Sex at the Forum: Sexual Justice and the Alter-Globalization Movement

The Geography of Justice

The global-justice and sexual-rights movements both emerged within global conditions that reformulated the grounds for radical politics. Analysts such as Sonia Alvarez, Davina Cooper, Stuart Hall, and Saskia Sassen have all mapped, in different ways, the effects of changing social infrastructure on political life. ¹ One spatial change of the post-Cold War period is that more political claims are made across national borders, especially through transnational advocacy networks. ² The establishment of the World Social Forum itself, with thousands of participants representing a myriad of political agendas, reflects this intensified use of transnational venues for progressive change.

Although sexual-rights and global-justice projects share this global context for political action, they differ significantly in their engagements with the transnational dimension. Participants at the WSF generally share a critique of global forms of capitalism (which at times Forum discourse also categorizes as patriarchal capitalism). ³ The World Social Forum is premised on the notion that global capitalism, and other large-scale systems of oppression, require transnational struggles, ideally centered in the global south. As Michael Hardt writes, “the alternative to the rule of global capital and its institutions will only be found at an equally global level, by a global democratic movement.” ⁴

Organizing for sexual rights, on the other hand, has a paradoxical scalar quality. The transnational scale has been critical to sexual-rights efforts. Many LGBTQ and women’s sexual-rights advocates associated with the Forum have operated through transnational venues for more than 20 years, by engaging expanding vehicles of human rights, the United Nation (UN), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Since the diffuse realm of public opinion is key to struggles for sexual rights, advocates also use transnational venues to wage their cultural struggles over sexual norms. ⁵ Yet the ultimate target of most sexual-rights advocacy remains the national level of state governments, in order to change policies and domestic climates that penalize alternative sexual or gender expressions. Thus, while the World Social Forum is premised on a transnational analysis of problems and struggles, most advocacy for sexual rights approaches the transnational scale instrumentally—as a tactic, to broadcast messages, leverage national governments, or to form networks of solidarity—rather than programmatically, that is, from a specific political agenda regarding transnationality and sexuality. ⁶ The differential geographies of sexual and economic politics play out in texts and practices of the World Social Forum, as I show below.

Sex and Global Justice

The differing geopolitical contexts and political genealogies of the sexual-rights and global-justice movements play out in practice. These differences are registered in World Social Forum texts. In the Forum’s version of a manifesto (which takes the form of multiple statements and calls), the subject of sex by and large appears to be an afterthoughts to struggles for global justice. If we read their declarations as a map of political sensibilities, we can easily conclude that sexual politics do not “count” in the same way that food security, sovereignty, or U.S. imperialism do for condemning injustice or constructing alternatives to the dominant world order. The clarity and precision found in discussions of such established issues as food, ⁷ global trade, or Palestine far exceeds the specificity of Forum writing about sexuality. As one critique notes, “the general topics such as neoliberal globalization . . . do not address transvestites’ poverty or their lack of access to the formal labor market.” ⁸ In general, WSF documents’ attention to sexuality ranges from silent to erratic. The texts’ unevenness on these subjects—the lack of political claim with the consistent clarity of other claims—signals debate about the place of sexuality in global-justice movements, including the charge that sexuality is a middle-class or European agenda. ⁹ This limited attention also demonstrates how difficult it remains to synchronize claims for sexual liberation with those for economic justice.

Rather than belabor add to critiques about the limited attention to sexuality in WSF texts, I instead want to consider how it is included. Consider the following two examples from the quasi-official “Call of Social Movements.” This is from the 2002 call:

We are diverse—women and men, adults and youth, indigenous peoples, rural and urban, workers and unemployed, homeless, the elderly, students, migrants, professionals, people of every creed, color, and sexual orientation. The expression of this diversity is our strength and the basis of our unity.” ¹⁰

From the 2005 “Call from social movements for mobilizations against the war, neoliberalism, exploitation and exclusion”:

We recognize diversity in sexual orientation as an expression of an alternative world and we condemn mercantilization. Movements commit to participate in the struggle against exclusion based on identity, gender and homophobia. We will unite our voices against all forms of mercantilization of the body of women and GLBT. ¹¹

These texts’ recognition of sexual diversity suggests that they were influenced by advocates for sexual justice, including sex worker organizing, LGBT politics, reproductive rights, and feminist networks, particularly those active in the global south but also reflects aspects of alter-globalization politics. For sexual rights advocates, sexual diversity presents a political frame beyond identity or rights, common rubrics for claims around sexuality. ¹² For global-justice advocates, diversity has come to be understood in political terms as countervailing neoliberal and imperialist hierarchical exclusions. In this way, sexual diversity, as “an expression of an alternative world,” is one mode of social differentiation that dominant forces invidiously rank, marginalize, or divide, and hence is to be welcomed.

The World Social Forum also emphasizes diversity within the progressive movement itself. The Forum (especially in Brazil and India) has been characterized by marked reflection on means and the relationship between means and ends. Forum discourse insists on the rethinking of process, space, and epistemology as vital to progressive politics. A “movement of movements,” the WSF is envisioned as a hub for coexistence and interaction among disparate activist projects without insisting on closure or cohesion. Following the 2007 Forum in Africa, Immanuel Wallerstein, a prominent World-Systems theorist closely associated with the Forum, emphasized the the Forum’s role as a locus for a plurality of political networks: “there is now an effective network of feminists, . . .” he wrote after the 2007 Forum in Africa, adding, [and]”there is a budding network of those defending alternative sexualities (which permitted Kenyan gay and lesbian movements to affirm a public presence that had been difficult before).” ¹³ While sexuality is rarely incorporated into theorizing about Forum politics, the fact that a World-Systems theorist sees sexual politics as part of the global-justice movement is worth noting.

1. 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.[↑]
2. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).[↑]
3. 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.[↑]
4. 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.[↑]
5. See Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders.[↑]
6. 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.[↑]
7. 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).[↑]
8. 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.[↑]
9. Isis Women, “Another World is Possible in Diversity: Affirming the struggle for sexual and reproductive rights,” feministdialogues.isiswomen.org (accessed January 28, 2008).[↑]
10. 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.[↑]
11. “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.[↑]
12. 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.[↑]
13. 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.[↑]