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  • Interrogating Heteronorms of Development
  • Svati P. Shah (bio)
Development, Sexual Rights, and Global Governance. Amy Lind, ed. New York: Routledge, 2010. 211 pp.

Development, Sexual Rights, and Global Governance joins a growing body of work that critiques the reification of heterosexuality within the theoretical and institutional spaces of the international development industry. This growing critique is contextualized, in turn, by critical work on the efflorescence of movements in the global South that aim to consolidate the concerns of lesbians, gay men, trans* people,1 intersex people, and a host of other constituencies who conform neither to sexuality nor to gender-based norms (whose naming is also subject to vigorous debate within these literatures). The latter, broader body of work has concerned itself with questions of categories, critiques of identitarianism, and problematizing liberal individualist framings of sexuality, in particular. At the same time, this body of work has also begun to interrogate how the exigencies of the development industry produces and reifies the “alphabet soup” of terms for groups of people who deviate from heterosexuality and gender conformity. Development, Sexual Rights, and Global Governance enters the fray by providing a set of critiques, primarily on “heteronormativity” as it is deployed in development work sponsored by international financial institutions, where heteronormativity primarily signals normative heterosexuality and gender.

The book is divided into three sections. The first interrogates theories of development. The second critiques heteronormativity within the context of development institutions themselves, where these primarily include the World Bank and “nongovernmental organizations.” The third section discusses modes of resistance against heteronorms, which includes discussing new forms of collectivization and information dissemination undertaken by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer activists in countries in the global South. The pieces in this section both discuss limitations of the current frames of sexuality and gender, as evidenced by limits within the regime of categorizing discrete nonnormative [End Page 624] sexualities in the global South, and collectively argue that the limits of available frameworks are potentially overcome by deploying the category of sexual rights.

Lind efficiently lays out the tensions within which the book is deployed in its initial pages, where she writes of “non-normative families and households that do not ‘count’ as subjects of development aid,” and states that “many of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups that emerged during the past two decades have held ambivalent relationships to development, modernization and modernity as they understand it” (1–2). Lind goes on to cite “ ‘homonational imperialism’ ” as a potential effect of “ ‘modernity’ ” that the authors in the volume seek to avoid. Instead, they highlight how current regimes of development marginalize LGBT individuals and the material effects of these marginalizations. At the heart of Lind’s overriding frame for the collection is a concern that questions of sexuality, and particularly of pleasure, have become marginalized in favor of the idea that sexuality is peripheral to so-called real world concerns, which are framed by the hegemonic regime of development as material concerns, which are figured as being distinct from sexuality. Showing that sexuality is already at the heart of materialist concerns, by demonstrating that “development” is currently predicated on heterosexuality and that sexual pleasure is not marginal to material survival, is the collection’s task.

While same-sex-desiring and, to a lesser degree, trans* bodies are at the center of these inquiries, sex work is spectral throughout the book. Sex work appears in Jyoti Puri’s chapter on a photography project conducted by hijras in New Delhi, India, in which Puri discusses hijras’ references to their livelihood, which is sex work by implication, but remains unnamed. In Ara Wilson’s chapter on lesbian eroticism in international and Thai nongovernmental organizations, sex work appears in reference to a conference on “trafficking,” though, again, sex work remains implied. Sex work appears again in Kate Bedford’s chapter on floriculture in Ecuador, in which prostitution is named as a category used by locals to stereotype women who work in the flower industry, but not by the World Bank officials who seek to produce Ecuadorian floriculture as empowering to women and, by extension, to communities. While the omission of sex work from the collection in no...

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