Rosalind Petchesky, Sonia Corrêa and Richard Parker
Reacting to decades of single-minded attention to abuse, victimisation and torture by feminist and human rights activists, writers on sexual rights since 2000 have shifted the balance towards ‘pleasure’. At issue here is the principle that ‘positive’ or affirmative rights – those that explicitly enhance capabilities, the range of freedoms and the enabling conditions necessary to exercise them – are as important as ‘negative’ rights – those that prohibit abuses and violence (Petchesky 2000; Garcia and Parker 2006; Corrêa et al. 2008). With respect to sexuality, the ICPD Programme of Action (1994) defined sexual health in terms of people being ‘able to have a satisfying and safe sex life’ aimed at ‘the enhancement of life and personal relations, and not merely counselling and care related to reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases’ (para. 7.1). A decade later, Paul Hunt, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health 2002–8, likewise defined sexual health as ‘a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being related to sexuality, not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction, or infirmity’. In addition to his inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the list of ‘fundamental human rights’ related to sexuality, Hunt remarked that ‘sexual health requires a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence’ (Hunt 2004: 14–15).
Implicit in these definitions is an awareness that positive and negative rights are inseparable: ‘Not only does a person’s right to fully develop and enjoy her body and her erotic and emotional capacities depend on freedom from abuse and violence, and on having the necessary enabling conditions and material resources [to make such enjoyment possible]; it may also be that awareness of affirmative sexual rights comes as a result of experiencing their violation’ (Petchesky 2000: 97). Nonetheless, as religious and ideological conservatism have strengthened their hold on policymaking in many national and international arenas, it remains far easier and more acceptable to oppose abuse, discrimination and hate crimes than to assert pleasurable and safe sexual experiences as a positive right – particularly for unmarried women, young people and all varieties of sexual and gender outlaws. This is because of not only external threats (the political risks of being accused, from the left and the right, of ‘hedonism’, ‘narcissism’ and ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Satanist’ values) but also internal divisions, including the confusions and disagreements among feminist and lesbian, gay, transgender and intersex activists about what positive, collective values for sexual pleasure and wellbeing we actually share. At the same time, restricting advocacy to negative freedoms has unacceptable costs:
The negative, exclusionary approach to rights, sometimes expressed as the right to ‘privacy’ or to be ‘let alone’ in one’s choices and desires, can never in itself help construct an alternative vision or lead to fundamental structural, social, and cultural transformations. Even the feminist slogan ‘my body is my own’, while rhetorically powerful, may be perfectly compatible with the hegemonic global market, insofar as it demands freedom from abuse but not from the economic conditions that compel a woman to sell her body or its sexual or reproductive capacities [in other words, radical changes in those conditions].
(Petchesky 2000: 91)
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1962), often seen as a pessimistic resignation to the irresolvable conflict between Eros and Thanatos in modern societies, may seem an unlikely source to draw on here. But this early-twentieth-century text may also be read as a cautious critique of civilisation’s inability to tolerate unfettered love, and an argument on behalf of ‘sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right’. Later Foucault (1978: 157) famously called for a ‘counterattack against the deployment of sexuality’ as a domain of power and biopolitical regulation, a counterattack that could have as its motto ‘bodies and pleasures’. Many researchers on sexuality and advocates of sexual rights across sexual and gender differences have taken up this call, beginning with Rubin’s (1984) conceptualisation of erotic justice and injustice and her appeal for ‘rich descriptions’ that would abandon ‘hierarchies of sexual value’ and simply document ‘bodies and pleasures’ in all their enormous variety. This literature reflects an attempt to escape the focus on normalisation, ‘sexual scripts’ and the techniques of biopolitics – that is, the very view of sexuality as discourse and regulatory power that Foucault exposed – and to focus instead on what Gary Dowsett (2000) has called bodies in desire: what people feel and do in everyday life. As Connell and Dowsett remark, ‘social framing theory’, more commonly known as social construction, has a ‘tendency to lose the body’ and intimate relationships in its preoccupation with discourses and techniques (1999: 191).
