Pathways
Women, Sexuality and The Political Power of Pleasure
2012 - 2013
Lead Researchers: Andrea Cornwall , Susie Jolly , Kate Hawkins
This book explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women. 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-emphasising 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. This book 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. It shows how positive approaches to pleasure and sexuality can enhance equality and empowerment for all.
Resources For This Project
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Better Sex And More Equal Relationships: Couple Training In Nigeria
In Nigeria, within marriage, women are expected to pleasure their husbands, and preparation for marriage focuses on teaching the girl how to do so. In contrast, non-married women were expected to enjoy sex with their boyfriends. Yet, what emerged from research by Aken’Ova’s organisation INCRESE (The International Centre for Reproductive Health and Rights) was women’s deep lack of sexual pleasure in their relationships, married or not. Some men mistakenly believed they were giving great pleasure to their lovers, and had not discovered the truth due to lack of communication. …
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Building A Movement For Sexual Rights And Pleasure
The Chinese NGO Pink Space organises exchanges to build solidarity between people marginalised because of their sexuality and challenge the sources of their oppression, as He explains. Pink Space brings together HIV positive women, lesbians, bisexual women, female sex workers, transgender men, and women married to gay men. Fun, laughter and discussions of sexual pleasure are always part of the agenda. He describes how a focus on sexual pleasure promoted solidarity between women. …
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Challenging Clitoraid
This chapter uses rhetorical analysis to analyse the Clitoraid campaign, an American initiative started by the believers of the Raelian religion that set out to raise funds to build a ‘pleasure hospital’ in Burkina Faso that would perform operations to ‘restore’ the capacity of excised women for clitoral orgasm. …
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Challenging The Pleasure Versus Danger Binary: Reflections On Sexuality Workshops With Rural Women's Rights Activists In North India
In this chapter, Sharma writes about a workshop programme by her organisation, Nirantar, aimed at building perspectives on sexuality in a manner that was both positive and political. The programme constitutes one of the first efforts in the Indian context to do this, with women from rural, poor communities as well as the organisations that work with them, in an intensive manner. …
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Could Watching Porn Increase Our Expectations Of (Safe) Pleasure? An Exploration Of Some Promising Harm Reduction Practices
This chapter explores how pornography can eroticize safer and less gender normative sex. The authors point out that pornography is a huge industry, and one of the most important sources of information on sexuality for young people in many countries. They discuss the prevalence and importance of porn as a conduit for sex education before describing ways in which the pleasure industry is challenging norms to create pornography that is positive. They advocate a harm-reduction approach where the harm is not ended, but its negative effects are mitigated, and cite examples of porn that erotizes safer sex with actors using female and male condoms. …
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Desires Denied: Sexual Pleasure In The Context Of HIV
Writing as a woman living with HIV, Alice Welbourn focuses on the forced asexuality that is often foisted on women when they are diagnosed with HIV. She argues that a focus on sexual rights and pleasure can enhance our analysis of the ways in which legal, religious and medical discourses can reinforce fear of women’s unfettered sexuality. Welbourn’s chapter offers a poignant reminder of the extent to which HIV positive women experience the pain of forced retirement from sexual pleasure. Welbourn describes how positive women’s pleasurable sexual experiences are constrained by the grief of a positive diagnosis; like trauma or rape, she argues, this can lead to forced asexuality which denies women their rights to their own autonomy with regard to their sexual and reproductive pleasure. …
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Enabling Disabled People To Have And Enjoy The Kind Of Sexuality They Want
For people with disabilities in the UK, Lorna Couldrick and Alex Cowan’s chapter shows, the situation is in many ways similar to women living with HIV: there is a presumption that people with disabilities are, or ought to be, asexual and little open recognition of their sexual needs and desires. Couldrick and Cowan point out that this lack of acknowledgement of the role of sex and sexuality in the lives of people with disabilities can be exacerbated by health and social care practices, arguing that, ‘the very delivery of health and social care may undermine the sexual health of disabled people and perpetuate the myth that if you are disabled, intimacy and sex no longer matters. ’ This chapter begins with a little information on the context of the authors’ experiences which underpin their positions. Then, after defining sexuality and sexual health, they explore why any discussion of disability and sexuality must encompass intimate relationships and sexual pleasure and not be limited to sexual dysfunction. …
