Full Description
This pioneering collection explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women.
Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasizing these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women's sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure.
Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure brings together challenges to these strictures and exclusions from both the South and North of the globe, with examples of activism, advocacy and programming which use pleasure as an entry point. It shows how positive approaches to pleasure and sexuality can enhance equality and empowerment for all.
Contents
Introduction: Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure - Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall and Kate Hawkins
1. Thinking with Pleasure: Danger, Sexuality and Agency - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
2. Challenging the Pleasure versus Danger Binary: Reflections on Sexuality Workshops with Rural Women's Rights Activists in North India - Jaya Sharma
3. Sexual Pleasure as a Woman's Human Right: Experiences from a Human Rights Training Programme for Women in Turkey - Gulsah Seral Aksakal
4. Better Sex and More Equal Relationships: Couple Training in Nigeria - Dorothy Aken'Ova
5. Building a Movement for Sexual Rights and Pleasure - Xiaopei He
6. Enabling Disabled People to Have and Enjoy the Kind of Sexuality They Want - Lorna Couldrick and Alex Cowan
7. Desires Denied: Sexual Pleasure in the Context of HIV - Alice Welbourn
8. Sex is a Gift from God: Paralysis and Potential in Sex Education in Malawi - Anaïs Bertrand-Dansereau
9. Why We Need to Think about Sexuality and Sexual Well-Being: Addressing Sexual Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa - Chi-Chi Undie
10. Could Watching Porn Increase Our Expectations of (Safe) Pleasure? An Exploration of Some Promising Harm Reduction Practices - Anne Philpott and Krissy Ferris
11. Challenging Clitoraid - Petra Boynton
12. How Was It for You? Pleasure and Performance in Sex Work - Jo Doezema
13. Eroticism, Sensuality and 'Women's Secrets' Among the Baganda - Sylvia Tamale
14. Laughter, the Subversive Body Organ - Ana Francis Mor
