local partners across Latin America and the Caribbean, that expressions of masculinities and patriarchal cultures were taking firmer grip and resulting in increased violence and discrimination against LGBTI people. A number of Christian Aid staff, particularly in policy and in country programmes, felt increasingly uncomfortable that the organisation did not have a position or official response to these acts of violence and violations of human rights towards LGBTI communities, and wanted to urgently address this.

(this issue, 158).

INGOs are also developing programming in partnership with local activists. In her article, Nicolette Matthijsen shares lessons from a project that was developed and implemented by Oxfam, in partnership with local organisations, but left space for each organisation to pursue its own approach to LGBTQI rights. The contexts were South Africa, Zimbabwe, and a third country in Asia, where LGBTQI-work has been criminalised since 2014. The project, titled Promoting and protecting human rights of sexual minorities, involved local civil society organisations working in ways that have evolved from local interpretations of what is needed to realise the rights of LGBTQI individuals and communities. The article shares insights in particular on the importance of fostering collective consciousness, and collective action, through the work of creating and sustaining safe spaces, online and in ‘real life’. The article also focuses on the importance of advocacy and activism to place LGBTQI issues on national and international agendas. Here, partnership with an INGO can enable local organisations to get their perspective heard by power-holders at levels that would otherwise be closed to them.

Progressive development organisations – including large INGOs – are increasingly aware of the criticisms levelled against them for naively using their large size, global North identity, and privileged location and positioning in international networks to overwhelm the smaller local groups and community organisations that represent the priorities of their members. These critiques have often been made from the perspective of women's rights organisations in the global South, who find their agendas shifting when they enter apparently equal ‘partnerships’ with international donor organisations (for example, see Nabacwa 2010, Warren 2012). These critiques are similar to those of SOGI activists

Ways of working on SOGI are critical. This is due to the tension mentioned earlier in this Introduction – that sexuality is a contested area for deeply gendered power struggles to be played out, and the history of Western domination of diverse cultures and societies, which in many cases resulted in the loss of gender and sexual identities, and alternative ways of living – means international development organisations have to be particularly careful to restrict their role to supporting the agendas of Southern partners.

The article from Nof Nasser-Edin and co-authors mentioned earlier suggests a different approach to work to challenge oppressive social norms around sexuality. They see a need to ensure work with communities in the Middle East and North Africa region draws on alternative ideas of sexuality as performance to avoid over-emphasis on notions of human rights. Their framework for doing this, Sexual Practice and Gender Performance (SPGP), is described in their article. However, the progressive ideas enshrined in UN policy documents and the UN systems that create a framework of international human rights law are seen by many as critical to their struggle. The notion of human rights is welcomed by progressives worldwide, and seen as a tool to use to challenge structural domination and inequalities.

Into the future: a progressive vision of sexuality

A range of new medical research findings and technologies have together begun to help an increasing number of people overcome the constraints on their ability to realise their rights regarding gender and sexuality. They are also helping activists challenge the view that to be ‘normal’ is to be heterosexual and cisgender. Increased access to the internet and other information and communications technologies (ICT) are giving many more women and girls more access to information about sexual health, sexual pleasure and sexual rights. Yet these on-line comprehensive sex education efforts are small compared to the numbers of people who consume porn. Porn plays a major role nowadays in the way many young people learn about sex and sexualities. Health and education need to integrate sexual rights perspectives, including the right to pleasure. Where are the spaces to learn about sex which focus on its potential for pleasure and empowerment, upholding sexual rights, respect and equality? Activists are considering how more people can gain access to new technologies as a part of a process of liberation and empowerment, while being mindful of how these technologies can also be used to control and manipulate people.

In her article, Nicolette Matthijsen draws on programme experience relating to these concerns in three contexts. She finds that ICTs not only offer safe spaces to explore sexuality, but also offer the chance to sexual minorities to increase their visibility and voices. As such, they are increasingly important in activism to advance rights today, as well as offering many options to activists to challenge and change harmful and oppressive social norms. Both online and ‘real’ safe spaces also offer many opportunities to increase the knowledge and skills of LGBTQI people.

Conclusion

If we could distil one message from the many perspectives on gender, sexuality and development represented here, it would be that while international recognition and support may be welcome for activists working to secure social justice for people with diverse SOGI throughout the world, this needs to be rooted in an analysis of power and inequality, and be offered in solidarity, without conditions.

Articles here highlight the pressing need for wider awareness of the role that all involved in development can and should play in ending intolerance, violence and exclusion for people whose gender and sexual identities and preferences differ from the heterosexual, cisgender ‘norm’, and from sexual norms that limit human beings: socially, psychologically, economically and politically.

Visions of human development that focus on inequality, choice and freedoms have more space within them to accommodate both gender and sexual rights and a full acknowledge the intersection between gender, sexuality and development. Inclusive visions have the potential both to see diversity as a positive aspect of being human, and to see valuing and respecting sexuality as an important aspect of diversity, if we are to achieve development that is worthy of the name.

Notes on contributors

Pauline Oosterhoff is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. Postal address: IDS, University of Sussex, Library Road, Falmer BN1 9RE, UK. Email: [email protected]

Caroline Sweetman is Editor of Gender & Development.

Notes

1 The Beijing Conference came one year after the UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, in 1994, where the issue of sexual rights of women was debated strongly and a feminist articulation of sexual rights, health and women's reproductive rights and freedoms was successfully placed in the Platform for Action (Beijing Platform for Action, paragraphs 92, 93 and 96 http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/pdf/BDPfA%20E.pdf, last checked 26 February 2018).

2 Oxfam owns and publishes this journal. To see an Open Letter from Gender & Development's Editor in regard to the issues mentioned in this paragraph, please visit the journal's website http://www.genderanddevelopment.org (last checked 26 February 2018)

3 Over the journal's lifetime, we have published many articles in other themed issues that are also relevant. Issues have focused on sexual and gender-based violence in humanitarian work, in armed conflict, and fragile locations, and on reproductive health and rights. All this content is available currently. For details of past issues see http://www.genderanddevelopment.org/page/issue-archive (last checked 26 February 2018)

4 LGBTQI+ refers to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, and Intersex. We have added a + acknowledging the plurality and wide diversity of gender and sexuality based identities that are not covered by these concepts. We recognise that the meaning of these terms do change over time and that many people use –and prefer to use- other, local terminologies.

5 See a report from NBC news for information on this, at https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/bermuda-lawyer-goes-court-challenge-gay-marriage-reversal-n849591 (last checked 26 February 2018).

6 Activists, journalists and policymakers argued that LGBT persons are not the only ones whose rights are violated. Singling these groups out might cause an anti-gay backlash. Conditionality is often based on outsiders’ assumptions about African sexualities. Some argued that actions to promote the rights of LGBT persons should be placed within a broader human rights perspective, recognise the role of African civil society groups and show an awareness of the historical fact that many of these discriminatory laws are actually a legacy of British colonial rule (Oosterhoff, Walden and Olerenshaw 2014).