Abortion and Sex Work: An impertinent dialogue on sexual rights.
The Department of Gender Studies seminar aims to identify and explore the possibilities and limitations of interpreting and using the sexual rights conceptual to address abortion and sex work. The conversation will chart tensions, contradictions and disjunctions, but also examine points of convergence – in particular, sexual rights as a tool to resist coercion and disciplining and, most principally, to contest the expansion and intensification of criminal law in current world conditions.
One possible narrative on the genealogy of sexual rights is that it was engendered at the crossroads between sexual health -- a technical notion framed by WHO in the mid 1970s that rapidly matured due to the impact of HIV/AIDS – and the concept of reproductive rights crafted by the feminist imagination in the USA in the heat of the 1970s-80s struggles around abortion, access to contraception and forced sterilization. Regardless of how this history is told, an unequivocal landmark on this path was the adoption of a paragraph on the right of women to exercise their sexuality free from coercion, discrimination and violence in the Platform of Action of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women. One remarkable trace of the Beijing sexual rights language is that while originally written to address the constraints experienced by heterosexual women in the sexuality realm (especially married women) it would be quite rapidly enlarged to mean ‘the right of all persons to exercise their sexuality free from coercion, discrimination and violence”. Since the 1990s sexual rights became therefore a rights-based place potentially inhabited by many other bodies and experiences: gay, lesbian and bisexual persons, and adolescents, but also sex workers.
Sexual rights remains until today a concept open to interpretation because it has not been translated into a binding normative definition, even when elements of protection and enabling conditions for the exercise of sexual rights have gained weight in human rights language. While this openness is positive because it allows for the conversation to continue, it also means that sexual rights denote very different things depending on the actors and the contexts.
For example, if in many places the term evokes predominantly LGBT rights, in the work by the Office of the High Commissioner of Human rights it is mainly used to address women’s sexual rights. Furthermore, quite frequently, groups and institutions that are committed to sexual rights in one domain do not expand this to cover/include other areas, as exemplified by movements and states' positions that hail the sexual rights of LGBT persons but repudiate sex work. In what concerns abortion specifically, while some voices constantly remind us that criminal laws on abortion are aimed at constraining women’s sexual autonomy, the abortion rights movement very rarely struggles for abortion as a sexual right.
Speakers:
Marge Berer, a feminist activist, editor and writer who for 23 years was the editor of the journal Reproductive Health Matters, which she co-founded, and is currently the international coordinator of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion.
Pye Jakobsson, a Swedish sex work activist, who has extensively worked on HIV /AIDS, is a co-funder of the Swedish network Rose Alliance (now Nordic network of sex workers and allies from Sweden, Norway, Finland) and Iceland and has recently stepped down as president of the Global Network of Sex Work Projects. She is also one of the co-founders of ICRSE, the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe and a member of the Australian sw organisation Scarlet Alliance.
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