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 -…
This commentary introduces the HARPS supplement on getting research into policy and practice in sexual and reproductive health (SRH). The papers in this supplement have been produced by the Sexual Health and HIV Evidence into Practice (SHHEP) collaboration of international research, practitioner and advocacy organizations based in research programmes funded by the UK Department for International Development.
Depictions of sexuality are beamed into our homes through satellite TV, pored over in internet cafes, catapulted around social and technological networks, stitched into the material of women’s attire, whispered in children’s bedtime tales, captured and disseminated in epidemiological data and crooned over the airwaves. But despite its ubiquity, international development has failed to afford sexuality the prominence that it should.
What does sexuality have to do with women’s empowerment? Research from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC shows that sexuality affects women’s political and economic empowerment in a number of important ways. For example, in the ways that women experience seeking election to political office, how women are treated and respected (or disrespected) in the workplace and in public, and how families and communities place expectations on how women should behave. Being exposed to sexual harassment and sexual violence and not being able to exercise choice in their sexual relationships affects women’s wellbeing and ultimately undermines political, social and economic…
China is managing major health system reforms against a background of rapid economic and institutional change. In doing so it is developing a learning approach to transition management and institution-building. This approach includes testing innovations at local level, encouraging learning from success, and then gradually building institutions that support new ways of doing things. Chinese policymakers and analysts are also developing strategies for drawing on international experience. Analysts from other countries and officials in organisations that support international health need to understand this approach if they are to strengthen mutual learning with their Chinese counterparts.