Initially dominated by research on North America and western Europe, the field of sexuality studies has gone through a “transnational turn” since the end of the twentieth century. Instead of automatically assuming that heterosexuality and homosexuality as lived in the global North set the pattern for the rest of the world, writers began examining the distinctive sexual histories and realities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Pioneered by a special issue of the journal GLQ in 1999 on “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally”, the turn has accelerated over the years, for example with a conference in Madrid in 2011 on “LGBT/Queer Studies: Toward Trans/national Scholarly and Activist Kinships”. A forum in the American Historical Review in 2009 gave a sense of the breadth of the resulting scholarship, with separate overviews on sexuality studies in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America discussing scores of recent publications.
Yet while the focus of sexuality studies has gradually expanded, until now the bulk of the research and writing has still been done from the global North. In 2007 the South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (Sephis) set out to change this situation by training a new generation of researchers on sexuality from developing countries. One initial result is the anthology The Sexual History of the Global South, in which twelve African, Asian, and Latin American scholars describe different facets of sexual life and history in their own countries. While their articles do not make a radical break with the approaches current in the field, the book's publication constitutes a welcome and promising challenge to what the book's editors call the “asymmetries of power” in sexuality studies (p. 2), and interrogate the colonialist gaze that has too often been turned on it. It specifically strikes a blow against what Jasbir Puar has critiqued as “femonationalism” and “homonationalism”:Footnote 1 the tendency to view women's and LGBT emancipation as uniquely Western gifts to an otherwise backward world. The Sexual History of the Global South makes clear that sexual actors worldwide have long been speaking and acting for themselves without waiting for condescending Northern saviours.
As the editors rightly note in their introduction, sexualities are “inherently localized”, not merely local reproductions of some global pattern (p. 14). There is, for example, no consensus in the South on using terms like “lesbian” or “queer” as opposed to indigenous terms that often have longer histories and different implications. The wide range of topics and regions covered in the book underlines the diversity of human sexuality. Yet many of the Southern researchers have drawn on useful insights of Northern theorists like Adrienne Rich, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler.
A number of themes recur in many of the articles. One is the ways (noted in a foreword by the Sephis coordinator and co-chair) in which state action and globalization reinforce “patriarchal relations, heteronormativity, and conservative control in many parts of the world” (p. viii). Hardik Brata Biswas notes, for example, how Bengali Hindu pornography since the nineteenth century “iterates the heteronormative structures of family, marriage, and the consumption of women by men” (p. 59). Iman al-Ghafari's piece on eroticism between Arab women analyses how a Syrian novel from 2008 “invites lesbophobia to a homosocial space” (p. 152), and how depictions of sex between women almost always assume an “absent male lover” (p. 153). Alberto Teutle López's article on gay male identity in Mexico in the 1980s is an account of unrelenting repression. Rajeev Kumaramkandath describes the dominant perception of a “flute” (a man who services other men sexually) in Keralam in India today as “a feckless male, an inept persona, unfit for family life” (p. 215). And in Fabíola Cordeiro's account, lesbians in a women's prison in Brazil remain, despite decreasing official repression, “the deviants among deviants” (p. 228).
Discrimination is all the more insidious when it takes on the mantle of anti-colonialism, national liberation, or even feminism. The editors call the widespread “policing [of] the imagination” in the South via the insistence that gender and sexual dissent have no place in “our culture” (p. 17) a form of “postcolonial amnesia” (p. 13). Basile Ndjio drives home the point by showing how homophobia in Cameroon not only replicates the essentialist colonial view of African sexuality while pretending to rebel against Europe, but also provides a safe outlet for sublimated anger against the corruption and machismo of the entrenched Biya regime. A concise and insightful article by Abel Sierra Madero (a sign of the rapidly growing scope for sexuality studies in Cuba today) recounts how Cuban nationalists in 1928 saw male homosexual pepillismo as “depriving our homeland of all its traditional virile energy” (p. 68), and a patriotic feminist viewed lesbian garzonas as “pestilent viruses that corrode the entrails of humanity” (p. 71).
