Ara Wilson, "Sex at the Forum: Sexual Justice and the Alter-Globalization Movement"
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Actual Co-Existence

How is sexuality relevant to radical economic projects? How does work for sexual justice attend to global economic inequalities? By exploring the texts, events, and social relationships of the World Social Forum, this essay has located the relationship between sexual and economic justice in an actually existing political practice, with a particular historical geography. By considering this context, we can interpret the uneven and contradictory interactions of sexuality and economics, not only in conceptual terms, but also in materialist terms.

The alter-globalization movement emerged from critiques of earlier left projects; in the World Social Forum, such critiques have made inclusive open space and diversity key values. Sexual diversity provides signs of difference that are crucial to the Forum's identity while also illustrating contradictions with progressive principles of inclusion (notably in the tension between including conservative religious agendas alongside sexual and gender justice claims). Sexual-rights advocates immersion in the less radical UN-NGO orbit—a political arena criticized by the core constituencies of the Forum—both enables and limits their connections with global-justice movements. At the same time, the Forum, with its emphasis on open process rather than fixed platforms—an emphasis that sexual diversity symbolizes—allows for cohabitation across different political inflections.

Which brings us to the understanding of political events as sites of social relations. Relations between different political projects involve social labor as much as conceptual work; the labor of sustaining ties that make up an interpretive community is crucial for political praxis.[32] The Forum's constant references to dialogue, space, and process convey the hope that such affinities will emerge among those working to forge more just worlds. Its spatiality, as open site, fosters the simultaneous presence of various progressive projects, including those concerned with economic or sexual justice. In this light, the juxtaposition of queers, feminists, and Marxists at the Forum potentially allows for the kinds of relations that forge and sustain affinity.

Viewing the Forum materially (as practices, relations, and sites) allows us to interpret the uneven convergence between sexual and economic justice in ways other than political failure. Sexuality's sign of the political difference of the global-justice movement points not just to the concepts, but also to the forms of political praxis that suggest other modes of political convergence. The WSF is predicated on a politics of the commons (shared political space, shared resources), with a vision of commonality that does not erase or commodify difference, but rather, aspires to value it. The WSF emphasis on inclusive, open political process allows a range of political projects to coexist, including those concerned with economic justice and sexual liberty. This cohabitation has spatial and formal implications. First, proximate spatial coexistence in the shared space of the Forum provides the condition for more sustained convergences between otherwise (mostly) autonomous projects. However ephemeral, cohabitation is valuable as potentiality, as the grounds for more imbricated relations between sexual and economic justice projects. Second, the cohabitation of efforts on behalf of sexual diversity and economic redistribution at the Forum suggests that, in addition to sharing common political space, these movements share some political forms—notably techniques for inclusive participation like open space, dialogue, participation—even as their practices are shaped by different genealogies.

The approach I have laid out here uses a particular site of the global left, the World Social Forum, to explore the relations between economic justice and sexual politics in theory and practice. Sexual politics do not considerably shape visions for economic justice, while economic analysis rarely predominates in sexual-rights advocacy. But this examination has uncovered modes of intersection that may be built upon for future projects. Sexual politics does crucial symbolic work in the forms and spaces of the World Social Forum. In the Forum, sexuality signals the very conditions for sexual-justice projects to cohabitat, and potentially converge, with economic visions for a more just world.

Endnotes

1. This paper emerged through discussion at a Colloquium, Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice, held at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and an invited lecture for the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. I thank Micaela di Leonardo, Janet Jakobsen, and Kate Bedford for providing those engaging exchanges and Yukiko Hanawa for eleventh-hour conversations on emergent politics. [Return to text]

2. International socialism lacked force in the political landscape at least from the 1990s into the 2000s. In more recent years, elections in Latin America resulted in forms of neo-socialist governmental and regional politics, but established socialist vocabulary still has not provided the dominant idioms for major strands of transnational advocacy in the post-Cold-War period. [Return to text]

3. These movements crystallized in a series of protests first identified with the dramatic 1990 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. However, feminists, environmentalists, and labor had criticized the World Bank or WTO before the protests at Seattle in 1999. [Return to text]

4. For information about the Forum, see "Charter of Principles," World Social Forum, www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/main.php?id_menu=4&cd_language=2 (accessed June 16, 2009); "Manifesto of Porto Alegre (unofficial translation)," World Social Forum, la.indymedia.org/news/2005/03/123579.php (accessed March 10, 2005); and Peter Waterman, "Place, Space and the Reinvention of Social Emancipation on a Global Scale," April 4, 2003, LabourNet Germany, www.labournet.de/diskussion/wipo/seattle/pa03/waterman.html (accessed June 16, 2009). [Return to text]

