38
Political agents or vulnerable victims?

Framing sexual rights as sexual health in Argentina

Mario Pecheny

In 1998 I wrote a paper with the title ‘Sexual Orientation, AIDS, and Human Rights in Argentina: The Paradox of Social Advance Amidst Health Crisis’ (Pecheny 2003). In this optimistic text, I described how the HIV epidemic helped redefine the status of homosexuality and contributed to the promotion of gay rights. That process was not exceptional. Since the 1980s, HIV and AIDS have been a window of opportunity to render homosexuals visible, foster social movements and NGOs and advance the recognition of gay rights almost everywhere (Altman 1994; Roberts 1995).

Concurrently, advocacy for reproductive health has helped the advance of women’s status. Human rights, population and women’s issues came together in the promotion of women’s empowerment and autonomy (Marques-Pereira 1995; Pecheny 2002). International United Nations Conferences in Vienna (1993), Cairo (1994) and Beijing (1995), and subsequent national and regional conferences have provided transnational public spheres in which women – and men – can discuss the relationship between health, rights, gender and sexuality, contributing to political action and networking at local, national and global levels (Petchesky 2003; Corrêa et al. 2008).

In Latin America, such events coincided with the transition from authoritarian regimes to formal democracies. Since the 1980s the rule of law, liberal rights, free elections and legitimate social mobilisations have become defining features of the political landscape in countries such as Argentina.

Considering these global processes of sexual and gender advance – in addition to political democratisation – why not be optimistic? Why not recognise the value of recent struggles and the advance of political and sexual rights? Intelligent pessimism, as Gramsci (1977: 19) put it, invites us to rethink some of the tensions inherent to these processes. In this chapter, I want to examine if and how the short-term politicisation of sexuality through health exists in tension with a broader and longer term process of the depoliticisation of sexuality and gender relations. According to my hypothesis, if HIV and reproductive health have contributed to the greater recognition of reproductive and sexual rights, they have done so in ways that need to be critically analysed: through allied processes of victimisation (or victimism), medicalisation and judicialisation.

In sexual and reproductive health, as well as in the first wave of sexual rights, subjects were framed as victims: victims of unwanted pregnancies, violence, HIV or social and gender inequalities. Little room was left for political agency, collective projects and historical and structural thinking. We witness now a gradual movement from sexual health to sexual rights. This process opens the door to repoliticise sexuality. However, the original framing has installed the idea that powerful, publicly speaking up and acting subjects – that is, political subjects – are suspect.

We can witness here a particular dynamic: the more sexual an issue or a subject appears to be, the more ‘political’ it is. Yet such actions are political in a specific and stigmatised way: considered as particular, interest based and conflictive. Inversely, the more desexualised an issue or a subject appears to be, the more apolitical it is: considered as impersonal, value or interest free and in harmony with the social order. The challenge, therefore, lies in how to sexualise and politicise issues and subjects in a democratic way, and in the direction of erotic justice.

If we rethink sexuality and politics dialectically, it is possible to identify three key moments in recent Latin American history. First, the widespread use of health discourse as a vehicle for the promotion of sexual rights. Second, the recognition of health discourse as an obstacle to the evolution of sexual rights. Third, the questioning of both health and rights languages as forms of depoliticisation of sexuality practices, parallel to the recognition of sexuality practices as inherently conflictive, and as impossible to reduce to the rational, the public and the normative.¹

In this chapter, I discuss these issues using the experience of Argentina and other Latin American countries as a case study. I draw examples from the fields of reproductive health, abortion, feminist politics and women’s rights, HIV and AIDS, sexual liberation politics and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights, in order to ask to what extent the language of health and rights is hindering the constitution of sexual subjects and the idea and practice of erotic justice.

Victims or subjects: the depoliticisation of sexual issues

In Latin America, sexual rights have advanced thanks to the incorporation of health issues, in particular reproductive health and HIV, in the public agenda. However, both conceptually and in practice, these advances increasingly reveal the existence of limitations, tensions and contradictions. In other words, the language of health obliterates the advance, diversification and deepening of sexual rights. We might as well ask to what extent the language of gender (in its equating of gender with women and in its desexualised versions) and the language of rights itself have lost their potential for social transformation.