Another theme that recurs in several articles (unfortunately not picked up in the editors’ introduction) is the way capitalist globalization and its discontents fuel sexual conflict. Musa Sadock shows that the colonial authorities’ ineffectual and repressive approach to sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Tanganyika was a failed effort to control the effects of mass labour migrations that the imperial economy itself had set in motion. Nitya Vasudevan's fascinating account links the (failed) attempt to ban dancing bar girls in Mumbai in 2005–2006 to the economic liberalization of the 1990s and conservative panic at the consequent undermining of idealized, privatized Hindu femininity. In his contribution on male homosexuality in contemporary Kerala, Kumaramkandath, too, points out the perceived “conflict between the modern market economy and the realm of moral values” (p. 219). Huang Yingying argues that Deng Xiaoping's economic reform contributed to sexual upheavals in China. Tsitsi B. Masvawure reveals that even in crisis-ridden Zimbabwe young women take advantage of the relative sexual freedom of university life to gain access to scarce consumer goods and attain middle-class status by finding higher-status male partners.
In contrast, neither the authors nor the editors pay much attention to the connections between sexuality and religion. This is a pity, since Gloria Wekker's work, for example, has brilliantly illuminated the role of African-derived religions in shaping same-sex eroticism in the Caribbean and South America.Footnote 2 While Al-Ghafari does write about a “tenacious lesbian soul” and “spiritual essence” (p. 145), she has relatively little to say about sexual attitudes specific to the Islamic world. She bypasses the debates unleashed by Joseph Massad's controversial but crucial book Desiring Arabs and by Afsaneh Najmabadi's Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards.Footnote 3 In view of the way one-sided portrayals of Muslim misogyny and homophobia are used today to justify Islamophobia, the “clash of civilizations”, and Israel's supposed role as a beacon of democracy and gay rights, this subject merits much more work.
The editors themselves note another lacuna of The Sexual History of the Global South: its neglect of transgender history – a major omission given the extraordinary diversity and vitality of transgender struggles worldwide. This is remarkable given editor Saskia Wieringa's own explorations of butch female sexual identities in Indonesia and Asia more generally, and the exemplary support she has given to female queer organizing and writing in the South. Transgender history has, of course, been a latecomer and a stepchild in LGBT studies in North America and Europe as well. In both the North and the South, transgender invisibility is doubtless a result of the relative poverty and social marginality of trans and gender-nonconforming people. Particularly in academia, trans people have had to struggle against overwhelming odds to gain any kind of foothold.
The Sexual History of the Global South also reflects the divorce of sexuality studies from feminist and LGBT activism – a divorce that seems to have occurred faster and gone further in sexuality studies than in fields like labour, black, and gender studies. In the early years of the transnational turn, scholars and activists joined to produce lively anthologies like Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron's Defiant Desire on South Africa, Rakesh Ratti's A Lotus of Another Color on India, and the more international anthology the author of this review has edited, Different Rainbows.Footnote 4 Wieringa and Sívori's anthology does include a few echoes of these earlier linkages of research with organizing. The editors note the role of lesbian, gay, and transgender identities as “a basis for solidarity” (p. 16). Indian feminists’ success, described in Vasudevan's article, in defending the Mumbai bar girls against right-wing attacks and left-wing indifference is inspiring. Teutle recalls the bonds between Mexico's early lesbian/gay movement and its left-wing opposition to the PRI dictatorship. Diego Sembol's article describes LGBT Argentina's progression from post-dictatorship division and violence in the 1980s to legal recognition, anti-discrimination legislation, and Criminal Code reform in the 1990s. The global South today is full of similar stories of struggle to be told and analysed, from Nicaragua to Nepal. It is to be hoped that the renaissance of sexuality studies that Wieringa and Sívori have valiantly helped launch will lead in the future to more of these stories being told.
