This thesis is a study of the ways in which the concept of sexuality changes in
meaning over time and as it travels through different Peruvian feminist
discursive fields and sites of action. Although academic research on Latin
American feminists' politics of sexuality has been very limited to date, their
own documents reveal a notable absence of debates on same-sex sexuality
within the field of sexual and reproductive rights. Moreover, when same-sex
sexuality is incorporated into discourse, conceptualized as lesbian rights, it does
not refer to low-income women. This paradox is mirrored in feminist
connections with British international development agencies. Combining multisited
ethnography with a variety of qualitative research methods, I examine the
effects of the shifting meanings and normative assumptions in the deployment
of 'sexuality' by key Peruvian feminist individuals and organizations in their
work at local, national, regional and global levels. In this thesis I show that feminist discourse on sexual rights is implicitly
heteronormative with reference to women in Lima's low-income settlements
and related national policy advocacy. This limitation is influenced by and
reinforces the discursive and funding pressures emanating from international
development agencies. Meanwhile, the same feminist actors' national and
regional public policy advocacy on lesbian rights and non-discrimination on the
basis of sexual orientation does not connect sexuality with, class, ethnic or
national differences and inequalities. The consequence is the construction of a
normative middle class, modern, global, urban lesbian subject in Peru that is
considered of little relevance by UK-based international development agencies.
At regional and global levels, feminist discourse on sexual and reproductive
rights has very recently incorporated ythe notions of 'sexual and gender
diversity', thus incorporating questions of same-sex sexuality. However,
differences of social class, race, ethnicity and geo-political location remain
unexamined. I argue that in future feminist cultural politics, the pre-theoretical
commitments and normative assumptions of sexuality and related rights-based
concepts, deployed in different discursive fields and sites of action, need be
theorized on the basis of women's knowledge from different economic, ethnic, racial and national contexts