As part of Western European development aid policy, comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is increasingly promoted in resource-poor countries. This paper engages with CSE promotion in Bangladesh funded by the Dutch Government. It unpacks the 'collaboration' by looking at how a paradox is played out between the universal ideals underlying a broader transnational rights-approach and the intended cultural sensitivity by adapting CSE to the targeted context. Feminist scholarship on the ideological, moral and affective underpinnings of CSE is used to question this model's implied universality and neutrality. The various negotiations, concerns and strategies of NGOrepresentatives as co-producers of sexuality knowledge in Bangladesh are focused upon. Analysis focuses on how a 'speakable' , middle-classoriented 'proper' sexuality is invented and managed through affect; how cultural insensitivity and secular normativity with respect to CSE are challenged in discussions concerned a rights-versus-health approach; and how a confident and knowledgeable adolescent or young person is imagined through the emancipatory project attributed to sexuality education. Rather than via equal collaboration, it is argued, adolescent sexuality education in these development aid settings is shaped by powerful transnational and local processes of Othering.
In this article, we look at colonialities of gender and sexuality as concepts employed in international aid and development. These international arenas reveal not only strong reiterations of modernist linear thinking and colonial continuities but also provide insights into the complexities of the implementation and vernacularisation of gender and sexuality in practices of development. Using a critical anthropological perspective, we discuss case studies based on our own research in Egypt and Bangladesh to illustrate the importance of unpacking exclusionary mechanisms of gender and sexuality scripts in the promotion of women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights in postcolonial development contexts. We provide a conceptual analysis of decolonial feminist attempts at moving beyond the mere critique of development to enable a more inclusive conversation in the field of development. To work towards this goal, we argue, a critical anthropological approach proves promising in allowing a politically-sensitive, ethical, and critical engagement with the Other.
To date, South Asian masculinity studies have largely investigated the construction of masculinities at the structural level, while subjective experiences have received little attention. This paper analyses data gathered from ethnographic research conducted among 40 adolescent boys living in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and asks: how do middle-class adolescent boys in Dhaka construct different ideals of masculinity and negotiate those in their everyday life at home and among peers? Which ideas about sexuality are involved? This analysis provides in-depth insights into the ways in which different models of masculinity are (re)constructed and embraced or resisted at the subjective level by adolescents in their everyday negotiations of sexuality. We will argue that this younger generation of men encounter unique gendered vulnerabilities in the contexts of fast urbanisation, an increasingly uncertain labour market and a lack of support in negotiating their emotional and social wellbeing.
Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality are seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, this book provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning.
Over the past two decades, issues of sexuality and gender have increasingly become instrumentalized in us/them demarcations in public debates on the position of ethnic and religious minority groups living in Western countries. In these debates, a sexually progressive West is imagined as opposed to a sexually progressive Rest, policing exclusionary and inclusionary regimes of power. This article presents a diasporic account of sexual progressiveness, focusing on the narratives of younger Iranian-Dutch. I argue that, through an imaginative state of sexual, cultural and ethnic (un)belonging, these highly educated interlocutors trouble not only the implied whiteness and universality of the sexually progressive subject, but also heteropatriarchal underpinnings of dominant nationalist and diasporic understandings of culture, home and nation.
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