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Eroticism, Sensuality And 'Women's Secrets' Among The Baganda
Sylvia Tamale describes how women have become subject to moralism, shame and sex negativity. Tamale explores how the institution of Ssenga among the Banda in Uganda, has endured and changed. Formerly an education by aunts for nieces on how to become good wives and pleasure husbands, it is now as often a commercial service for better sex and relationships. Both earlier and current versions of Ssenga largely focus on conformist scripts, privileging men’s pleasure over women’s. …
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How Was It For You? Pleasure And Performance In Sex Work
This chapter challenges the assumption that sex workers get no pleasure from their work, citing research in several locations including India, China, Spain and Finland. This research demonstrates that placing sex workers’ experience of pleasure at the forefront can provide a fresh angle on familiar arguments. This is particularly important in the study of sex work, where ideological conflict and political necessity have tended to harden into fixed positions and inflexible ways of thinking. This chapter follows the lead provided by sex workers themselves in taking pleasure seriously. …
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Introduction: Women, Sexuality And The Political Power of Pleasure
This introduction introduces the debates on sexuality in the global north, and focuses on the debates around sexuality and pleasure occurring in the south that are starting to break the silence on the positive and empowering dimensions of women’s sexuality. Although there is much debate on the theoretical aspects of women’s sexuality, there is little debate on the policy implications of these debates, or documentation of practical initiatives on empowerment through positive approaches to sexuality. The authors note that, in discussions of sexuality, there is no focus on enjoyment, only on the dangerous aspects of sexuality. Development discourse associates sex with hazard and harm, and ndoes not talk about what might be positive, pleasurable or empowering about sexuality. …
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Laughter, The Subversive Body Organ
Ana Francis Mor describes how laughter, brought on by cabaret theatre in health workshops in Mexico, was key to changing people, not just their minds, but their hearts and their bodies and what they do with them. Mor describes how women learn gender ideologies from the television soap operas, all-pervasive in Mexico, which take their cue from Catholicism. Mor describes trainings on health run in rural Mexico for women, men and children. The three year programme trained over 30,000 people in total, in four day-long trainings that included participants first identifying key health issues in small groups, and a cabaret theatre working on these issues in the afternoon, and performing them in the evening. …
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Sex Is A Gift From God: Paralysis And Potential In Sex Education In Malawi
Religious organisations are often the site for some of the most negative prescriptive messages about sexuality and might seem a difficult place to raise such issues. However, there are glimmers within religious institutions of recognition of the power of pleasure. In this chapter, Bertrand-Dansereau describes how secular sexuality education interventions create even less space for discussion of pleasure than religious interventions in Malawi, and how negativity about sex and sexuality limits their effectiveness. Bertrand-Dansereau finds unexpectedly that in Malawi, church sexuality education was far more open and sex-positive than secular alternatives, which tried to motivate people to safer behaviours through fear of disease. …
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Sexual Pleasure As Woman's Human Right: Experiences From A Human Rights Training Programme For Women In Turkey
Seral Aksakal details the policing of women’s sexualities, which extends from violence by the state through to that of measures taken by family members, especially older women, to constrain and contain younger women. In Turkey, as in so many contexts, women lack information and education about sexuality. This allows myths to thrive. Combined with a conservative political context, this further undermines women’s capacity to enjoy pleasurable sexual relationships, acting as a quiet form of violence that permeates society and exerts a powerful oppressive influence in women’s – and men’s – lives, and negative social messages about sexuality make it difficult for women to have enjoyable sexual relationships. …
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Thinking With Pleasure: Danger, Sexuality And Agency
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. …
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Why We Need To Think About Sexuality And Sexual Well-Being: Addressing Sexual Violence In Sub-Saharan Africa
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. …
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Women, Sexuality And The Political Power Of Pleasure, Zed Books
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. …
