Negotiating Global Body Politics

Abstract

This special issue of Gender, Technology and Development on Bodies, Sexualities and Gender looks at changes in technology and gender in relation to sexuality, embodiment, and development. The issue features the latest feminist thinking about sexuality in relation to technology understood within the broader debates on gender and science, bodies and health, culture and economic development. It takes up economic, legal and social concerns around technology and gender, questioning the assumed emancipatory power of technology for women. The contributions trace the tensions and complexities around technology and sexuality from diverse disciplinary viewpoints. The issue endeavors to capture the changing nature of sexuality in relation to technology and development, looking at embodiment, artificial reproduction, sexuality and reproduction, trafficking, organ trafficking, and sexual pleasure.By examining diverse legal, medical, and cultural contexts of "development" in a globalized world that give meanings to sexuality and embodiment, the issue aims at opening up new areas for reflection and research on the transformation of sexuality and their implications for the politics of gender equality.Research on sexuality has been dominated by two basic perspectives: (a) essentialist, which reduces sex to the biological differences between the male and the female, and views gender as a dichotomous social construct; and (b) anti-essentialist, which emphasizes diversity, and considers sexuality to be analytically inseparable from culture and history. At present, the science of human sexuality is Eurocentric. Views on sexuality differ depending on the "cosmology" from which they emanate, and in which they become embedded. Polytheist cosmologies mostly comprise Gender, Technology and Development 18(1) 1-8