One example of this recent critical literature is Peter Jackson’s detailed ethnographic exploration of the ‘explosion of Thai identities’ and the ways they ‘are simultaneously gendered and sexualised’. Jackson elucidates the ‘endless circuit of mutual referencing’ between ‘the categories of gender and sexuality’ as they became manifest in the profusion of popular discourses for expressing different ways of being sexual, having sex and doing gender in mid-twentieth-century Thailand. He challenges the frameworks of theorists such as Foucault and Sedgwick who tend to separate ‘sexuality’ from gender. Instead, Jackson wants to ‘talk of “eroticism” and “discourses of the erotic” ’ and to frame ‘Thai identities as eroticised genders rather than sexualities’ (Jackson 2007: 352, 343). In doing so, he implicitly recasts Thai erotic subjectivities as active agents, self-naming and living their desire, rather than as objects of regulatory discipline.
In a different way, Sylvia Tamale (2006) defies stereotypes of African women as always victimised by ‘harmful traditional practices’, and recovers local forms in which African women may redeploy such practices as vehicles of women’s sexual empowerment. In a study of the ssenga (female erotic teachers and counsellors) among the Baganda people of Uganda, Tamale finds a complex mix of aims and effects in sexual initiation rituals. Along with messages to young women and girls that convey strict heteronormativity and the need to fulfil wifely duties, she uncovers a strong sense of entitlement to sexual pleasure and wellbeing for women. In addition to messages about the importance of economic independence from husbands and rights to be free from cruelty and abuse, ssengas (whose practices have now become commercialised) convey information about aphrodisiacs, lubricants, ‘sexual paraphernalia and aids’ and a variety of sexually suggestive terms. Tamale even defends the traditional practice of elongating the labia of premenarchal girls, condemned by the World Health Organisation as a form of female genital mutilation (FGM), as pleasure enhancing for both women and men. Among the younger generation of ssenga trainees, many are rejecting the more traditional gender norms that privilege male sexuality, make motherhood women’s ultimate identity and fail to train men in how to please their women partners. These young Baganda women ‘regard sex not primarily for procreation but for leisure and pleasure, relocating sex from the medicalised/reproduction plane to the erotic zone’ (Tamale 2006: 93).
It may be one of the strange ironies of the HIV pandemic that it has created a space for more open talk about sexuality, sexual behaviour and erotic pleasure. The Pleasure Project (2007) cites evidence that HIV prevention and safer sex programmes incorporating and promoting sexual pleasure can increase the consistent use of condoms and thus improve public health outcomes. The project has identified a wide range of such programmes in countries as diverse as Cambodia, India, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Some, focusing on the familiar ‘target groups’ such as men who have sex with men, sex workers and young people, involve interventions by peers and co-workers; others, focusing on married couples, involve such unlikely participants as ‘local Catholic priests and nuns’. The project catalogues a surprising array of techniques for eroticising both the male and female condom and using them to enhance stimulation. It introduces sexy language and tasty lubricants in training people how to use tongues, lips, hands and eyes to make insertion a sensual experience, and it uses media campaigns to convey the general message that safer sex (with condoms) is exciting, ‘natural’ and fun (Philpott et al. 2006; Knerr and Philpott 2006). Reminiscent of decades of feminist campaigns for safe, effective and female-friendly contraceptives, these programmes are committed to a ‘power of pleasure’ message as well as to the enabling conditions of availability, affordability and good quality. All, they imply, are essential components of sexual rights as human rights.
The ‘sexy’ marketing of safer sex products may seem like an instrumentalist cooption of ‘pleasure in its own right’ – pleasure as a means towards prevention. Yet, to the extent that millions of people across the globe – disproportionately young African, South Asian and African-American women – receive knowledge of sexuality filtered through the prism of HIV and AIDS, there is no better site in which to move pleasure to the foreground. This solemn coupling of health crisis and the erotic should remind us that ‘the construction of sexual desirability’ is ‘already social’, whatever the context (Connell and Dowsett 1999: 191–2).
