Gender and Sexuality
Gay Pride, Dehli, India, 2008
Credit: Jesse Rapczak, 2008 / CC BY NC ND
Summary
The androcentric and heteronormative dimensions of contemporary globalization are largely neglected. However, many social divisions and power relations are interlinked—among them gender, class, race, sexuality and religion—helping to create identities. Since the late nineteenth century, feminist protest and action in favor of sexual minorities have been deployed on an international scale, while migratory flows, inequalities and examples of violence also have gender and sexuality-related aspects.
Theories of gender, the body and sexual minorities have highlighted the androcentric and heteronormative aspects of contemporary globalization. Recent work on intersectionality highlights the way that different forms of discrimination and power relations linked to gender, class, race, sexuality, religion, etc. operate in combination.
Transnational and international activism
Having been broadly neglected by the civil law revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cause of women’s emancipation was actively taken up in the late nineteenth century in Europe and America, where the first feminist associations called for the right to vote and to access university and certain highly regulated professions.
Women’s suffrage and women in national parliaments, 1893-2018
Comment: The database of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (an international parliamentary organization created in 1889) enables the course of women’s struggle for political rights to be followed. Obtaining the right to vote extended from 1893 (New Zealand) to 2015 (Saudi Arabia), with 56 states achieving it before World War II (part of the Americas and of Europe, as well as Russia). It was extended to all the Americas and to Europe, as well as to India and China, between 1939 and 1960 (89 states), and finally to the rest of the world (66 states). Women’s eligibility generally came later and their presence in national parliaments is far from achieving parity (only 3 countries, with 61% in Rwanda). It exceeds 30% in only 48 countries; in the 138 other parliaments numbers of women vary between 29% and 1% (Oman).
The 1960s saw the growth of liberation movements demanding new rights in areas such as sexuality and reproduction and wage equality, which spread to all continents. These movements were supported by regional and international institutions (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean [ECLAC], European Parliament, European Court of Human Rights [OCHR]). The UN adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979), held several international conferences on women, from Mexico (1975) to Beijing (1995), and adopted an approach of gender mainstreaming in all its programs.
The social and sexual liberation of the 1960s and 70s also led to the gradual destigmatization of sexual minorities, leading to the decriminalization of homosexuality, the combat against homophobia and the prohibition of certain forms of discrimination (age of consent, access to roles in the army, churches, etc.). Court battles in the 1980s and 90s institutionalized and transnationalized LGBT+ activism in the context of the ravages of AIDS. The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), originally founded in 1978, took on an advisory role to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (1993 and 2011), while the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses (1990) and the European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) worked to counter discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and to ensure the recognition of new rights (civil partnership, parental rights, adoption by same-sex couples, trans-sexuality, intersexuality, etc.).
Recognition and protection of homosexuality, 2018
Comment: For the past 40 years, the NGO known as the ILGA has been bringing national and local organizations together by issuing information and appeals for the application of LGBTI rights. Based on their data, these two maps show the major differences in legislation and protection in countries where homosexuality is legal. It is mainly in Europe, North America, and certain South American countries that these rights are most comprehensive (civil union, marriage and adoption) and protected (notably in the context of combating hate crime or incitement to hatred).
Criminalization of homosexuality, 2018
Comment: For the past 40 years, the NGO known as the ILGA has been bringing national and local organizations together by issuing information and appeals for the application of LGBTI rights. This map, based on their data, shows that respect for such rights is very unequal throughout the world. Homosexuality is legal in 63% of the countries and territories mentioned, and penalized in 37% of them (Middle East, Africa and certain Asian states), with punishments ranging from prison to the death penalty (in 13 countries).
Global Circulation and Interaction
Increased migration has dimensions relating to gender and sexuality that were present in the colonial period and are now reflected in globalized female migration, domestic work (in homes, child care, social care, etc.), sex work, the gay economy (pink dollar), LGBT+ and the queer internet.
Globalization is also manifested in the persistence of gender pay gaps, the requirement to work part-time, informal employment, the time spent daily on unpaid domestic work and care-giving, etc.
Women continue to suffer from gender-based inequality and violence, including selective abortion, forced marriage, domestic violence and honor killings, the prevalence of virilocal residence, sexual harassment, food shortages, water collection, environmental pollution, lack of schooling, rape as a weapon of war, etc.