5. On the relation of alter-globalization movements to feminism, see Catherine Eschle, "'Skeleton Women': Feminism and the Antiglobalization Movement," Signs 30.3 (2005): 1741-70. On the World Social Forum and feminism, see the special issue of the Journal of International Women's Studies 8(3) April 2007, www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/April07/index.htm; and Sonia E. Alvarez with Nalu Faria and Miriam Nobre, "Another (Also Feminist) World Is Possible: Constructing Transnational Spaces and Global Alternatives from the Movements," Trans. Arturo Escobar, The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman, eds, (New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, 2004). Online version published by Choike.org, www.choike.org/documentos/wsf_s313_alvarez.pdf (accessed October 20, 2006). [Return to text]

6. Johanna Brenner, "Transnational Feminism & the Struggle for Global Justice," New Politics 9.2 (2003): 78-87 and excerpted in The World Social Forum, Sen, Anand, Escobar, and Waterman, eds, 32-33. Online version published by Choike.org, www.choike.org/documentos/wsf_s106_brenner.pdf (accessed April 9, 2005). [Return to text]

7. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). [Return to text]

8. Sonia Alvarez, "The 'NGOization' of Latin American Feminisms," Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures, Sonia Alvarez, E. Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 306-324. Davina Cooper, Sexing the City: Lesbian and Gay Politics within the Activist State (Rivers Oram: NYU, 1994). Stuart Hall, "Brave New World: The Debate About Post-Fordism," Socialist Review 21:1 (Jan-March, 1991): 57Ð64. Saskia Sassen, "Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy," Indiana Journal Of Global Legal Studies 4 (1996-1997): 7-41. Ara Wilson, "The transnational geography of sexual rights," Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights, Mark Philip Bradley and Patrice Petro, eds (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 251-65. [Return to text]

9. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). [Return to text]

10. The Forum criticizes multinational corporations and neoliberalism. However, it does not have an explicit stance against capitalism per se. The Forumal also targets U.S. imperialism and other situations associated with U.S. hegemony, notably, Israeli occupation of Palestine. [Return to text]

11. Michael Hardt, "Today's Bandung," New Left Review 14 (2002): 116. Hardt here stresses a distinction between Forum activities that focus on national-level solutions, like shoring up controls in the face of neoliberalism, and those oriented to transnational projects. [Return to text]

12. See Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders. [Return to text]

13. Feminist Dialogues and LGBT South-South Dialogue are two networks that argue that struggles against neoliberal globalization, militarism and imperialism are linked to sexual rights. [Return to text]

14. On food, the 2005 World Social Forum statement speaks with great precision, stating: "We struggle for the universal right to healthy and sufficient food. We struggle for the right of the peoples, nations and peasants to produce their own food. We manifest against subsidies to exports . . .. Let's avoid food dumping . . .. We reject GMO foods . . .. We reject patents on any form of life and in special on seeds." World Social Forum, Call of the Social Movements, January 31, 2005, www.nadir.org (accessed March 8, 2005). [Return to text]

15. Ana Elena Obando, "Sexism in the World Social Forum: Is Another World Possible?" WHRnet, Association for Women's Rights in Development. February 2005. www.whrnet.org/docs/issue-sexism_wsf.html (accessed January 22, 2007), 3. [Return to text]

16. Isis Women, "Another World is Possible in Diversity: Affirming the struggle for sexual and reproductive rights," feministdialogues.isiswomen.org (accessed January 28, 2008). [Return to text]

17. Jose Correa Leite and Carolina Gil, "World Social Forum, Call of Social Movements 2002," The World Social Forum: Strategies of Resistance, Trans. Traci Romine (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005), 187. [Return to text]

18. "World Social Forum, Call from Social Movements," January 31, 2005. www.nadir.org (accessed March 8, 2005). I do not here discuss the use of "mercantilization," except to note that it illustrates a commonplace reading of select sexual phenomenon, particularly trafficking in women for sexual services, as symptoms of capitalism's capacious reach in ways that are at odds with much sex-worker politics. [Return to text]

19. Barbara Klugman, "Parallel or Integrated 'Other Worlds': Possibilities for Alliance-building for Sexual and Reproductive Rights," Journal of International Women's Studies 8.3 (2007): 88-112. [Return to text]