HIV and programmes to address it are prominent scenarios for producing gendered and sexual ‘scripts’ (Paiva 2000; Simon and Gagnon 2007), but they merely illustrate the reality that ‘bodies and pleasures’ are never unmediated. Alas, Foucault was right; they are always and everywhere produced, shaped and made intelligible through a field of discursive meanings (Butler 1993; Fausto-Sterling 2000). This in turn raises questions about the complex variety of whatever we may mean by ‘pleasure’ and the uneasy tension between pleasure as an infinitely variable lived experience and the more inflexible categories of ‘rights’:
The idea of sexual pleasure, its definitions, its language, its expression, all typically come from below, from the local context where people experience life. These interpretations emerge from cultural systems of meaning and significance that are a mélange of popular culture intersecting with elite culture, mechanically reproduced and ideologically mediated … The tendency of categorising rights does not easily lend itself to the multiple and fluid interpretations of pleasure and desire.
(Garcia and Parker 2006: 24–5)
Lewis and Gordon (2006) make a compelling case for why the call to bring pleasure back into sexual rights may be rhetorically appealing but glosses over the enormous ambiguities and complexities that the idea of sexual pleasure involves. Enumerating dozens of hypothetical contexts in which sexual encounters occur, or reasons why people may engage in sexual acts – along a broad continuum from coercion to lust – they observe, ‘the possibility and nature of “pleasure” is utterly different in all these situations’.2 Not only does ‘context [shape] sexualities and sexual encounters’; it also shapes what pleasure feels like (p. 110). A few of their examples illustrate this dramatically:
If your children or grandparents are starving or ill, if you are unemployed or poor, if you are in a conflict zone far from home, then a paid sexual encounter could be joyful not because of actual physical or emotional satisfaction, but because you are accessing possibilities of affirmation … If you are far from home in a risky conflict situation, far from the intimacies of family or community, living in discomfort, facing the unknowns of danger, injury or death, under pressure to keep up a ‘front’ in mostly male company, then the pleasure of sex with a local woman, enabled by financial exchange, may not be just about orgasm, but involve a whole range of reassurances and comfort. If you live in a civil war, with collapsed social infrastructure, widespread abject poverty and minimal family resources and violence in the home, your sexual experience with the older sugar daddy (who is enabling your only possible access to education as a girl) may also be the kindest, most pleasuring relation you have.
(p. 111)
Here, we are reminded of the classic narrative by the nineteenth-century African-American former slave, Harriet Jacobs, when she begs her readers to stretch their moral compass to understand why she, as a 15-year-old enslaved girl, would willingly give herself to an older, unmarried man ‘who is not her master’: ‘There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment’ (Jacobs 1987 [orig. 1861]: 385). Pleasure comes in many forms and may involve successful trades within conditions of racialised and gendered subordination, or warding off ‘the fragile edges of pride, anxiety, humiliation and rejection that haunt traditional masculinities’ (Lewis and Gordon 2006: 115).
But this kind of careful attention to the infinite nuances of pleasure and the ‘contextual realities of real relations, real bodies in real life situations of survival’ seems to require an entirely different vocabulary from that of human rights. Lewis and Gordon ask, ‘is the language of “needs to be met” and “rights to be fulfilled” radically off key, dissociating sexual pleasure from social context and insulating it from the tides of ordinary daily lives?’ (2006: 113). Here we come up against the limitations of rights as an ethical framework and discourse; the ways in which its tendency to press sexuality into discrete identity categories and to focus on violations fails to capture either the range of erotic experience or ‘the sexual diversity within each of us’ (Sharma 2006: 55). One way to address this problem is to broaden our understanding of eroticism itself and thus of what a human rights of sexuality might encompass. We need to return to something closer to Audre Lorde’s (1984) conception of the uses of the erotic and the ways in which eroticism is about empowering and energising not only my body but also my community. This is similar to what Vera Paiva suggests in proposing a form of public education around HIV/ AIDS that would merge a Freirian approach to politicisation as self and community empowerment with a Brazilian cultural affirmation of the erotic potential in all of us. From this perspective, eroticism and public, communal engagement are entirely interdependent: ‘[E]ncouraging people to be the agents of their whole life – subjects who are capable of choosing and deciding’ and ‘to look beyond [their] own narcissistic reflection [toward] psycho-social emancipation’ is a means for ‘creating political agency and stimulating desire at one and the same time’ (Paiva 2003: 200–1).
