Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective

by VincanneAdams (Editor), StacyPigg (Author)

New
Paperback
2005
$48.94

Sex in Development examines how development projects around the world intended to promote population management, disease prevention, and maternal and child health intentionally and unintentionally shape ideas about what constitutes normal sexual practices and identities. From sex education in Uganda to aids prevention in India to family planning in Greece, various sites of development work related to sex, sexuality, and reproduction are examined in the rich, ethnographically grounded essays in this volume. These essays demonstrate that ideas related to morality are repeatedly enacted in ostensibly value-neutral efforts to put into practice a global agenda reflecting the latest medical science.
Sex in Development combines the cultural analysis of sexuality, critiques of global development, and science and technology studies. Whether considering the resistance encountered by representatives of an American pharmaceutical company attempting to teach Russian doctors a value free way to offer patients birth control or the tension between Tibetan Buddhist ideas of fertility and the modernization schemes of the Chinese government, these essays show that attempts to make sex a universal moral object to be managed and controlled leave a host of moral ambiguities in their wake as they are engaged, resisted, and reinvented in different ways throughout the world.
Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Leslie Butt, Lawrence Cohen, Heather Dell, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Shanti Parikh, Heather Paxson, Stacy Leigh Pigg, Michele Rivkin-Fish

Synopsis

Sex in Development examines how development projects around the world intended to promote population management, disease prevention, and maternal and child health intentionally and unintentionally shape ideas about what constitutes normal sexual practices and identities. From sex education in Uganda to aids prevention in India to family planning in Greece, various sites of development work related to sex, sexuality, and reproduction are examined in the rich, ethnographically grounded essays in this volume. These essays demonstrate that ideas related to morality are repeatedly enacted in ostensibly value-neutral efforts to put into practice a global agenda reflecting the latest medical science.

Sex in Development combines the cultural analysis of sexuality, critiques of global development, and science and technology studies. Whether considering the resistance encountered by representatives of an American pharmaceutical company attempting to teach Russian doctors a value free way to offer patients birth control or the tension between Tibetan Buddhist ideas of fertility and the modernization schemes of the Chinese government, these essays show that attempts to make sex a universal moral object to be managed and controlled leave a host of moral ambiguities in their wake as they are engaged, resisted, and reinvented in different ways throughout the world.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Leslie Butt, Lawrence Cohen, Heather Dell, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Shanti Parikh, Heather Paxson, Stacy Leigh Pigg, Michele Rivkin-Fish

$48.94

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20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 06 Jun 2005
ISBN 10: 0822334917
ISBN 13: 9780822334910
Book Overview: Ethnographic studies of the role of sexuality and gender in development discourse and policy.

Media Reviews

This volume is an interesting read for social scientists, social historians, and health care workers. By bringing such richly documented case studies together, it inspires researchers who study sexuality to reflect upon how exactly sexuality is constituted in their time and place.... [T]his volume is a must. - Anna C. M. Tijsseling, Archives of Sexual Behavior
This collection adopts a sophisticated ethnographic and historical perspective. . . . [I]t will be invaluable to those with an interest in health policy or development as well as anthropology. - Sophie Day, Times Literary Supplement
[A]n excellent anthropological intervention into development studies that deserves a broad interdisciplinary feminist audience. . . . Indeed, each of the chapters in this anthology is an excellent ethnographic case study exploring the situated dynamics of sex and development programs (Adams and Pigg, 21). Assembled together, and organized around clearly articulated common themes, they make this book a truly important one. The book has remarkable geographic and conceptual scope, and the conversation it stages among sexuality studies, science studies, and critical development work is exceptionally innovative. In short, the collection deserves to have broad and lasting impact on the
field. - Kate Bedford, Signs
[A] refreshing perspective. . . . The authors, and especially Adams and Pigg in their introduction, skillfully examine the facticity of scientific understandings of the body and sex typical of development projects, uncovering ways in which certain discourses, like science, come to be different and often more powerful than others in practice. . . . Through all of the contributions, we see sex in development as a global process but one that takes on many different guises. - Robert C. Philen, American Anthropologist
[A] series of rich and detailed ethnographic studies carried out by anthropologists over the past 10 years in Asia, Africa and Europe. . . . [T]his collection makes an important contribution to fledgling debates on sexuality and development in a global context. - Carolyn H. Williams, Feminist Review
This book charts territory that has so far been little explored in gender and development literature, namely the interrelationships between totalizing, `scientifically neutral' concepts of sex and sexuality and local constructs of sex and gender in developing societies. - - Sylvia Chant, Progress in Development Studies
The book makes a case for thinking in new directions about sexuality in relation to the `scientization' of development policies. It's an important reference work for scholarship in anthropology, public health, and gender and sexuality studies, and in development studies. - Frauen Solidaritat
This important and timely book makes a case for thinking in new directions about sexuality in relation to the `scientization' of development policies. It will become an important reference work for future scholarship in anthropology, public health, and gender and sexuality studies, and, one would hope, in development studies. -Rayna Rapp, coeditor of Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction
[A] refreshing perspective. . . . The authors, and especially Adams and Pigg in their introduction, skillfully examine the facticity of scientific understandings of the body and sex typical of development projects, uncovering ways in which certain discourses, like science, come to be different and often more powerful than others in practice. . . . Through all of the contributions, we see sex in development as a global process but one that takes on many different guises. -- Robert C. Philen * American Anthropologist *
[A] series of rich and detailed ethnographic studies carried out by anthropologists over the past 10 years in Asia, Africa and Europe. . . . [T]his collection makes an important contribution to fledgling debates on sexuality and development in a global context. -- Carolyn H. Williams * Feminist Review *
[A]n excellent anthropological intervention into development studies that deserves a broad interdisciplinary feminist audience. . . . Indeed, each of the chapters in this anthology is an excellent ethnographic case study exploring the situated dynamics of sex and development programs (Adams and Pigg, 21). Assembled together, and organized around clearly articulated common themes, they make this book a truly important one. The book has remarkable geographic and conceptual scope, and the conversation it stages among sexuality studies, science studies, and critical development work is exceptionally innovative. In short, the collection deserves to have broad and lasting impact on the
field. -- Kate Bedford * Signs *
The book makes a case for thinking in new directions about sexuality in relation to the `scientization' of development policies. It's an important reference work for scholarship in anthropology, public health, and gender and sexuality studies, and in development studies. -- Frauen Solidaritat
This book charts territory that has so far been little explored in gender and development literature, namely the interrelationships between totalizing, `scientifically neutral' concepts of sex and sexuality and local constructs of sex and gender in developing societies. -- Sylvia Chant * Progress in Development Studies *
This volume is an interesting read for social scientists, social historians, and health care workers. By bringing such richly documented case studies together, it inspires researchers who study sexuality to reflect upon how exactly sexuality is constituted in their time and place.... [T]his volume is a must. -- Anna C. M. Tijsseling * Archives of Sexual Behavior *
This collection adopts a sophisticated ethnographic and historical perspective. . . . [I]t will be invaluable to those with an interest in health policy or development as well as anthropology. -- Sophie Day * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Vincanne Adams is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of Doctors for Democracy: Health Professionals in the Nepal Revolution.

Stacy Leigh Pigg is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She is the editor of the journal Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness.