Looking for sex in all the wrong places*

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of how issues on sexuality are captured by the World Bank's economic rationality, producing a sanitised discourse which, through its silences, further contributes to a normalised view of sexuality.

Given the Bank's authority to determine what kinds of health and development programmes are established in the developing world, it is in a unique position to influence approaches to issues of gender and sexuality. An analysis of the Bank's documents reveals, however, that rather than addressing these fundamental components of some of the most pressing health emergencies of our time, its economic rationality and technocratic viewpoint has effectively silenced and sanitised the discourse on sexuality, thereby limiting what sexuality and gender-related issues can be tackled in the context of Bank sponsored programmes, and constraining efforts to advance fundamental sexual rights. Nevertheless, unexpected and paradoxical results may arise from that process, which, thus, does not necessarily lead to the furthering of a comprehensive conservative agenda.

Keywords:

• World Bank
• sexuality
• discourse
• discursive formations

Notes

*This article is based on a longer study that was developed in collaboration with Sexuality Policy Watch, with funding provided by the Ford Foundation. For an extended discussion of the issues examined in this article, see “Looking for sex in all the wrong places: The silencing of sexuality in the World Bank's public discourse”, which is available as part of the e-book, SexPolitics: Reports from the Front Lines, edited by Richard Parker, Rosalind Petchesky, and Robert Sember, 2007. This e-book includes a series of case studies, as well as a crosscutting analysis, focused on the politics of sexual health and rights in eight countries and two institutional contexts. SexPolitics can be found online at <http://www.sxpolitics.org/frontlines/home/>.

1. The translations of “Denkkollectiv” and “Denkstil” to, respectively, thought collective and thought style, were adopted in the 1979 English version of his book, possibly to stress their nature as specific concepts within a general theoretical framework.

2. Although we did not use any quantitative methods, we still find that the word “sample” is applicable.

3. The main source for this part of the text is Mattos (2000). Some additional information was provided by Chamberlain (1996) and the Bank's own website.

4. This is not to say that the Bank adopts that particular theory as its “official” discourse; in fact, discussion within the Bank is permeated by other views, such as institutionalism, in particular (one could argue that the Bank itself would not make much sense in purely neoclassical terms). But, since that is indeed the hegemonic view in economics, by and large, it is bound to have an effect on how the technical arguments are cast.

5. The effects of decades of “adjustment policies” were already mentioned at the beginning of this paper; for the catastrophic repercussions on individual lives of this state of affairs, see, for instance, Forrester (1997) and Sennet (1998).

6. As shown, for example, in Williamson (2000). For a more extensive critique of neoclassical theory, see also Keen (2001).

7. From a quasi-layman point of view, we would say that this probably also reflects the over-mathematisation of economics, strongly criticised by Ormerod (1994).