Gender gaps in the labor market, 1991-2018
Comment: This graph is based on ILO data and classifies regions according to the differences between men’s and women’s levels of participation in employment (registered employment, either part- or full-time). On a global scale, 50% of women work, compared with 80% of men. This average masks contrasting regional situations. The greatest disparity is in North Africa, the Middle East and Southern Asia where women, fairly consistently over time, do not work much (3 to 4 times less than men). The variation between men and women is less – but still between 10 and 15% – in Europe, North America, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Women in the labor force, 2018
Comment: ILO data enable the skill levels of working women to be compared with the revenue of the country concerned. The graph only shows the distribution of women in the jobs market according to their skill level; men are not represented. In countries with low revenue, women rarely occupy posts in the intellectual professions or in management, representing under 3%, while men occupy double that number (this is not shown in the graph). Conversely, in countries with high revenue, almost 40% of women do jobs demanding high levels of skill, outdoing men (37% of men occupy these posts).
While classical feminism foresaw the emergence of transnational sisterhood, according to feminist critiques from Afro-Americans (Black feminism) and Latino-Americans (notably in former colonies) neoliberal globalization is based on the intersectionality of power relations and the interaction of issues such as gender, sex, class, race, ethnicity and nationality, while emancipation movements are not similarly convergent. The crucial role of the accumulation of capital and resources enabled by Europe’s colonization of the Americas in the fifteenth century, the forced labor of indigenous and African peoples, violence against women in both the colonies and colonizing countries and the sexual division of labor act to keep women confined in the spheres of reproductive work and the family.
These ideas coincide with others on the transformation of the process of sexual identification. The theory of the bicategorization of the world (hetero- versus homo-normativity, male versus female, etc.), which became dominant in Europe and America in the late nineteenth century and spread with colonization, has been countered by recent scientific discoveries on the significance of continuum and intracategorical variation in relation to sexual dimorphism. Conversely, the experience of colonization fueled the repression of pre-existing minority sexual practices in many societies, including some that had not been colonized but were heavily influenced by western “ modernity.” Since the 2000s the integration of sexual minorities in some previously hostile countries has become a mark of progressive democracy, even in those countries that do not systematically respect minority rights (pink-washing). Homophobia and sexism are essentialized as cultural practices inherent in some places in the world (hence the ethnicization of homosexuality, the stigmatization of some migrant populations and the resurgence of anti-feminist and anti-LGBT+ movements).
- gender > Gender
- Historic, social, cultural and psychological construction of a binary categorization between sexes (men/women) and between the values and representations associated with them (masculine/feminine). Arising from the feminist works of the 1970s, the concept of gender spread through the United States during the 1980s and then in Europe from the 1990s before being taken up in the literature on sexual minorities. The gender concept views relations between the sexes as a power relationship (historically constructed around the material and symbolic subordination of women compared to men) that cannot be isolated from other power relationships such as social class, race, age or disability.
- minorities > Minority
- Any social group which finds itself in an inferior situation relative to a dominant group in a given society. This situation can be expressed quantitatively, but can also be defined with reference to qualitative data of a cultural nature (linguistic, religious, ethnic, national, even social minorities). Membership of a minority can be a matter of self-identification or an ascribed identity; it may bring with it various kinds of discrimination. The presence of minorities can give rise to social engineering policies (positive or negative discrimination), or demands for protection and recognition.
- androcentric > Androcentrism
- Understanding the world, whether consciously or not, from the basis and viewpoint of human beings of the male sex. The idea was developed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in The Man-Made World: Our Androcentric Culture (1911), and has since been used by sociologists and anthropologists (when talking about patrilineal societies, for example) as well as by feminist movements.
- heteronormative > Heteronormativity
- Gendered construction of society based on dividing people into two and only two categories (bicategorization) by sex (man or woman), derived from biological sexual duality (male and female) and accompanied by a normative emphasis on heterosexual reproduction. Heteronormativity presupposes an alignment of biological sex, sexuality, gender identity and gender roles and can encourage heterosexism (discrimination against LGBT people).