In the policy domain, sexuality issues have been rendered as amenable to political decision making and policy intervention. In the domain of rights, similar processes of framing have also led to forms of depoliticisation. As a result, sexuality remains hidden behind languages that inherently violate its logic: the languages of health policies as well as the language of formal, positive and enforceable rights. These liberal languages suppose identifiable and stable subjects, and the possibility of ownership of one’s body, in contradiction with alternative practices that are more substantive, fluid and blurred.

Latin American societies have developed a sexual rights agenda and sexuality-related policies since the last wave of democratisation, in the 1980s and 1990s. Advances have been recorded in fields such as civil rights equity for women and men; access to contraception and sex education; freedom of sexual expression and diversity; access to abortion (in a few cases); redress for sexual and gender violence; HIV/AIDS; sex work; and transgender rights. There are key pending issues, but a long road has been travelled, which provides a degree of optimism (Cabal et al. 2001; Pecheny 2003; Amuchástegui and Rivas 2004; Vianna and Lacerda 2004; Amuchástegui and Aggleton 2007; Petracci and Pecheny 2007; Dides et al. 2008).

However, this agenda often presupposes the notion of sexual victims rather than sexual subjects (Raupp Rios 2004). In sexual and reproductive health, as well as in reproductive and sexual rights, subjects were originally framed as victims. For example, abortion is often more visible as a maternal mortality issue than as a woman’s right to choose her own sexuality and reproduction; and abortion is framed as an individual moral decision or as an involuntary individual fate, rather than the product of gender and class structural relations of inequality and oppression. Social movements often reinforce these ideas and crystallise social interactions based on a logic of the competition among victims, within each social movement and between social movements (Pecheny 2004; Kapur 2005; Polletta 2006). This hegemonic ‘victimist’ framing makes powerful, publicly speaking up and acting political subjects less entitled to rights than to reparations or privileges.

By depoliticisation, I mean the ideological eradication of structural conflicts. After long periods of dictatorship and violent struggle, political conflicts are conceived of today as susceptible of being resolved. The new democratic regimes have framed political conflict as clashes of opinions, rather than the results of social contradictions that may not be amenable to consensus or even compromise. Institutional politics, by definition, institutionalises social conflicts. The possibility of institutionalisation separates ‘civilised’ from ‘barbaric’, Hobbesian social interactions (Benasayag and del Rey 2007). Institutional democracies tolerate conflicts and conflictive actors only when they are able to fit within the norms of this institutionalisation.

How then can societies coexist with their oppressed, inadmissible conflicts? In political theory, the paradigmatic case is the problematic coexistence of capitalism and democracy (Przeworski 1986), but gender relations and particularly sexualised relations or sexuality practices are also at the root of conflicts hard to institutionalise through normal politics. Normal politics implies the construction of conflicts as decidable issues within the political agenda and as the potential objects of public policy. Conflicts framed as clashes of opinions rely on the liberal assumption that all individuals have an equally valuable point of view. The idea that opinions are organically linked to structural and radical conflicts contradicts the vision of an ultimately harmonic order that lies at the base of formal democracy. Political order only institutionalises conflicts that do not question its own foundations.

In addition, governments implement policies on legitimate issues. According to its own validity claim, democratic legitimacy depends on formal procedures such as the majority rule, in a context of fairness. Even within this idealised state, the scope of government tasks means that there is no rational argument for accepting majority rule if this will lead to decisions on topics that ought to remain free from government interference and/or which are beyond politics. Sexuality practices constitute one such area in which government intervention is problematic. It is the self-image of democratic legitimacy that fosters this paradox: the more sexual an issue or a subject appears to be, the more it is considered as personal, conflictive – in other words, beyond democratic legitimacy and government’s legitimate interference.

In this context, how should the sexual nature of some issues and subjects be taken into account in the pursuit of erotic justice? As Sonia Corrêa (2007: 12) has put it:

A challenge sexuality and development thinkers must tackle is to consolidate sexual rights as a foundation of erotic justice. Erotic justice endorses principles of pleasure, fulfilment and delight in sexuality, consent in sexual practices between partners, and a public climate that restricts violence, stigma and discrimination. This concept is inspired by Gayle Rubin (1984). Erotic justice should have the same policy legitimacy as the long-standing and widely accepted principle of social justice and the more recently recognised premise of gender justice.

