Sexualities and Development Andrea Cornwall

Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology, 2004

The global HIV/AIDS pandemic has served as a wake-up call to speed up both research activity and advocacy work on sex and sexuality, shedding light on how neglecting sexuality-related issues can profoundly affect the advancement of human rights, and society at large. This paper aims to illustrate the relationship between sex, sexuality, and development by focusing on contemporary LGBTQ+ issues. After peering at the (heteronormative) discourses of sex and sexuality within the development sector, and their impacts on LGBTQ+ people’s socioeconomic status and wellbeing, this essay shall emphasise the need to revise development’s approach to sexuality.

2024

In this undergraduate seminar, we will meet once a week for three hours to learn about how anthropologists have studied sex, gender, and sexuality across cultural contexts. We will attend to the varied ways that culture shapes ideas and experiences of bodies, pleasure, illness, morality, family, reproduction, and economy, among others. Our intellectual itinerary will be guided by three questions: (1) How is that seemingly most “natural” aspect of humanity—sexuality—culturally structured and personally experienced in such different ways across time and space? (2) What do diverse constructions of gender, sexuality, and identity tell us about the cultures that produce them? (3) What does thinking about sexuality at the scale of the local and the global help us understand more broadly about politics, justice, and community? To answer these questions, we will draw on scholarship in anthropology and related fields. In the first part of the course, we will explore the ways anthropologists have analyzed sexual and gendered differences from the 1920s to today. Our aim is to understand how cross-cultural differences (including culture, nation, and race) both create and destabilize social categories, like “gay,” “homosexual,” “queer,” “trans,” and “heterosexual.” The second half of the course will help students develop and complete a final research project. Students will write short critical responses to our readings, lead group presentations in-class, and complete a final project that analyzes a contemporary phenomenon using anthropological theories and methods. By the end of this course, students will gain knowledge and tools that will enable them to critically examine gender, sex, and sexuality and situate them within historical and global contexts.

Cambridge University Press, 2020

Introduction The most significant recent development, a break with the past, in the study of sexual cultures has to do with the term ‘culture’ itself: that we think of sexuality (and sexualities) as having ‘cultures’. Historically, both in academic and popular thinking, the term ‘sexuality’ most frequently elicited responses that have to do with biology. That is, whether as an area of study or as a set of ideas people have about their intimate lives, sexuality was too easily detached from the social contexts where it belongs and presented as something of itself. There is a strong tendency to view our sexual lives as dictated by their own peculiar rules that ( a ) are biologically derived, ( b ) have been historically stable (that is, the same since the ‘dawn of time’), ( c ) are ‘essentially’ about our ‘private’ lives, and ( d ) are ‘basically’ the same across different cultures. Ironically, while, on the one hand, we think of sexuality as a world-untoitself – such that it is regard...

Ids Bulletin-institute of Development Studies, 2006

2007

us with the opportunity to continue some of the debates initiated by Patricia MacFadden, Charmaine Pereira and Sylvia Tamale in an earlier issue (see Feminist Africa 2). In keeping with Feminist Africa's intellectual development agenda, the present issue also provides a platform for new research carried out by leading African feminist thinkers. The three feature articles present thoughtprovoking material drawn from the Mapping Sexualities Research Project. This is possibly the first project in the transnational field of sexuality research to have been carried out by African researchers rooted in feminist praxis. Through this new knowledge, we provide ourselves with the opportunity to deepen and further inform the ongoing debates and struggles around various aspects of sexuality. Much of the literature available on the global market addresses African sexuality by proxy – in terms of grand theorisations of race and imperialism, colonial histories of regulation and population contr...