Ara Wilson, "Sex at the Forum: Sexual Justice and the Alter-Globalization Movement"
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The Limited Economy of Sexual Rights

Sexual-rights activists have been drawn to the global justice movement as a locus of contemporary radical energy. They see the Forum as a relevant site in which to stage conversations, forge networks, and to coexist with, if not actively link to, the global justice movement.[24] Nearly two dozen feminist organizations (most addressing women's sexual rights) participate in the governance of the Forum. The LGBT South-South Dialogue, the only gay organization represented on the WSF's governing board, has hosted Forum panels on the connections between neoliberalism, imperialism, heteronormativity, and the material conditions of queers in the global south.[25]

One Forum event offers a concrete example of the ways activists are exploring convergences between sexual and economic politics. Organized by the Feminist Dialogues,[26] a network of women's organizations in the global south, this event modeled dialogue across four political sectors: feminism, LGBTQ, labor, and race/caste. Each speaker discussed points of convergence as well as critique of other movements. A gay activist from South Africa acknowledged the LGBT movement's lack of attention to class and race, for example, but also noted the failure of India's caste-organizing and international-labor movements to address sexuality in their work.

Beyond a handful of examples like this and LGBT South-South Dialogue, however, international sexual-rights and LGBT organizations have rarely forged operative networks with transnational struggles for economic justice. A feminist call for the Forum to incorporate attention to sexual and reproductive rights asserts that sexual diversity and sexual emancipation "are part of the same struggles in which the right to land and the right to express one's sexuality both contribute to the construction of radically democratic futures."[27] Yet, this call does not explain how these are part of the same struggle—a problem replicated in other conversations about the relation of sexual justice to economic justice. Perhaps understandably, sexual-rights activism targets sources of explicit oppression of non-normative sexuality—the state, medicine, religion, and public culture. Few have dedicated much conceptual effort to articulating the relevance of sexual politics for critiques of global capital and visions for alternative worlds. For these sexual-rights advocacy, the global-justice movement serves as a dynamic staging ground rather than a source of collaboration on political projects.

Connections or failures of articulation among sexual and economic movements follow specific political histories and institutional contexts. Sexual-rights discourse, notably, is inflected by decades of participation in the UN-NGO orbit which, from the late 1980s until recently, presented the main vehicle for transnational advocacy for such issues as reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, sexual violence, or human rights of sexual minorities. This UN-NGO arena collaborates more or less with market and state structures. According to critics, sexual-rights advocates rely on frameworks—specifically, liberal formulations of sexual autonomy and reproductive rights—that prevent them from addressing broader social-justice concerns,[28] especially economic redistribution.[29] In practice, NGO advocacy's reliance on institutionalized political forms that distinguish economic from political rights has made it difficult to argue effectively for 1) the indivisibility of rights and 2) a substantive emphasis on capacities to realize rights. Thus, in radical circles, NGOs are often seen as the benevolent face of hegemonic powers.[30] Professionalized modes of advocacy within the UN-NGO orbit thus curtailed sexual-rights advocates' connections to the global-justice agenda (which remain suspicious of NGOs). It also eclipsed earlier activism for women's sexual mobility or queer liberation, whose forms and networks were more linked—at least in spirit—to radical left politics.[31]

Indeed, many sexual-rights advocates were themselves frustrated with these limits, which explains the choice to align their projects with the WSF and the alter-globalization movement. At the same time, the problematic engagements with the UN-NGO orbit also generated the very capacities of activists to bring sexual politics to a radical transnational political venue like the WSF.

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