Erotic justice provides a potent political discourse for actors making claims within the public sphere, but it is less useful as a guide for institutional politics and public policies. Translating principles of erotic justice into laws and policies is more difficult than the cases of social and gender justice. What should be the role of the state in respecting, fulfilling and promoting erotic justice (García and Parker 2006)? What measures and policies can social movements claim? Who are accountable, and what are they accountable for? What is the connection between social justice and erotic justice?

Since the 1980s and the new wave of democratisation, an evolution of sexual rights and a transition from gender- and sex-based inequalities to more equal relations or patterns have been recorded in most Latin American countries. In spite of some pending issues – such as the decriminalisation of abortion – the process of evolution has been so rapid that it may be perceived as the manifestation of linear progress. Nevertheless, there are critical contradictions within sexual democratisation, as well as serious tensions in the political democratisation processes throughout the region.

The consolidation of formal democracies, together with the rule of law, political liberalisation and processes of citizenship (i.e. processes that encourage individuals to consider themselves the subjects of rights (Amuchástegui Herrera and Rivas 2004; Paiva 2003, 2006)), are crucial for political democratisation. By political democratisation, I mean that the scope of rights recognition, as well as that of citizenship, increasingly extends to reach a larger number of subjects and a wider range of matters. New categories of subjects have access to acknowledged rights; societies and legal systems acknowledge new rights; rights contents expand; and the field of application of rights broadens (Lefort 1981, 1986; Jelín 1996; Pecheny 2002).

As a dynamic process, political democratisation implies reflecting on the politicisation of relations and matters framed as necessary, natural and/or private. Ideologically, structural social relations have been constructed as though they are necessary, essential or unavoidable (i.e. they could not be otherwise), as private (i.e. in opposition to the political and the public domains); and as natural (i.e. not social and cultural). A process of politicisation implies shedding light on the fact that social relations are contingent (i.e. are not inevitably so), that they are not (purely) private and that they do not derive from a natural order (Pecheny 2002). This alternative political framing authorises social actors to act politically in a transformative direction.

Sexual democratisation refers to patterns of greater equity in personal relations and the contestation of the frontiers between legitimate sexual practices, identities and relations, as illustrated by Gayle Rubin’s (1984) well-known binary oppositions between good, natural and blessed sex and bad, unnatural and sinful sex. In a narrow sense, sexual democratisation means the recognition, protection and promotion by the state of rights related to sexuality. Let us consider here the politicisation of sexuality in a context of democratisation through neoliberal and neopopulist forms. For the purpose of this chapter, I do not consider these forms as exclusive, but as a continuum; since the 1990s, Latin American neoliberalism has been compatible with historically populist parties, discourses, identities and folklore.

Particularly since the International Conferences on Human Rights (Vienna 1993), Population (Cairo 1994) and Women (Beijing 1995) and in the context of recurrent structural adjustment and neoconservative reduction of political demands, one of the most common strategies for advancing claims for sexual rights has been to frame them as public health needs (Pecheny 2003; Parker et al. 2004). Simultaneously, advances in health have permitted the promotion of sexual rights, because even in contexts of privatisation and neoliberal reform, health is still recognised as a universal good. A Latin American colleague once said, quite ironically: ‘Because in my country we do not have high rates of maternal deaths related to abortion, it is more difficult to demand the decriminalisation of abortion’. Her comment illustrates a common feeling among activists. In the region, many feminists find that public health’s need to reduce maternal deaths is a more effective argument for the decriminalisation of abortion than is a demand for women’s sexual rights.

To what extent is health discourse a useful strategy or an ideological perspective? To what extent have the gains been obtained at the price of their depoliticisation? Politicisation, which involves both argument and struggle, is a process through which social relations are resignified as contingent, as political and public, as well as socially, culturally and historically constructed. This process presupposes the recognition of conflicts inherent to a particular historical moment and social structure. In addition, politicisation is a process by which individual, isolated experiences are inscribed within a broader collective experience, in the sense that ‘I am not the only one’. Take, for example, the experience of assuming one’s HIV seropositivity. For many years, most individuals who received an HIV diagnosis experienced this moment alone, isolated from others (Terto 2000; Pecheny and Manzelli 2008). A politicisation of seropositivity occurred when individuals were able to make sense of their own personal experiences within a community of peers (Pecheny 2002; Paiva 2003).

