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.1 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.
- See Keck and Sikkink, Transnational Advocacy, 3. [↩]