- intersectionality > Intersectionality
- Intersectionality illustrates the interplay of multiple structures of domination and the cumulative impacts of inequalities relating to gender, class, race, age, disability and sexual orientation. Research undertaken on intersectionality during the 1990s, analyzing the discrimination experienced by black women in the United States, demonstrated the cumulative effects of a combination of social relations – showing that economic relations were not ultimately the sole determining factor. By extension, an intersectional approach reflects the connections between these inequalities – their entanglement – in developing strategies of resistance and mobilization.
- race > Race
- A homogenous biological group in the animal kingdom, distinct from the rest due to its hereditary physical characteristics. Although scientific studies have endlessly demonstrated that human beings form a single race, several political doctrines since the 19th century have used the notion to distinguish human populations, this despite the recognition of fundamental human rights and successful prosecutions in many countries and at the international level (Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948). The notion of race is now used in a very different way – which can, however, lead to confusion – in official statistics, positive law and some social science research, notably in the United States and Canada, to describe and analyze the social organization and values of different ethnic communities.
- Discrimination
- Enduring inequalities between individuals or groups in their ability to access goods and/or exert their rights. Discrimination may be unintentional when the political authority, state or society concerned does not pay sufficient attention to certain sections of the population (older people, for example); or it can be based on an intention to discriminate according to criteria such as origin, sex, age, handicap, physical appearance, language, opinions (political, trade-union, religious, etc.), joblessness, or social mores (apartheid, racial segregation, homophobia, etc.). The battle against discrimination now involves protection and compensation policies (reserved access to housing, employment, education, etc.) and/or punishment for discriminatory behavior.
- institutionalized > Institutions
- The term institution refers to social structures (rules, standards, practices, actions, roles) that are long-lasting, organized in a stable and depersonalized way, and play a part in regulating social relationships. An institution can be formalized within organizations (international or otherwise). In political science, institutionalism tackles the objects of political analysis by studying their structural basis and their organizational model rather than thinking about how they relate to society.
- transnationalized > Transnational
- A relationship is transnational when it forms at the global level, whether intentionally or in practice, and exists outside the national context and at least partly beyond the control or influence of national governments (Bertrand Badie, 1999). Transnationalism is an interpretation of international relations that emphasizes the role of non-state actors and cross-border flows. It has developed since the 1970s around authors such as Joseph Nye, Robert Keohane and James Rosenau, in reaction to the dominance of realist and neorealist analyses.
- recognition > Recognition
- The validation by an individual, group or institution of a practice, situation or identity that has been claimed. Intrinsically relational and a factor in socialization, recognition can be formal or informal, reciprocal or unilateral. Theories of recognition have an important place in philosophy (Hegel in particular) and have been more recently developed in the social sciences around the “struggle for recognition” (Axel Honneth) and the denial of recognition. International recognition is a discretionary act through which a subject in international law (usually a state or international organization) grants legal status to a situation or an act (a government’s accession to power by non-constitutional means, unilateral declaration of independence, military intervention, etc.).
- migration > Migration
- Movement of people leaving their country of origin permanently (emigration) to relocate to another country (immigration), which might be voluntary or forced (war, poverty, unemployment, human rights violations, climate factors, etc.), and which often involves temporary stays of varying duration in several transit countries. Migratory flows, which are an integral component of humanity’s history, give rise to a range of public policy measures linked to specific political, economic and cultural contexts and understandings of nationality. Host states seek to organize immigration, sometimes to attract it (need for labor, exploitation of specific territories, naturalizations, etc.), and most often to restrict it (border controls, quotas, residence permits, etc.). In most cases the states of origin seek to maintain relations with their nationals and diaspora communities living abroad.
- colonial > Colonization
- A historical process by which Europe established deep links with the rest of the world. From the late fifteenth century (the Age of Discovery), a vast movement began for economic, political, and cultural domination of the world, first by Spain and Portugal and then by England, France, and Holland, which from the late sixteenth century started to compete for possession of colonial wealth. A second wave of colonization took place in the nineteenth century, when all the countries of South America that had been under the first two empires were already independent. The Industrial Revolution encouraged the search for new markets, and France and England jockeyed for a share of part of Asia and Africa. The colonized territories had different statuses (dominions, protectorates, or direct rule).