Other subjects face similar situations of isolation: a young person who realises s/he has desires for a person of the same sex; a rape victim; a girl or a woman with amenorrhoea who faces the possibility of terminating a pregnancy; and a victim of sexual violence. In all of these cases, politicisation means the inscription of individual experiences within a larger whole. Something that ‘does not happen to me as a woman’, but happens to us ‘as women’, provides a way of politicising an individual experience. Such a process allows for the possibility of recognising sexual questions not (only) as individual destinies, but as framed by conflicts intrinsic to a structure of unjust and/or unequal social relationships at a particular historical moment.

In contrast, depoliticisation processes entail concealing or sequestering the historical, structural and political character of specific practices and relations. Depoliticisation can take different forms. Victimisation (or victimism) assumes that individuals or groups deserve to be listened to in their claims only as the victims of injustices, and not as the full subjects of rights. Medicalisation supposes that social problems can be framed and solved objectively by the intervention of doctors and the medical system. Judicialisation refers to the notion that claims should be brought before judges in individual cases, and that injustices should be resolved in terms of individual reparations.

In Latin America, these three mechanisms have allowed for advances in sexual rights, provided individual reparations and improved the relative position of subaltern groups, but at the price of fragmentation and competence between groups. They have stimulated between ‘victims’, a perverse competition whose characteristics are consistent with current processes of social disarticulation and with neoliberal political dynamics (Pecheny 2004).

Throughout the region, procreation, abortion, HIV and AIDS, gender, sexual education, gay and lesbian rights, transgender identity, sex work, etc. are usually framed as public health, human rights and/or population issues or policies, rather than as issues of sexuality. The sexual dimensions of an issue (practice, problem) are usually silenced, by policy- and decision-makers but also by activists and social movements. Depoliticisation is thus intimately linked to desexualisation.

Victimisation is the process through which situations of misfortune or injustice (Shklar 1990) are signified from the perspective of victims who need or ask for reparation – ‘I can speak because of what happened, it happened to me; what happened to me gives me the authority, the dignity, to be listened to and get a response’. Victimisation confers moral virtues and personal dignity on individuals or groups (Polletta 2006). Sometimes it may be necessary to add a redundant adjective before the term victim as in ‘innocent’ victims, as if ‘guilty’ victims might deserve less.

As a way of obtaining a response, strategies of victimisation have provided benefits to different individuals and groups. However, victimisation reaffirms individual stigma and disempowers the collective. When a rape victim appears as a sexed, sexual and desiring subject, her claim for reparations from the act of sexual violence becomes suspect. It seems as if a pure victim, incapable of acting and devoid of desire and reasoning, better deserves her rights than a full person who is the subject of her own body, actions and reason.² In the long term, victimisation contributes to depoliticising conflicts and to the incapacity of acting politically. It hinders the constitution of subjects as political subjects and as collective ones and hinders the possibility of framing social claims as universal. Consequently, victimisation strategies tend to social fragmentation and reducing structural conditions to individual situations.

Victimhood’s temporality is also problematic: is one a victim at the very moment of the victimising acts or does one remain a victim ‘forever’? Given that being a victim is a short-term state and/or it refers to the past, victimism impedes structural and strategic thought. Although it works, it responds to a model of individual amends and avoids a commitment to a more universalising model of rights. This phenomenon happens at national and global levels. By supporting ‘those who suffer the most’, well-intentioned, patronising international donors, non-governmental organisations and government agencies encourage this way of acting.

Moreover, victimism renders political representation logically impossible, as in claims such as ‘You’re not HIV positive, so you have no say in this’ or ‘There are no lesbians on the panel!’ Only authentic victims can speak in the name of other victims, and ultimately only a victim can speak for herself. When it comes to sexual issues, it is common to find this pre-modern idea of representation, which defines it as physical representation, rather than a more modern notion of representation, which is an abstract one. Should the represented subject always be physically ‘there’? Should everybody be mentioned on a panel or in a committee, paper, law or policy, in order to ‘be represented’? This kind of physical representation becomes a key aspect of the competition among victims: to be visible, named, mentioned, specified, and not be subsumed into any form of abstract or universal category.

Victimisation obliterates and impedes the possibility of acting responsibly and speaking of plurality, which, according to Arendt (1992), are the human condition of politics. As agency and expression imply suspicion, the rights of the victim remain linked to silence and helplessness. It is possible to think, as Bruckner (1995) has pointed out, that victimisation is but a fake version of privilege. We are no longer in the field of universal rights here, but in the field of privileges derived from suffering.

