Article notes[1]

To imagine how sexual justice might relate to economic justice, the empirical materialist in me asks: how, and where, do they meet already? The actually existing projects I turn to in response are the global movements associated with economic justice, specifically the alter- or anti-globalization movements associated with the World Social Forum (WSF). Examining the geopolitical contexts, texts, and practices of the Forum, I explore how projects for sexual and economic justice have, or have failed to, interact in that self-consciously alternative space.

My emphasis on this particular site emerges from reflections on modes of interpreting transnational feminist and queer politics. One common mode evaluates the intersection of economic and sexual justice projects according to received scales of political judgement, for example, scales of political success, radicalism, or inclusion. Another mode analyzes projects respective conceptual logics, often according to similar scales. This essay opts for a different mode, which might be considered empirical and materialist. It brings an analytical geographic lens to explore claims for justice made through particular forms and spaces at a particular historical juncture. Such a theoretically-inflected but empirical description of actually existing politics explores analytical questions about the affiliation of Marxism with queer and feminist theories through materialist investigations of history, location, relation, and practice.

Actually Existing Limits

In the post-Cold-War period, characterized by the diminished power of an international socialist idiom,[2] the most vibrant calls for transnational economic justice have been the disparate political projects that loosely cohered under the labels "global justice" or "anti/alter-globalization."[3] Many of these projects come together at the World Social Forum, a gathering of thousands that has met in Brazil, India, Kenya, and at smaller regional forums for nearly a decade.[4]

The WSF (or in its original host language, Portuguese, the Fórum Social Mundial), began in 2001 as a protest against capitalist globalization (specifically against the powerful and private World Economic Forum held in Davos at the same time). In subsequent years, it evolved into a wide umbrella for radical politics, incorporating expanded representations of sexuality in its programming. Advocates for women's sexual rights and for the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders—LGBT or queers—have found sympathetic ground at the Forums held in Brazil and India and many of the regional Forums, although not all of them. This essay discusses the WSF editions from 2001 to 2007 as a real-world sites where the political projects of sexual and economic justice co-exist and, potentially, comingle.

Although WSF politics have a somewhat identifiable core centered on struggles against global capitalism and imperialism, there is contestation over how that political center articulates with other issues, such as national struggles, orthodox religions, or non-governmental organizations—or gender or sexuality. Many have argued that the alter-globalization movement's reception of feminist contributions remains uneven, incomplete, or under-thought.[5] And if the WSF's engagement with feminism remains underdeveloped, the articulation of sexual politics is even less clear. According to Johanna Brenner, the Forum exhibits "strategic silences" about abortion and sexual orientation, in large part because of it welcomes the anti-imperialist projects of religious organizations that are otherwise conservative on gender and sexual politics.[6] The limited integration of sexual politics into the prevailing political discourse of the World Social Forum conjures up long-standing suspicions that the left's view of the salience of sexual politics remains dim.[7]

The starting point for this essay is this observation: that progressive sexual and economic politics come together unevenly and incompletely at the Forum. A simple reason for this is the fact that advocacy for sexual politics and economic justice, as expressed at the WSF, have autonomous genealogies and orientations. In the approach taken here, I do not adjudicate, but rather describe the uneven convergence between the two projects as they are appear in three domains: the geopolitical context for the two fields; global-justice discourse about sexuality (represented by WSF texts); and sexual-rights engagements in the space of the World Social Forum.

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.[8] One spatial change of the post-Cold War period is that more political claims are made across national borders, especially through transnational advocacy networks.[9] 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).[10] 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."[11]

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.[12] 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.[13] 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,[14] 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."[15] 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.[16] 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."[17]

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.[18]

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.[19] 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)."[20] 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.

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.[21] 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."[22] 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.[23]

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.

The Limited Economy of Sexual Rights

Sexual-rights activists have been drawn to the global justice movement as a locus of contemporary radical energy. They see the Forum as a relevant site in which to stage conversations, forge networks, and to coexist with, if not actively link to, the global justice movement.[24] Nearly two dozen feminist organizations (most addressing women's sexual rights) participate in the governance of the Forum. The LGBT South-South Dialogue, the only gay organization represented on the WSF's governing board, has hosted Forum panels on the connections between neoliberalism, imperialism, heteronormativity, and the material conditions of queers in the global south.[25]

One Forum event offers a concrete example of the ways activists are exploring convergences between sexual and economic politics. Organized by the Feminist Dialogues,[26] a network of women's organizations in the global south, this event modeled dialogue across four political sectors: feminism, LGBTQ, labor, and race/caste. Each speaker discussed points of convergence as well as critique of other movements. A gay activist from South Africa acknowledged the LGBT movement's lack of attention to class and race, for example, but also noted the failure of India's caste-organizing and international-labor movements to address sexuality in their work.

Beyond a handful of examples like this and LGBT South-South Dialogue, however, international sexual-rights and LGBT organizations have rarely forged operative networks with transnational struggles for economic justice. A feminist call for the Forum to incorporate attention to sexual and reproductive rights asserts that sexual diversity and sexual emancipation "are part of the same struggles in which the right to land and the right to express one's sexuality both contribute to the construction of radically democratic futures."[27] Yet, this call does not explain how these are part of the same struggle—a problem replicated in other conversations about the relation of sexual justice to economic justice. Perhaps understandably, sexual-rights activism targets sources of explicit oppression of non-normative sexuality—the state, medicine, religion, and public culture. Few have dedicated much conceptual effort to articulating the relevance of sexual politics for critiques of global capital and visions for alternative worlds. For these sexual-rights advocacy, the global-justice movement serves as a dynamic staging ground rather than a source of collaboration on political projects.

Connections or failures of articulation among sexual and economic movements follow specific political histories and institutional contexts. Sexual-rights discourse, notably, is inflected by decades of participation in the UN-NGO orbit which, from the late 1980s until recently, presented the main vehicle for transnational advocacy for such issues as reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, sexual violence, or human rights of sexual minorities. This UN-NGO arena collaborates more or less with market and state structures. According to critics, sexual-rights advocates rely on frameworks—specifically, liberal formulations of sexual autonomy and reproductive rights—that prevent them from addressing broader social-justice concerns,[28] especially economic redistribution.[29] In practice, NGO advocacy's reliance on institutionalized political forms that distinguish economic from political rights has made it difficult to argue effectively for 1) the indivisibility of rights and 2) a substantive emphasis on capacities to realize rights. Thus, in radical circles, NGOs are often seen as the benevolent face of hegemonic powers.[30] Professionalized modes of advocacy within the UN-NGO orbit thus curtailed sexual-rights advocates' connections to the global-justice agenda (which remain suspicious of NGOs). It also eclipsed earlier activism for women's sexual mobility or queer liberation, whose forms and networks were more linked—at least in spirit—to radical left politics.[31]

Indeed, many sexual-rights advocates were themselves frustrated with these limits, which explains the choice to align their projects with the WSF and the alter-globalization movement. At the same time, the problematic engagements with the UN-NGO orbit also generated the very capacities of activists to bring sexual politics to a radical transnational political venue like the WSF.

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]