Posts tagged ‘sexuality’
Latin American Dialogue on Sexuality and Geopolitics
Between August 24th and 26th, 2009, the Latin American Dialogue on Sexuality and Geopolitics took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Organized by Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW) in partnership with the Latin-American Center on Sexuality and Human Rights (CLAM), the meeting gathered close to 50 participants from nine countries — academics, researchers and activists — who debated the conditions of sexual politics in the region.
The session Sexuality and Economics: visibilities and invisibilities featured:
- Lucila Esquivel, coordinator of the Paraguayan Association of Sex Workers
- Ofélia Becerril, professor at the Colégio de Michoacán, in México;
- Adriana Piscitelli, professor and researcher at the Núcleo de Estudos de gênero PAGU in UNICAMP (Brazil);
- Maria Elvira Benítez, Anthropology PHD student at the Museu Nacional and program assistant at the Centro Latino Americano em Sexualidade e Direitos Humanos (CLAM), in Rio de Janeiro; and
- Bruno Zilli, anthropologist and also researcher at CLAM.
Many of the papers presented in this session focussed on sex work and the online overview of this session is an interesting read. The overview paper for the session, Prostitution as economic activity in urban Brazil, was written by Ana Paula Silva, professor at the Centro Universitário Augusto Motta (UNISUAM), in Rio de Janeiro, and Thaddeus Blanchette, professor at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) e also at UNISUAM. You can read a summary of their presentation and the comments that followed from it on the Sexuality Policy Watch website.
IDS Comment on World AIDS Day
To commemorate World AIDS Day our colleague Andrea Cornwall wrote a story for the IDS website about Uganda’s new Anti-Homosexuality Bill. This dangerous and discriminatory Bill will violate the fundamental human rights of sexual minorities, compound their exclusion from access to services and exacerbate the stigma people living with HIV and AIDS experience. Cornwall challenges Britain, as the original architect of the discriminatory laws that remain on the statute books of so many of its former colonies, to ensure that British aid does not abet regimes of this kind in such flagrant abuses of human rights. (more…)
Untying Development’s Straightjacket: Masculinities, Sexualities and Social Change
If development really did justice to the diversity of people’s social and sexual identities, livelihoods and living arrangements, how would it be different to the approaches we see today? What would be done differently? How can practitioners, activists, academics and policy actors concerned with challenging and changing oppressing gender and sexual norms work together to loosen development’s “straightjacket”? What is needed – in terms of knowledge, skills, practices, alliances – to enable those who seek to bring about positive social change to address the violence and oppression that development policies and practice may implicitly sustain because of a failure to recognise or engage with those who do not conform to taken-for-granted norms, and work together to make the world a fairer place?
PLRI members are attending a four-day symposium in Cape Town from the 18-22 September, which will bring together theorists, researchers, activists, policy actors and practitioners working on gender and development, men and masculinities, HIV prevention, gender violence and sexual rights. It will be convened as a collaborative initiative involving a number of programmes co-ordinated by the Institute of Development Studies in the UK – Participation and Development Relations, Sexuality and Development, Pathways of Women’s Empowerment, HIV and Development – in partnership with Sexuality Studies at York University in Canada, the Dissident Men Programme, UNDP and UNAIDS. (more…)
Socio-Legal Studies Association: Call for papers
The Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference will take place from the 30 March- 1 April 2010, at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.
A call for papers has been issued under the Gender, Sexuality and Law Subject Stream. The stream seeks to draw together socio-legal scholarship from across the globe, featuring scholars from a range of disciplines relating to the broad theme of gender, sexuality and law.
Past papers have considered sexuality and education law, queer theory, same-sex marriage, gender and parenthood, sex work, domestic violence, public sex, sexuality and the media, religion and sexuality, international comparisons, and theories of gender but papers pertaining to any area of gender, sexuality and law will be considered.
The Truth About…Men, Boys and Sex
Cheryl Overs has contributed an article to a new publication from the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), The Truth About…Men, Boys and Sex: Gender-transformative policies and programmes. The report provides information, evidence and practical advice on:
- Why working with men and boys is important;
- What SRH issues and services are particularly important for different men and boys; and
- How programme developers, managers and service providers can integrate a focus on male sexual and reproductive health and gender transformation in their programming.
Sex Workers in Development: Can we get to hear their voices?
A seminar at the Institute of Development Studies on the 5 December will introduce the PLRI and feature speakers on gender, sexuality, migration and trafficking.
This will be followed by a showing of Caught Between the Tiger and the Crocodile, produced by Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW). In Cambodia, the 100% Condom Use Policy – created to “protect” sex workers and curb HIV/AIDS – is reportedly being used by local police as an instrument to harass, persecute, and criminalize sex workers. The film tells the stories of women that have been arrested for carrying condoms, which are then used as evidence of sex work (illegal after new anti-trafficking laws were introduced earlier this year).
Once arrested, these women are sent to “rehabilitation centers” – facilities advertised as job-training centers by the government, but denounced by local groups as inhumane prisons.