Radical victimisation raises aspects that are more controversial. The idea of the absolute victim justifies, in a Hobbesian dynamic, any measure of her part. If my own being is at risk, everything is justified. The victim is sacralised, in a religious sense.

If we agree that victims do not speak nor act, then the dead, the disappeared, embryos, foetuses (Boltanski 2004), the dying or animals, are victims par excellence. All these are absolute innocents, and so they are right a priori. This a priori rightness is non-political and, to some extent, non-human. By definition, pure victims do not speak out. There is a large gap between silence and political discourses. Is silence a political discourse without the context of a hermeneutic process of signification of that silence as political? The political performance of different discourses is critical. In this sense, how performatively powerful are silence, complaints, ironies and protests?

An individual complaint is a discourse that returns to itself, powerless, with no consequences. This typically ‘feminine’ discourse remains at the private level (Amorós-Puente 1990). At the private level too, we also find the irony, a discourse that allows an individual to look, in perspective, at themselves in his or her own situation. This is the gay or Jewish discourse (Kaplan 1997): not powerless, yet not powerful either, because subjects need to introduce their political claims into the public sphere. In public, they become the contentious discourses of protest, of political confrontation in a conflictive situation. As such, the contradiction between speaking subjects and speechless victims becomes clear.

Victimisation is particularly harmful for the politicisation of sexuality. Pro-choice and anti-abortion sides each identify their own victims. Debate becomes impossible at this point. The embryo, the ‘unborn child’, incapable of agency, is an absolute victim, while women are also reduced to non-subjects. Victims are transparent, while subjects are contradictory. The subjective experience of abortion is not coherent, neither is public opinion, while the absolute victim always displays coherence. The unborn child has the right to life from the time of conception, and this is coherent with how this figure has been constructed (Bajos and Ferrand 2006). Arendt (1997) warned, too, against coherent political discourse deductive principles of action, potentially leading to totalitarianism.

My argument here against victimisation does not deny the existence of persons who are victims of something or someone (Cole 2007). Critics of victimisation do not deny the atrocities or inequalities that have caused victims to suffer. The main problem lies in the construction of victims as subjectivities devoid of the potential for becoming political subjects. To accompany someone, to join someone in his or her tragedy, is not the same as to join a collective fight for the future, in positive or utopian terms. In other words, this form of depoliticisation also renders compromises and alliances among different social actors impossible.

Concluding remarks

Recent Latin American history shows a political evolution in sexual matters. However, the politicisation and depoliticisation of sexuality through processes of victimisation, medicalisation and judicialisation invites us to rethink the link between sexuality and politics. These phenomena are, of course, part of broader processes of depoliticisation and objectivation of social practices. Practices and claims are legitimate only when they appear to be impersonal or neutral. In capitalist societies, the logics of social action are ideologically homogenised, as in the case of capitalists and workers (Offe 1985). Different degrees of interest are determined by structural differences of class position, and available political forms of liberal democracy provide the members of different classes with unequal chances of articulating their interests (Offe and Wiesenthal 1985). Critics of political democracies have shown that structural class inequalities are critical to determining the social conditions of formal equality and, inversely, how formal political equality has contributed to the reproduction of class inequalities. In a similar sense, concepts such as sexual citizenship and/or intimate citizenship have recovered this kind of approach to examine political equality in relation to structural differences based on gender and sexuality (Plummer 2003; Cáceres et al. 2004; Corrêa et al. 2008). In other words, these concepts may help us understand how inequalities based on gender and sexuality determine the social conditions of political equality and, inversely, how formal political equality has contributed to the reproduction of gender and sexuality-related inequalities.

Contemporary Latin American societies tend to repress both class and gender/ sexuality structural and historical conflicts. If politics is a way of transforming unequal and unjust social relations, processes of depoliticisation should be analysed critically. Processes of depoliticisation conceal the political nature of sexuality practices, which parallels the ideological process of the concealment of sexualised political dimensions in social relationships. Both politicisation and sexualisation make conflicts visible and mobilise passions. In contrast, depoliticisation and desexualisation objectify sexuality and other social practices. They make social practices impersonal and consistent with the rational-bureaucratic legitimacy of health policies.