- internet > Internet
- Global interconnection of local IT networks facilitating the exchange of texts, images, sound and video by means of a standard protocol (TCP/IP). Invented by researchers and the military in the US in the 1960s, the network has been steadily growing, spreading and innovating ever since. At the start of the 1990s, browsers made the internet accessible to the general public. High-speed connections have permitted increasingly large data transfers, driving a proliferation of online activities and the transition from an information storage approach to a logic of continuous flows. The community-based and interactive Web 2.0 stimulates interactions between users, changes social behaviors and alters forms of engagement by giving them instant visibility. Internet censorship is regularly practiced by non-democratic states. The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the connection between this network and connected objects of various kinds.
- Globalization
- The term globalization refers to a set of multidimensional processes (economic, cultural, political, financial, social, etc.) that are reconfiguring the global arena. These processes do not exclusively involve a generalized scale shift toward the global because they do not necessarily converge, do not impact all individuals, and do not impact everyone in the same way. Contemporary globalization means more than just an increase in trade and exchanges, an internationalization of economies and an upsurge in connectivity: it is radically transforming the spatial organization of economic, political, social and cultural relationships.
- inequality > Inequality
- Unequal distribution of goods, material and/or non-material, regarded as necessary or desirable. Beyond income inequality (national, international and global), cumulative inequalities can also be measured with respect to accessing public services (healthcare, education, employment, housing, justice, effective security, etc.) and accessing property and natural resources more generally, and also relative to political expression or the capacity to respond to ecological risks. When these inequalities are based on criteria prohibited by law, they constitute discrimination.
- virilocal > Virilocal
- A term used in ethnology to describe the residence of a young heterosexual couple when they are required to live in the same village as, or near to, the husband’s parents (in contrast to uxorilocal, when the couple must live near the wife’s parents). When the wife moves to live with her husband’s family, her residence is described as patrilocal.
- environmental > Environment
- In broad terms, the environment is understood as the biosphere in which living species cohabit, while ecology studies the relations between these organisms and their environment. The environment encompasses very diverse natural areas from undisturbed virgin forests to artificialized environments planned and exploited by humans. In a more limited definition of the term, “environmental” issues are those relating to natural resources (their management, use and degradation) and biological biodiversity (fauna and flora). As a cross-cutting public concern, the environment encompasses issues of societal organization (production models, transport, infrastructure, etc.) and their impacts on the health of humans and ecosystems.
- rape > Rape
- Rape is a criminal act that uses human sexuality (in all its forms) as a method of torture and destruction of the victim’s identity and physical integrity, without necessarily involving death. It has lasting long-term consequences (pregnancy, disease, psychological burden, social and/or family stigma). Sexual violence has an inherent dissymmetry linked to the conditions of human reproduction, since only rape victims who are women can fall pregnant. Rape is an extreme form of violence and a crime of violation for the social and moral individual affected (destruction of family honor in some cultures, feelings of shame among victims). The use of systematic rape as a weapon of war has been recognized since the 1990s.
- war > War
- Violent confrontation between armed groups over values, status, power or scarce resources, in which the aim of each party is to neutralize, weaken or eliminate their adversaries. This organized, collective, armed violence can be undertaken by states (via their national armies) or by non-state groups; it can bring several states into opposition (interstate war) or occur within a single state (civil war). The former, progressively codified within a legal framework, have become rare, while the latter, today primarily caused by state institutional failure, are tending to become more international in scope, to last over time (sometimes decades) and to be extremely devastating, especially for civilian populations.
- sisterhood > Sisterhood
- Sisterhood is the female equivalent of brotherhood, or fraternity. It emerged in feminist writing and action in the 1970s to stress the solidarity and similarity of living conditions between women in androcentric environments and contexts.
- neoliberal > Neoliberal
- The term “neoliberal” is one deployed by critics and not a label attached to any self-proclaimed school of economics. It generally refers to economic policies inspired by the Chicago School (Milton Friedman, awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976), partially applied by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA during the 1980s, and subsequently recommended by economic and financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF. These policies translate into state-implemented privatization and market deregulation measures and differ from classical liberalism in the importance accorded to economic efficiency relative to political freedoms.
- race > Race
- A homogenous biological group in the animal kingdom, distinct from the rest due to its hereditary physical characteristics. Although scientific studies have endlessly demonstrated that human beings form a single race, several political doctrines since the 19th century have used the notion to distinguish human populations, this despite the recognition of fundamental human rights and successful prosecutions in many countries and at the international level (Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948). The notion of race is now used in a very different way – which can, however, lead to confusion – in official statistics, positive law and some social science research, notably in the United States and Canada, to describe and analyze the social organization and values of different ethnic communities.
