ABSTRACT
What would the world be like if we really did have the right to choose our sexuality and pleasurable sexual relations?
(Karin Ronge, Women for Women’s Human Rights, Turkey)
Sexuality has had a place in international development from the early days of colonial and missionary intervention in the countries of the global South. Late nineteenth-century European sexual mores were transported to the colonies as part of imperial expansion. With it came an ordering of the world into rigid gender and sexual binaries, with the naturalization of the categories ‘women’ and ‘men’, and the late nineteenth-century European categories ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’. Development came to be cast as a moral as well as economic endeavour, famously described by Gayatri Spivak (1988), for India, as ‘white men rescuing brown women from brown men’. Laws and social policies sought to encourage the formation of nuclear families based on the – still relatively novel in the Victorian period – European model of heterosexual monogamy. Practices considered ‘barbaric’, such as child marriage and female genital cutting, became a prime focus of colonialism’s ‘civilising’ project. Education for girls and women sought to produce domesticated ‘good women’ who would maintain hygienic homes and respect their husbands (Hunt, 1990); the contradictions of colonial extraction also fostered ‘bad women’, who left rural homes for lives as sex workers in the city ( Jeater, 1993; White, 1990).
