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Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in West Bengal, India, Akshay Khanna examines the conditions under which epidemiological knowledge about ‘men who have sex with men’ is produced and brought to circulate. He looks at conditions under which particular idioms of gender and sexuality are transformed into epidemiologically over-determined identity categories. The Sexual Subject that circulates in development praxis as an embodiment-in-the-world, it is argued, would be better understood in terms of the political economy that makes its intelligibility and circulation possible. …

Sexuality, especially in African female sexual discourse, is associated with danger and fear, a paradigm that is dangerous and paralysing, especially to young women coming to sexual consciousness. Bakare-Yusuf argues for the need to provide a counter-narrative that emphasises pleasure, love and desire and transcends this discourse of sexual danger. Moving beyond this discourse allows for the exploration of the complexity and richness of women’s sexuality so that women don’t fall into a sexual paralysis. In this chapter, Bakare-Yusuf argues that the realm of ecstasy, desire, intimacy, mutuality and pleasure of the female erotic universe is often a precursor to and provides a backdrop to sexual danger and domination. …

Thirty-five years on from the abortion rights victory of Roe vs. Wade, abortion proponents in the USA continue to battle political opposition and the formidable abortion opponents that seek to overturn legal abortion in the long-run, and limit access to services in the short-run. This article outlines the many battles over national and foreign aid policies, legal changes, attacks on and limits to access that have characterized the on-going abortion debate in the USA. Beyond the political, it further illustrates how, despite the legal and human rights discourse the politicians and advocacy bodies pursue, deficient access and funding and stigma are overwhelmingly the critical barriers for the poor and ethnic populations, demonstrating that the ‘choice’ debate is not a realistic one in a context where poor mothers can neither afford to have an abortion, nor mother another child. …

Jerker Edström argues that common interpretations of vulnerability in gender and development discourse, policy and practice tend to reinforce essentialisms about men and women. These interpretations compromise our ability to think clearly about the structural influences on HIV and sexual health, as well as its relations to gender inequity and women’s empowerment. He examines some predominant constructions of women in the AIDS response, based on the notion of vulnerability, and suggests how unhelpful the notion of vulnerability is to the political project of women’s empowerment in redressing inequality and injustice. …

Abortion has become an ever more controversial issue, provoking strong reactions both ‘for’ and ‘against’. Language used in disputes over whether or not women should have access to safe and legal abortion indicates just how polarised debates have become: pro-choice versus pro-life; pro-abortion versus anti-choice. As the anti-abortion agenda has become coupled with other conservative agendas, such as ‘pro-abstinence’, ‘pro-chastity’ and ‘anti-contraception’, an increasingly assertive movement has evolved. The extension of these conservative forces to parts of the world where thousands of women die every year because they were unable to access safe abortion and protect themselves from HIV infection, has turned this polarized dispute into an urgent development issue. …

Despite 80,000 female deaths a year due to unsafe abortions and a higher prevalence of them occurring in developing countries, abortion remains a women’s reproductive health problem instead of a development problem. In fact, it calls for a stronger advocacy strategy for greater consciousness-raising and sensitization. The Campaign Against Unwanted Pregnancy in Nigeria seeks to employ a multi-pronged strategy that seeks to break the silence on unsafe abortion to create climate for discourse, conduct reliable studies to provide data for debate, and employ the data as a tool to rally support for action on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights in general, and safe abortion specifically. Undertaken primarily through partnering community and faith-based organisations, CAUP seeks to engage policy-makers, the media, CBOs and religious and traditional leaders as part of a strategy to build up a critical mass of advocates that will fight to reduce high levels of mortality caused by unsafe abortion. …

In spring 2006, the Vagina Monologues was staged in Serbia for the first time. Performed by well-known actresses, including a celebrity soap star, the show attracted a wide audience of people beyond those usually interested in the women’s movement. Hundreds of young girls came to see the soap star, but at the same time they heard about pleasure and orgasm, and how to love their bodies, as well as about sexual abuse and domestic violence. Men in the audience cried with emotion. …

In her exploration in this chapter of pleasure and violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, Chi-Chi Undie argues that it is important to acknowledge and talk about sexual wellbeing and pleasure with the victims and perpetrators of violence. Otherwise, survivors remain forever defined by their negative experiences, unable to move beyond these to enjoy sexual relationships again. And if perpetrators only hear stories of sexual violence then they are given the impression that sexual violence is normal, and that no alternative is possible. This chapter highlights the need to consider sexuality and sexual well-being – even when working on sexual violence; provides an analysis of the public health, religious and development framings of sexuality and sexual well-being; calls for a more nuanced understanding of sexual violence and an improvement in service provision, particularly in the area of psychosocial support; and suggests that there are actually parallels in the way that sexual violence and sexuality (more broadly) are framed, and points out the shortcomings of these framings. …

Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasizing these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure. Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions from both the South and North of the globe, with examples of activism, advocacy and programming which use pleasure as an entry point. …

The global HIV/AIDS pandemic has pushed sexuality issues higher up on the development cooperation agenda but the sexual health and rights of lesbian women and other women who have sex with women are often completely missing from sexual and reproductive health and rights policies, materials and documents. Karin Lenke and Mathilda Piehl are concerned that this underlying homophobia and heteronormativity will lead to these women being unable to enjoy their full human rights in any field. …

This project explored the meanings and debates around women’s empowerment within and among sets of actors with a global reach, and how they are shaping values, ideas and policy actions (or absence of actions) on women’s empowerment. …

Contestations is an e-journal whose aim is to elicit lively disagreements and to offer a platform for argumentation. It is inspired by a vision of deliberation that is about people feeling able to air their views, listen to a plurality of positioned responses and take from that what they will - without any pressure to arrive at a consensual conclusion. It is, above all, about the freedom to dissent with any of the orthodoxies that exist in the field of women's empowerment - and there are many - and take the opportunity to provoke others to think again about the things they take for granted. …

This special issue of 'Development' picks up some of the contentions and contestations that have accompanied the uptake of 'women's empowerment' by the development industry. Contributors reflect on their own personal and political engagement with the term and what it has come to represent. …

This research project looked at a small number of cases of local, national or regional initiatives on sexual rights and women’s empowerment that have succeeded in creating spaces for challenging repressive social norms concerning female sexuality. It looked at the interactions with international influences, including religious and development institutions. …

By exploring the link between the denial of women’s reproductive rights and the denial of women’s sexual agency under patriarchy, the researchers sought to elucidate the conditions under which feminist demands around abortion have been successful by drawing together experiences from across Latin America. …