Gender and sexuality

1. Globalization:
Gender and
Sexuality
By: Casey Connelly, Cecilia Leyton Jaimes,
Luis Ortiz-Cruz, & Elizabeth Schierbeek

2. Capitalism

3. Capitalism’s Influence on Sexuality:
What comes first, the market or the desire?
● The increased supply of sexual services in developing countries is a product of
national and transnational political-economic forces.
● One of the main links between global markets and sexuality is the commercial
sex industry, including sex tourism.
● Desires, including sexual desires, can be created and influenced by the market.
● It is political economic conditions that often generate subjectivity and desire.
● Capitalist markets do not simply liberate existing erotic desires, but produces
entirely new modes of sexuality.
● Sexuality creates value for modern capitalism.

4. Economically Constructed Sexuality:
Market Generated Thai Sex Shows
● With the transformation in industrialized nations from Fordist to post-Fordist
societies, changing labor markets, and with the rise of consumer capitalism,
modes of sexuality have transformed and industrialized as well.
● Transnational capitalism generates ‘Western’ (heterosexual) men’s desire for
sexualized nightlife in Bangkok, Thailand.
● Bangkok’s sex shows symbolize commodified labor in service and
manufacturing.
● These shows that are often said to commodify women, actually utilize
commodified mass production and service work as themes.
● What are your thoughts on the idea that transnational capitalism is
conditioning new modes of sexuality?

5. The Globalization of the Sex Industry
● Industrialization of sex work significant to the development of capitalism globalization
● Resulting in the commodification of bodies, exploitation, violence, health risks (HIV) etc.
● The international globalization of the sex industry involves issues of racism, poverty,
sexual oppression, capital accumulation, migration & economic exploitation.
● Increasing sexual moralism -> Total Criminalization
● Increasing accessibility to public health institutions -> Decriminalization

7. Capitalism/Disparities & the Prison Industrial
Complex
● Is the PIC a broken system?
● Women represent 13% of the U.S. prison population
● Women are the fastest growing incarcerated population, increasing a shocking
700% between 1980 and 2014
● The U.S. contains ⅓ of the 625,000 incarcerated women in the world with 201,200
women and girls held in penal institutions
● 9.3% of men in prison, 6.2% of men in jail, 42.1% of women in prison, and 35.7% of
women in jail are sexual minorities (Meyer)
● 33% of women in prison and 26% of women in jail identify as lesbian or bisexual:
only 3.4% of women in the general U.S. identify as either lesbian or bisexual
(Stemple and Meyer)

9. Neoliberalism

10. Neoliberalism in Asia:
Gendered Morality Tales
● Gendered morality tales, or images of failed femininity, narrate localized experiences of
globalization in various Asian cultures and highlight the hierarchically gendered divisions
of labor that sustain neoliberal policies of economic development in the region.
● Though Asia is made up of a diversity of cultures, religions, and other characteristics,
patriarchal patterns of gender hierarchy are common in many of them. Chastisement of
unruly femininity reflects the power of cultural ideologies, in tandem with powerful
systems like neoliberalism, to produce and continually reproduce localized systems of
gender hierarchy and oppression.
● They dramatize the importance of gendered labor for Asian capitalist development, and
also serve to focus public attention on individual (mis)behaviors rather than inequalities
that are rooted in structural systems.
● Gendered morality tales stigmatize characteristics that are otherwise integral to the
process of global capitalist accumulations and neoliberal development.

11. Gendered Morality Tales:
Widow Ghosts, Juki Girls, & Parasite
Singles● Thailand: A Widow Ghost (phii mae maay) is a sexually voracious ghost woman who roams the
countryside looking for a husband.
○ They expose the reliance of rural households on women’s urban income, and that of industry on
labor of rural women.
● Sri Lanka: A Juki Girl is a figure of uncontrolled desire, who spends her factory wages on fashion, is
unmarried, and goes to urban locations seeking sexual excitement.
○ They expose the contradictions of a system that relies on rural women/labor to produce global
value, but which denies their claims to experience the transformative effects of their labor.
● Japan: A Parasite Single is a young woman who selfishly delays marriage and childbearing.
○ This figure represents a rebuke of the neoliberal state, and a rejection of the demand for women to
shoulder the burden of reproduction without equitable social support.
● In the case of gendered morality tales in Asia, why is local grassroots activism necessary to
overcome these forms of oppression that seek to aid neoliberal capitalist economic
development?

12. War on Incarcerated Women and Sexual Minorities
● War on Drugs unintentionally became the War on Women
● From 1986 to 1996, women’s incarceration in state prisons for drug offenses rose 888%
as opposed to the 522% of men being incarcerated
● Good Girl/Bad Girl Dichotomy becomes prevalent after the War on Drugs as a mode to
justify the incarceration of victims
● Sexual minorities are more likely to serve longer sentences and be sent to solitary
confinement, as well as spend more time in solitary confinement
● Sexual minorities are more likely to be punished consensual sexual contact

13. War on Incarcerated Women & Sexual
Minorities (cont.)
● Gender neutrality/Equal Protection Clause
● Women are denied the necessary licenses to practice cosmetology or hairdressing, trades
often taught in prison
● Bill Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996
(PRWORA)
● Housing Opportunity Program Extension Act (HOPE) signed in 1996
● “Bad Mothers” and parental rights loss

14. Neocolonialism
& Colonialism

15. Neocolonial Influence on African
Homophobia

17. Capitalism and African Gender Roles

18. Grassroots
Activism

20. INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and
Trans people of Color Against Violence
● Founded in 2000 by women of color activists
during a conference at the University of
California-Santa Cruz
● Andrea Smith is a co-founder
● Placing women, gender-nonconforming, and
trans people of color at the center
● Intersectional approach to addressing women’s
and LGBTQ+ rights
● Recognition of “the state as the central
organizer of violence which oppresses women,
transpeople and gender nonconforming people
of color and our communities”
● Affiliated with other orgs like RAWAN , Ywu,
Creative Interventions, and Mamas of Color
Rising

21. INCITE!’s Activism
● Helps found the Boarding School
Healing Project, which organized Native
Americans to protest against the U.S.
government for forcing over 100,000
Native American children to attend
boarding schools
● Launches SisterFire, a national tour of
women of color artists, in 2004
● Has several grassroots chapters
nationally
● Publishes Color of Violence: The INCITE!
Anthology in 2006, The Revolution Will
Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit
Industrial Complex

22. #NiUnaMenos
● Argentine feminist movement that spread all
over the continent.
● Organize massive demonstrations of women
and men demanding to end sexist violence,
gender-based violence and femicide.
● Political orientation of the movement: they
proclaim equality and social justice and are
against the political system and its neoliberal
model.
The transversality of what brings this movement together is that they consider themselves anti-
patriarchal and anti-capitalist, because they criticize the consumer society and how women have
been installed as objects and dehumanized.
“Capitalism is sustained and supported on the basis of the historical oppression
of women.” - Ni una menos

23. Grassroots organization #NiUnaMenos
influence on legal action: Argentina & Chile
● Inclusion of the term “femicide” as an aggravated homicide crime in court sentencing
● Increase the maximum sentencing for rape to 30 years
● Immediate passing of laws against gender-based violence
● First national registry of femicides
● Decriminalization of abortion in cases of rape and life-threatening situations

24. Question & Answer
Additional issues that any of the audience members
would like to discuss or ask questions on?

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