Reproduction and Democratization
In November 2007 Josephine Ho gave a public lecture at Barnard on
sexual and economic justice. We reproduce the transcript and video
below.
Professor Ho has been intensively involved in the burgeoning
counterculture movements in Taiwan, and she has long insisted on the
need to think about sex, culture, capital, and the state in her academic
and activist work. She founded the Center for the Study of Sexualities
at the National Central University in 1995, and she has written
extensively on many cutting-edge issues in the Taiwanese context,
spearheading sex-positive views on female sexuality, gender and
sexuality education, queer studies, sex work studies and activism,
transgenderism and, most recently, body modification. In 2003, a dozen
conservative Christian NGOs brought a lawsuit against Ho and the Center,
targeting her sexuality studies Internet databank. With the support of
students, scholars, activist groups, and a widespread international
petition, plus her own self-defense in court, Ho won the case. Her
reflections on justice and the struggle to defend freedom of speech on
sexual matters are hence particularly crucial to our conversations.
Ho's talk centrally addresses youth sexuality, and the multiple
challenges to young people's sexual autonomy in East Asia. With middle
class parents anxious over their inability to transfer class status to
their children, Ho argues that parents and teachers are growing
increasingly alarmed at the class implications of so-called deviance in
gender and sexuality. The state, allied with conservative civil society
groups, intervenes in this perceived site of crisis in the name of child
protection, invoking a parental imaginary that aims to infantilize
public spheres and forge a new social consensus about the asexuality of
young people. She hereby calls upon us to question the attempts being
made in many countries to purify social spaces of sexuality by treating
all sex work as trafficking, all Internet sexual exchanges as predation,
all adult publications dealing with sexuality as pornography—and to
handle them all as criminal acts. As well as foregrounding concerns with
themes of criminalization and economic/political crisis, Ho's lecture
also highlights the need for academics and activists to devoting more
resources to nurturing sexual autonomy, particularly with regard to
youth.
Video
Transcript
Download the transcript (PDF)
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