When the National Network of Sex Worker Organisations in Kerala insists on both ‘an enabling environment … in which [sex workers] can live as free citizens’ and ‘the right to safe and pleasurable sex’, its actions reflect a similar understanding (see Corrêa et al. 2008: Chapter 9). So does Outsiders, the UK-based organisation for people with various forms of disability, when it holds sex parties for differently abled people of diverse sexual and gender orientations, making recognition of their sexual lives as important as access to physical, public spaces (Ilkkaracan and Jolly 2007). Erotic justice and social justice are not one and the same, but they are deeply tied to one another; and a human rights framework worth fighting for must embrace their deep interconnections.
The appeal to relink bodies with communities, and erotic justice with social justice, brings us back from the nebulae of ethics to the more solid but shifting ground of politics. But what sorts of politics will make these linkages possible in the world as it currently is? Over a quarter of a century ago, Derrida’s dream of dancing beyond all the sexual binaries – ‘feminine-masculine, … bi-sexuality, … homosexuality and heterosexuality’ – was a vision of queerness that anticipated the eruption of ‘incalculable choreographies’ of sexual and gender variance across the globe (Derrida 1982: 76). Today, that vision seems like more than a dream, still much less than a liveable reality free from stigma and harassment, for the millions who attempt to live it. The issue we inevitably come back to is how to transform visions into practical possibilities: what obstacles still exist to bridging theory and practice? What concrete strategies, organisational forms and ways of building viable coalitions are beginning to emerge for sexual rights activism? And, to what extent can that activism overcome some of the troubling limits of human rights as discussed earlier?
An inhospitable global landscape makes these questions all the more daunting. In scornful reaction to the choreographies of pleasure, three powerful forces – rampant militarism, hegemonic capitalism and dogmatic religiosity – continue to produce violent, commodified, covert, apologetic or otherwise distorted forms of sexuality. The institutions of states and intergovernmental organisations, to which previous generations looked for social solidarity and the promise of equality, have become discredited by corruption, privatisation, paralysis and complicity with militarism, global capitalism and radical religion. Meanwhile, religious institutions are themselves caught in scandals of sexual predation (the Catholic Church) and agendas of military aggrandisement (imperial Christianity, radical Islam, Hindutva communalism, militant Zionism). In the interstices of these large-scale forces – at the level of the micro-politics of everyday life – biomedical authorities continue to pathologise, and states to police, criminalise and persecute, sexual deviants of many kinds. New local and transnational actors constantly emerge, but they face, on the one hand, scarce resources and marginalisation within, or on the fringes of, left and feminist movements that have themselves become increasingly fragmented and marginalised; and, on the other hand, the risks of cooption that come from reliance on international development agencies and donor agendas.
Yet, external forces and constraints are only part of the picture. A revitalised language and politics of sexual freedom needs to overcome a number of binary traps – false double binds – that hobble our movements and keep political practice lagging behind recent theoretical advances regarding sexuality and gender. Among these traps, the following are most worrisome.
A division between erotic justice and social justice (and consequently between movements for sexual rights and those aimed at economic development and ending poverty and war) derives from an epistemological error that extracts intimate and bodily experience from its social matrix. Such a division makes no sense in the context of real people’s lives. A sex worker’s struggle against poverty, police brutality, HIV and moral stigma is a multipronged struggle for a whole and dignified life. A transgender or intersex person’s capacity to be who she/he is, in public without shame, or to access necessary health and prenatal care, is inseparable from her/his ability to find work in an environment free of discrimination and harassment. The exposure of Iraqi women, gay men and transgenders to daily threats of sectarian, sexual and gender-based violence, and their exclusion from the political space, are part and parcel of their collective oppression due to the US-led military invasion and occupation (Susskind 2007).
