This integration of sexual politics within broader global-justice activism reflects the historical conditions of the post-cold-war moment. Alter-globalization movements coalesced in the wake of centralized parties, disappointing postcolonial realities, and radical orthodoxy. The WSF is characterized as much by critiques of the older left as it is by critiques of global capital and northern imperialism. Movement intellectuals position their politics in relation to the failure of the Old and New Lefts, hoping to avoid the “tragic utopias of the 20th century” or Leninist vanguardism. 1 Global justice networks make up “a social movement of a historically new type, one unassimilable to older models of struggle,” in the words of Eric Lott.” 2 This differentiation is exemplified by the WSF’s emphasis on open space, participatory democracy, and horizontal networks—an emphasis on the means as much as the ends of progressive politics.
Sexual diversity is significant for Forum texts for its role in signaling the difference of post-communist re-imaginings of citizenship and participatory democracy from earlier left programs. In texts primarily addressing neoliberal capitalism or U.S. imperialism, referencing sexual diversity tacitly rebukes the homophobia that have characterized many progressive struggles. Affirming sexual diversity also challenges forms of nationalism that refuse to recognize sexual lives that do not fit with visions of “traditional” heterosexual norms. Sexuality indexes an alternative left; it marks the movement’s reflexive commitment to an open, inclusive, and participatory politics predicated on translation and alliances rather than one coherent platform with fixed meanings and boundaries.
This differentiating function helps explain where and how sexuality appears in WSF discourse. When the Forum is understood as an open space for processual means and democratic difference, the inclusion of LGBT groups signals its identity as a “horizontal” field of encounter while sexual diversity manifests the principle of inclusion. But when the Forum is seen as a platform for organizing global action towards achieving alternative futures, attention to sexuality in WSF discourse becomes scarce. Beyond diversity for diversity’s sake, how sexual orientation might be “an expression of an alternative world”—as one of the ends of Forum process—has yet to be genuinely explored. While WSF texts call for solidarity with the struggles of farmers and peasant struggles, for example, they neither identify queer populations nor name specific groups working for sexual justice. The emphasis on social diversity thus limits both critiques of sexual injustices and visions for transforming current sexual arrangements. Sexuality in Forum texts represents the radical democratic embrace of difference—above all, it the difference of the global-justice movement from both neoliberalism and communist parties—rather than sexual diversity as the imaginative horizon for radical politics.
In practice, the Forum’s self-conscious emphasis on diversity has effects: the emphasis on inclusivity does create a space for addressing sexual politics within the spaces of the World Social Forum, albeit in contradictory ways. Feminists and queer advocates have criticized the Forum’s embrace of anti-imperialist but patriarchal religious politics, arguing that the conservative religious voices included in the Forum prevent “the integration of the struggles for sexual and reproductive rights.” In an open letter to the Forum, a collection of groups appeals to the Forum’s understanding of sexuality as diversity, writing:
As the struggles for the construction of another world can only be successful if they recognize the diversity of identities and political subjects, we affirm that the World Social Forum is a process open to all that recognize this diversity. Consequently, organizations and individuals that promote the marginalization, exclusion and discrimination of other human beings, are alien to this process. 3
The Forum’s emphasis on space and processes that allow for difference has allowed advocacy for sexual politics to stake claims to its project. The next section considers the extent to which the presence of sexual-justice advocates at the Forum generates points of political convergence between sexual justice and economic justice projects
- 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). [↑]
- Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (New York: Basic books, 2006).[↑]
- “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.”[↑]