20. Immanuel Wallerstein, "The World Social Forum: From Defense to Offense," Commentary No. 202, February 1, 2002 (circulated on listserv email). Wallerstein here credits the Forum with fostering feminist and queer networks that predated, indeed enabled, their participation at the WSF. Another leading theorist of the Forum, Boaventura de Sousos Santos, regularly includes sexuality when discussing radical alternatives to global injustice. [Return to text]

21. Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD), "The politics of the WSF's 'Open Space,'" www.nigd.org/WSF%20itself%20summary.html (accessed March 22, 2005). [Return to text]

22. Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (New York: Basic books, 2006). [Return to text]

23. "Letter to the Internacional Comitte [sic] of the World Social Forum/Another World is Possible in Diversity: Affirming the struggle for sexual and reproductive rights," Nairobi and Lima, January 28, 2008. www.nigd.org (accessed March 1, 2009). Signed by more than 50 organizations, this letter was written after the 2007 Forum in Kenya in response to "a march against abortion inside the WSF site, and the unacceptable treatment that fell upon a LGTB activist in the public closing ceremony." [Return to text]

24. Examples of WSF activities relevant to sexual politics include the following: In Mumbai in 2004, a panel addressed "LGBT alternative strategies to exclusionary globalization," and Indian groups working for LGBTQ, male-to-female kothi, sex workers, and people living with HIV/AIDS formed a coalition called Rainbow Planet. The subsequent 2005 Porto Alegre Forum included a tent dedicated to "sexual diversity," panels that addressed LGBT issues, and stalls representing a Brazilian sex worker organization and the International Gay Games. At the 2007 Forum in Kenya, sexual rights were discussed at several panels and were one of the topics addressed in commentary. Oishik Sircar, a 2008-09 Fellow at the India Institute for Critical Action: Centre In Movement (CACIM), is researching sexual diversity organizing at Social Forums in India. For a critical overview of organizing for reproductive and sexual rights and for LGBT/sexual diversity issues at the WSF, see Klugman, "Parallel or Integrated 'Other Worlds.'" [Return to text]

25. The LGBT South-South Dialogue has published one of the few activist analyses of queer issues in relation to globalization. See Irene León and Phumi Mtetwa eds, Globalization: GLBT Alternatives (Quito, Ecuador: GLBT South-South Dialogue, 2003). [Return to text]

26. "A Dialogue Between Movements," moderated by Sunila Abeyasekara, and organized by a network comprised of the National Network of Autonomous Women's Organization (India), Articulacion Feminista Marcosur, Development Alternative for Women in New Era, Women's International Coalition for Economic Justice, FEMNET-Africa, INFORM-Sri Lanka, and ISIS International. For more information, see "Feminist Dialogues 2005 Focus on Militarism, Fundamentalism and Globalisation," Isis Women, 2005 www.isiswomen.org/pub/we/archive/msg00202.html#fd (accessed February 18, 2006). [Return to text]

27. Isis Women, "Another World is Possible in Diversity." [Return to text]

28. There are numerous critiques of the human rights framework as the basis for feminist, and by extension, queer claims to justice. Most of these critiques are based on strategic grounds (e.g. rights limit and constrain results) or on conceptual grounds (e.g. the flaws of liberal logic). For this critique in relation to sexual rights, see Klugman, "Parallel or Integrated 'Other Worlds'", and Wilson, "The transnational geography of sexual rights." [Return to text]

29. For a fuller exploration of the legacy of UN-NGO organizing on feminist participation in the WSF, see Klugman, "Parallel or Integrated 'Other Worlds'"; and Ara Wilson, "Feminism In the Space of the World Social Forum," Journal of International Women's Studies 8.3 (April 2007): 1-27. Some long-term consequences of UN-NGO organizing have been the bureaucratization of political language with UN shorthand (such as MDGs for Millenial Development Goals) and an emphasis on negative rights, that is, freedom from harm, like trafficking in women or sexual violence, The major organizations concerned with global queer sexual rights—the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), and Amnesty International—have yet to advance robust arguments about the material dimensions of sexuality or the links between economic justice and sexual justice. See Wilson, "The Transnational Geography of Sexual Rights." [Return to text]

30. On the complicity of NGOs with global powers, see entries in: Michal Feher, Gaëlle Krikorian, and Yates McKee eds, NonGovernmental Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2007). See also Gayatri Spivak, "'Woman' as Theatre: United Nations Conference on Women, Beijing 1995," Radical Philosophy (1996) 75: 2-4. [Return to text]

31. For an account of the transformation in radical feminist politics resulting from democratization and globalization in Latin America, see Alvarez, "NGOization." [Return to text]

32. See Keck and Sikkink, Transnational Advocacy, 3. [Return to text]

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