Treating sexuality as something separate from political economy ignores the fact that healthcare access, affordable housing, adequate nutrition, safe environments and secure livelihoods are indispensable for safe and pleasurable erotic experience to be real. This false dichotomy not only obscures the necessary enabling conditions for sexual rights across lines of gender, class, race, ethnicity and geography. It also disregards the materiality of sexual expression and wellbeing, a materiality rooted, not in some essential biological drive or genetic predisposition, but rather in the ways that bodies ‘matter’ and become materialised through the same regulatory norms and power relations that produce gender, class, race, ethnicity and geography to begin with (Butler 1993; Corrêa et al. 2008). If bodies themselves – genes, hormones, sexual and reproductive organs – are always imbued with, and made intelligible through, norms and practices, the cultural and economic/political dimensions of those norms are also closely intertwined. And the indeterminacy of these relations (fluid, unpredictable, changing) makes it all the more urgent that advocacy for erotic justice and advocacy for economic justice be similarly bound together.
As work on our recent book, Sexuality, Health and Human Rights (Corrêa et al. 2008) came to a close, the US presidential elections crowded the mainstream media with speeches by leading candidates professing ‘faith’ and belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. At the same time, militant Islamists in Sudan were calling for the death of a British teacher who allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammed, and a religious court in Saudi Arabia sentenced a female rape victim to 300 lashes for being seen in a car with men to whom she was not related. In such a climate, many advocates of both erotic justice and economic justice must feel pressed into a staunch defence of secularism – indeed, they must even feel nostalgia for what seemed to be a calmer, more rational era in which secularity governed public space, and religion was a matter of private conviction and ritual. But it is precisely because religion has become so intensely politicised in the post-Cold War world that secularity has taken on an aura of either a lost golden age or the demonic and godless opposite of religious virtue. In other words, we again confront a false dichotomy, a highly rhetorical construction, that evades the complex ways in which ‘faith’ and ‘reason’, religion and politics, have always been interpenetrating, overlapping domains, although in different ways and in different historical and local contexts (Asad 2003; Derrida and Vattimo 1998).
In the present geopolitical context – and possibly for the foreseeable future – feminist and sexual rights activists and intellectuals will need to re-engage with religion without ‘returning’ there. What this means, in terms of political analysis and strategy, is bringing a critical perspective to bear on religion as a continuous but changing aspect of political and social reality, not its ‘opposite’. On the one hand, this kind of critical engagement means challenging – loudly and forthrightly – the injustices perpetrated in the name of religion, however and wherever they occur, while also disavowing Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of religious bigotry sometimes proclaimed in the name of sexual rights. On the other hand, it could also mean opening doors that a dogmatic or defensive secularism leave closed – for example, examining the spiritual, ecstatic and mystical dimensions of sexuality, or forging alliances with religious identified groups where we share common goals and values. Sisters in Islam in Malaysia, the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies and Catholics for a Free Choice provide examples of groups that have moved in this direction.
Both the Marxist left and the religious right dismiss claims concerning sexual freedom and expression as ‘individualist’ by definition and therefore ‘bad’ – whether because such claims are subordinate to the presumably ‘collective’ aims of ending poverty, securing universal healthcare, empowering workers and so on, or because they represent ‘selfish’ and ‘hedonistic’ moral values. We argue, instead, for a vision that encompasses both singularity and interdependence (of bodies, persons, desires). By insisting on the singularity of bodies we point to the indeterminacy and infinite variety of desire, even as bodies and pleasures are always lived within, and dependent on, multiple relationships and social ties. We also remind ourselves that economic and social rights accruing to communities (for safe water, healthcare, livelihoods, etc.) are ultimately about the individual bodies that need these resources to live. Rights are always individual and social at the same time, just as persons are. No one else can get inside ‘my’ body and experience its particular pain, terror, yearning or ecstasy. But the pain, terror, yearning and ecstasy are the effects of power relations and interdependencies that make us who or what we are, embed us within community and kin networks and simultaneously produce community and kin as social constructs.
The project of reconceptualising individual claims within matrices of community and kin relationships – a holistic perspective that emphasises the social and relational dimensions of sexual rights – is closely linked to that of rethinking identity politics. Here again we are faced with an array of imagined dichotomies that end up enervating social movements and weakening their capacity for radical transformation. In the realm of sexual and gender politics, there exist tensions between two unsatisfactory tendencies. First, there is the totalising and gratuitously additive character of acronyms (LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQI, etc.) that glibly cover over the specifically different situations of each subgroup, as well as the power differentials among them. Second, there is the also troubling prospect, and the reality, of ‘splinterings’, in which each of the subgroups breaks away into its own identity-based enclave. The contempt that some gay men, lesbians and straight feminists have sometimes shown toward trans men and women who wish to join their gatherings, and the reaction of trans and intersex groups who seek to establish clearly defined communities of their own, reinforce the fragmentation that critics of identity politics have bemoaned for some 15 years. Just as problematic is the reluctance of many HIV and AIDS groups to take on and defend issues of sexual diversity, equality and pleasure, in addition to the safer discourses of public health. All this replays the tensions between commonality and difference (of race, ethnicity, class, region, sexual orientation) that have disturbed feminist politics for decades.