- ethnicity > Ethnicity
- Ethnicity is a descriptive category that appeared at the end of the 19th century, constructed by anthropologists and disseminated by colonial administrations. Unlike “race” it does not reference biological criteria but designates a group of individuals with the same origin, the same cultural tradition, whose unity is based on language, history, territory, beliefs and the awareness of belonging to an ethnic group. Ethnicity, which some have claimed to be a natural phenomenon, is in fact a social construct, externally imposed or claimed, at once arbitrary and evolving. Proposed as an exclusive identity, it becomes all the more powerful as an instrument of political mobilization when the state is in difficulty. Ethnocentrism consists in understanding the world exclusively through the lens of one’s own culture and seeking to impose this interpretation.
- nationality > Nationality
- In legal terms, nationality expresses an individual’s legal status of belonging to a state in accordance with the rules issued by that state. Nationality derives from parentage (jus sanguinis – right of blood), or from birthplace (jus soli – right of the soil), or is acquired by naturalization. The concept of nationality is linked with the development of the nation-state and the concept of citizenship, even though the status of a national and of a citizen do not necessarily overlap (non-democratic regimes, discrimination against some population categories based on ethnic, religious, linguistic or social criteria).
- indigenous > Indigenous
- Although there is no universally accepted definition to describe indigenous or first peoples, the UN has declared that “indigenous peoples are inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment. They have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live.” The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted in 2007. According to the UN, indigenous peoples represent 370 million individuals, forming over 5,000 different groups, present in around 90 countries on five continents and speaking more than 4,000 languages, most of which are becoming extinct.
- colonies > Colonization
- A historical process by which Europe established deep links with the rest of the world. From the late fifteenth century (the Age of Discovery), a vast movement began for economic, political, and cultural domination of the world, first by Spain and Portugal and then by England, France, and Holland, which from the late sixteenth century started to compete for possession of colonial wealth. A second wave of colonization took place in the nineteenth century, when all the countries of South America that had been under the first two empires were already independent. The Industrial Revolution encouraged the search for new markets, and France and England jockeyed for a share of part of Asia and Africa. The colonized territories had different statuses (dominions, protectorates, or direct rule).
- dimorphism > Dimorphism
- The existence of two distinct forms of the same human, animal, or vegetable species. Research in feminist anthropology undertaken since the 2000s highlights the extent to which primordial dimorphism between men and women has been accentuated by social practices dividing the two sexes (food rationing, marriage selection, sartorial customs, division of labor, and so on).
- modernity > Modern
- Modernity, characterized by the increasing importance of the economy, of technical innovation, of Western-type democratic regimes, and of rational-legal bureaucracy, is defined from an evolutionist perspective according to the model prevalent in the most industrialized countries, and is a trend toward which all the so-called less advanced societies are seen as converging. This viewpoint, widely denounced for its naïve evolutionism, remains nonetheless implicitly present in much political discourse and within a good deal of research. “Postmodern” is used of artistic and philosophical currents of the second half of the 20th century that critique and deconstruct the concept of modernity.
- democracy > Democracy
- A political system based on sovereignty of the people, in which the right to govern depends on acceptance by the people. Inspired by the model set up in Ancient Greece and the individual liberties promoted by liberalism, democracy today is mainly representative and based on the principle of citizens’ equality (elections by universal suffrage). It cannot be dissociated from respect for fundamental human rights, which include freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of information, and so on. While it has gradually become universalized and is tending to become the norm, it does not refer to a single model since it always depends on the social and cultural context in which it is implemented, which varies from one place to another and according to time period.
- migrant > Migration
- Movement of people leaving their country of origin permanently (emigration) to relocate to another country (immigration), which might be voluntary or forced (war, poverty, unemployment, human rights violations, climate factors, etc.), and which often involves temporary stays of varying duration in several transit countries. Migratory flows, which are an integral component of humanity’s history, give rise to a range of public policy measures linked to specific political, economic and cultural contexts and understandings of nationality. Host states seek to organize immigration, sometimes to attract it (need for labor, exploitation of specific territories, naturalizations, etc.), and most often to restrict it (border controls, quotas, residence permits, etc.). In most cases the states of origin seek to maintain relations with their nationals and diaspora communities living abroad.