Objectivation takes place through the language of public health, but also in the language of gender (most usually in non-relational versions of gender as women) and the language of rights (premised on coherently identifiable sexed/gendered subjects). All these processes and languages related to policy legitimacy reify and homogenise the diversity of projects of happiness, including those related to sex, eroticism and loving relationships.

When we rethink sexuality and politics dialectically, three key moments in recent Latin American history can be identified: health discourse as a vector of sexual rights; health discourse as an obstacle to the evolution of sexual rights; and both health and rights as veiled forms of the depoliticisation of sexuality practices. My analysis of these processes shows the limits policies have when dealing with sexuality, and the value of politics considered as inherently conflictual.

According to Honnig (1993: 15):

To affirm the perpetuity of the contest is not to celebrate a world without points of stabilisation; it is to affirm the reality of perpetual contest, even within an ordered setting, and to identify the affirmative dimension of contestation.

At the same time, this analysis invites us to think about more strategic, contextual, long-term policies, geared towards creating more favourable environments for local, subaltern political struggles, as well as more favourable environments for sexual and erotic practices.

Notes

1 I use here the expression ‘sexuality practices’ to emphasise that I am talking of social practices, experiences and actions rather than of an epistemic field.

2 Interestingly, the Penal Code in Argentina allows abortion only in the case of danger to the life or health of the pregnant woman; and when the pregnancy results from a rape committed to a woman legally declared insane or mentally retarded.

References

Altman, D. (1994) Power and Community. Organizational and Cultural Responses to AIDS, London: Taylor & Francis.

Amorós-Puente, C. (1990) Mujer: Participación, Cultura Política y Estado, Buenos Aires: de la Flor.

Amuchástegui Herrera, A. and Rivas Zivy, M. (2004) ‘Los Procesos de Apropiación subjetiva de los Derechos Sexuales: Notas para la Discusión’, Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos, 19 (3): 543–97.

Amuchástegui, A. and Aggleton, P. (2007) ‘ “I had a Guilty Conscience because I wasn’t Going to Marry Her”: Ethical Dilemmas for Mexican Men in their Sexual Relationships with Women’, Sexualities, 10 (1): 61–81.

Arendt, H. (1992) Condition de l’Homme Moderne, Paris: Agora.

Arendt, H. (1997) L’Impérialisme, Paris: Seuil.

Ayres, J. R. (2002) ‘Conceptos y Prácticas en Salud Pública: Algunas Reflexiones’, Revista Facultad Nacional de Salud Pública (Colombia), 20 (2): 67–82.

Bajos, N. and Ferrand, M. (2006) ‘La Condition ftale n’est pas la Condition humaine’, Travail, Genre et Sociétés, 15: 176–82.

Benasayag, M. and del Rey, A. (2007) Éloge du Conflit, Paris: La Découverte.

Boltanski, L. (2004) La Condition ftale. Une Sociologie de l’Engendrement et de l’Avortement, Paris: Gallimard.

Bruckner, P. (1995) La Tentation de l’Innocence, Paris: Grasset.

Cabal, L., Roa, M. and Lemaitre, J. (eds) (2001) Cuerpo y Derecho. Legislación y Jurisprudencia en América latina, Bogota: Termis.

Cáceres, C., Frasca, T., Pecheny, M. and Terto Jr., V. (eds) (2004) Ciudadanía Sexual en América Latina: Abriendo el Debate, Lima: Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.

Cole, A. M. (2007) The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Corrêa, S. (2007) ‘Realising Sexual Rights’, available at www.ids.ac.uk/ids/bookshop/outputs/RealisingSRids.pdf (accessed 12 December 2008).

Corrêa, S., Petchesky, R. and Parker, R. (2008) Sexuality, Health and Human Rights, London and New York: Routledge.

Dides, C., Marques, A., Guajardo, A. and Casas, L. (2008) Chile: Panorama de Sexualidad y Derechos humanos, Santiago: FLACSO/CLAM.

García, J. and Parker, R. (2006) ‘From Global Discourse to Local Action: The Making of a Sexual Rights Movement?’, Horizontes Antropológicos, 12 (26): 13–41.

Gramsci, A. (1977) Pasado y Presente, Buenos Aires: Granica.

Honnig, B. (1993) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Jelín, E. (1996) ‘Human Rights and the Construction of Democracy’, in Jelin, E. and Hershberg, E. (eds) Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenship, and Society in Latin America, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Kaplan, M. B. (1997) Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire, New York and London: Routledge.