How therefore do we create meaningful and politically viable linkages across a wide range of identity-based groups without erasing the real social differences among them or returning to the empty and historically contaminated (and anthropocentric) abstraction of ‘humanity as a whole’? The vision here is one of a politics of the body and its integrity, freedom, social connectedness and pleasures that would form the ground for working coalitions and solidarity across many diverse activist groups – whether feminist, lesbian, gay, transgender, queer, intersex and people living with HIV or groups mobilised against torture, militarism, racism and ethnic violence and those for healthcare, reproductive justice, comprehensive sex education, food security and disability rights. Good models for such work across identity boundaries do exist, but they are still few and far between. At the national level, they include the campaigns in Turkey to reform the civil and penal codes (Ilkkaracan 2007); the human rights response to HIV and AIDS in Brazil (Berkman et al. 2005); and the fight to revoke Section 377 in India (Corrêa et al. 2008, Ramasubban 2007). At the international level, they include the drafting and adoption of the Yogyakarta Principles (2007) (O’Flaherty and Fisher 2008; Sanders 2008) and the coalitions working to bring awareness of sexual, reproductive and health rights to the UN Human Rights Council.
Here there are lessons to be learned from another, related false dichotomy: that between the local and the global. All the examples of good models cited earlier are ones in which key actors have combined deep knowledge of local conditions, institutions and cultures with awareness of, and experience in, shaping international human rights principles. They exemplify the observation made earlier that the global and the local are intersecting spaces rather than separate spheres, particularly in conditions of globalisation and the proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Tan 2009). Yet tensions between these spaces persist, as illustrated by the Zina cases in Nigeria in which international activists attempted to intervene in complete disregard of the strategies of local sexual rights activists (see Corrêa et al. 2008: Chapter 3). Commenting on the resulting discordance, Imam remarked:
To respect the beliefs, tenets, and practices of both local cultures and international human rights agreements requires a double ‘claim and critique’ strategy. This consists of claiming ownership of both local cultures and international human rights discourses (including the right to participate in the defining content of each), while privileging neither local nor international as automatically superior and thus being able to criticise both.
(Imam 2005: 66)
Imam’s caveat reminds us once again that human rights/sexual rights discourse and practice constitute a terrain of political struggle that is constantly shifting. We cannot dispense with the language of human rights, but neither can we accept it as fully adequate or complete. As Jacques Derrida has said, ‘we must [il faut] more than ever stand on the side of human rights’, but they ‘are never sufficient’ (in Borradori 2003: 132). Rather, the political project of human rights and sexual rights is to continually reinvent their meanings so they are social and individual, global and local, theoretical and practical, inclusive and specific, visionary and operational, about the body and about the collective body, all at the same time. The ‘beyond’ beyond dichotomous thinking is political solidarity.
1 The text of this chapter was originally published in Sonia Corrêa, Rosalind Petchesky and Richard Parker, Sexuality, Health and Human Rights (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 212–24. It is reprinted here with minor revisions by the authors and with the permission of the publisher.
2 The list includes: ‘marital duty or fear of abandonment; … the need to perform and prove yourself; because you have no choice; business; education funding; fear of violence; self-esteem boosting; boredom; kindness and generosity; pity; fear that the man’s balls will burst or he will go mad; worn down by constant demand; to be allowed to sleep; to have children; to feel powerful; for exercise; self-affirmation; love; … for revenge; because there are electricity cuts at night; … to lose weight; … because you cannot sleep; to reduce tension in the home; to share intimacy … to forward your career; to get good grades’ and on and on (Lewis and Gordon 2006: 111).
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