Colloquium Description

Towards a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice seeks to bridge debates between globalization studies and sexuality studies by asking how concerns for economic and sexual justice can best be connected. Contemporary movements for global economic justice have tended to shy away from issues of sexuality, while campaigns for sexual rights rarely foreground economic concerns. Likewise, within academia, conversations about poverty, economic restructuring, and neo-liberalism have occurred largely apart from research on sexual rights, the emergence of "global gay" identity, sex tourism, trafficking, and sex work. This gap exists even as major issues like trafficking that were once concerned mainly with sweatshop labor have come to be synonymous with sexuality.

However, developments within, and in the spaces between, these concerns have heightened interest in the interaction between sexual and economic justice. Anti-poverty activists have come to focus on the spread of HIV/AIDS as a major stumbling block to ending extreme poverty, while HIV/AIDS activists have increasingly focused on the need for global health care reform (Sachs 2005, Petchesky 2003). Sexual rights activists in the UN orbit continue to debate the material conditions required for realization of rights to sexual autonomy (Meillón and Bunch 2001). Sexuality was also a prominent theme at the last World Social Forum meetings.

In the academy, both feminist and queer scholars have foregrounded globalization in several prominent anthologies, and an anthology on Queerying Development is finally forthcoming (Lind and Bergeron n.d.; see also Kleitz 2000; Adams and Pigg 2005). Current research points to several unresolved tensions between issues of globalization and issues of sexuality. While recognizing that global developments in economics, politics, and culture have expanded possibilities for sexual freedom, many scholars and activists note the need to account for the widely varying conditions of freedom that characterize sexual "choices" (Kempadoo 2004; Altman 2001). Research on the complicity of neo-liberal economic change in undermining sexual freedom has also generated pause among those celebrating the potential for globalization to liberate sexual minorities. Many researchers have linked scapegoating of such minorities to the negative effects of economic globalization, for example, when economic reform weakens state power it often leads to a state legitimization crisis that is played out on the site of sexuality (Adam 1999, Alexander 1994). Likewise, several feminist political economists have argued that global processes of economic restructuring rely on certain arrangements of intimacy to pick up the slack of caring labor in an era of state retrenchment, and are thus implicated in forging new regimes of heterosexuality (Bakker 2003; Sparr 1994; Brodie 1994; Peterson 2003). Other researchers have concentrated on the way in which sexual identities are increasingly expressed through economic relations, raising crucial questions regarding the role of capitalism, tourism, consumerism, and globalization in the articulation of sexual community (Joseph 2002, Chasin 2000, Wilson 2004, Puar 2001). The relationship between sexuality and empire is also being re-considered, with new attention devoted to the interaction between ideologies of progress and sexuality in the post-colonial moment (Briggs 2003; Hoad 2000).

Such trends in the field confirm that scholars and activists must urgently examine the interactions between economics and sexuality—in a global frame—in order to develop solutions that promise justice in a broad sense. However, these trends also indicate the need for conversation to move beyond assertions that sexual and economic justice are mutually co-constitutive, to consider how they should be reconfigured. Towards a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice focuses on the reconfiguration of these terms—on developing new visions of sexual and economic justice and considering how they can best be secured.