Kapur, R. (2005) ‘The Tragedy of Victimisation Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Postcolonial Feminist Legal Politics’. in Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: Routledge.

Lefort, C. (1981) ‘Droits de l’homme et politique’, in L’Invention démocratique, Paris: Fayard.

Lefort, C. (1986) ‘La Question de la Démocratie’, in Essais sur le politique, Paris: Seuil.

Marques-Pereira, B. (1995) ‘Les Droits reproductifs comme Droits de Citoyenneté’, in Marques-Pereira, B. and Bizberg, I. (eds) La Citoyenneté sociale en Amérique Latine, Bruxelles and Paris: L’Harmattan.

Offe, C. (1985) ‘Introduction’, in Disorganized Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Offe, C. and Wiesenthal, H. (1985) ‘Two Logics of Collective Action’, in Offe, C. Disorganized Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Paiva, V. (2003) ‘Sem Mágicas Soluções: A Prevenção do HIV e da AIDS como um Processo de Emancipação Psicossocial’, Divulgação em Saúde para Debate, 27: 58–69.

Paiva, V. (2006) ‘Analisando Cenas e Sexualidades: A Promocao da Saúde na Perspectiva dos Direitos Humanos’, in Cáceres, C., Careaga, G., Frasca, T. and Pecheny, M. (eds) Sexualidad, Estigma y Derechos humanos: Desafíos para el Acesso a la Salud en América Latina, Lima: FASPA/UPCH.

Parker, R., di Mauro, D., Filiano, B., García, J., Muñoz-Laboy, M. and Sember, R. (2004) ‘Global Transformations and Intimate Relations in the 21st Century: Social Science Research on Sexuality and the Emergence of Sexual Health and Sexual Rights Frameworks’,Annual Review of Sex Research, 15: 362–98.

Pecheny, M. (2002) La Construction de l’Avortement et du Sida en tant que Questions politiques: Le Cas de l’Argentine, Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.

Pecheny, M. (2003) ‘Sexual Orientation, AIDS and Human Rights in Argentina’, in Eckstein, S. and Wickham-Crowley, T. (eds) Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America, New York and London: Routledge.

Pecheny, M. (2004) ‘Lógicas de Acción Colectiva de los Movimientos por los Derechos Sexuales: Un Análisis con Aires abstractos de Experiencias bien concretas’, in Cáceres, C., Frasca, T., Pecheny, M. and Terto Jr., V. (eds) Ciudadanía Sexual en América Latina: Abriendo el Debate, Lima: Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.

Pecheny, M. and Manzelli, H. (eds) (2008) Estudio Nacional sobre la Situación Social de las Personas Viviendo con VIH en la Argentina, Buenos Aires: UBATEC.

Petchesky, R. (2003) Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights, London: Zed Books.

Petracci, M. and Pecheny, M. (2007) Argentina: Derechos humanos y Sexualidad, Buenos Aires: CEDES-CLAM.

Plummer, K. (2003) Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Polletta, F. (2006) ‘Ways of Knowing Stories Worth Telling: Why Casting Oneself as a Victim Sometimes Hurts the Cause’, in It was like a Fever. Storytelling in Protest and Politics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Przeworski, A. (1986) Capitalism and Social Democracy (Studies in Marxism and Social Theory), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Raupp Rios, R. (2004) ‘Apuntes para un Derecho Democrático de la Dexualidad’, in Cáceres, C., Frasca, T., Pecheny, M. and Terto Jr., V. (eds) Ciudadanía Sexual en América Latina: Abriendo el Debate, Lima: Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.

Roberts, M. W. (1995) ‘Emergence of Gay Identity and Gay Social Movements in Developing Countries: The AIDS Crisis as Catalyst’, Alternatives, 20 (2): 243–64.

Rubin, G. (1984) ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in Vance, C. (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Shklar, J. (1990) The Faces of Injustice, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Terto Jr., V. (2000) ‘Male Homosexuality and Seropositivity: The Construction of Social Identities in Brazil’, in Parker, R., Barbosa, R. and Aggleton, P. (eds) Framing the Sexual Subject. The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vianna, A. and Lacerda, P. (2004) Direitos e Políticas Sexuais no Brasil – O Panorama atual, Rio de Janeiro: CEPESC.