Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 19 views

    4699 8785 1 SM

    Uploaded by

    Puteri Semesta
    filsafat

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    4699 8785 1 SM

    Uploaded by

    Puteri Semesta
    19 views5 pages
    filsafat

    Original Title

    4699-8785-1-SM

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    filsafat

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    19 views5 pages

    4699 8785 1 SM

    Uploaded by

    Puteri Semesta
    filsafat

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 5

    Edisi Cetak Lepas

    Versi Digital
    ISSN: 0852-8489

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


    Penulis: Diana T. Pakasi

    Sumber: Jurnal Sosiologi MASYARAKAT, Vol. 19, No. 1, Januari 2014: 119-122

    Dipublikasikan oleh: Pusat Kajian Sosiologi, LabSosio FISIP-UI

    Jurnal Sosiologi MASYARAKAT diterbitkan oleh LabSosio, Pusat Kajian


    Sosiologi Departemen Sosiologi Fakultas Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu Politik (FISIP)
    Universitas Indonesia. Jurnal ini menjadi media informasi dan komunikasi
    dalam rangka pengembangan sosiologi di Indonesia. Redaksi MASYARAKAT
    mengundang para sosiolog, peminat sosiologi dan para mahasiswa sosiologi
    untuk berdiskusi dan menulis secara bebas dan kreatif demi pengembangan
    sosiologi di Indonesia. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
    Website: www.journal.ui.ac.id/jsm

    Untuk mengutip artikel ini:


    Pakasi, Diana T. 2014. “Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and
    Morality in Global Perspective.” Jurnal Sosiologi MASYARAKAT, Vol. 19,
    No. 1, Januari 2014: 119-122.

    SK Dirjen Dikti Akreditasi Jurnal No. 80/DIKTI/Kep/2012


    Resensi

    Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and


    Morality in Global Perspective

    D i a n a T. P a k a s i
    Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam
    Email: [email protected]

    Adams, Vincanne dan Stacy Leigh Pigg (editors). 2005. Sex in De-
    velopment: Science, Sexuality and Morality in Global Perspective.
    Durham: Duke University Press. 360 halaman.

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


    Perspective, Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg present a series of
    ethnographic studies by various authors in their attempts to analyze
    how the implementation of sexual and reproductive health programs
    as part of global agendas interacts with local cultures. This book
    tries to portray how the practices of development projects on sexual
    and reproductive health as moral acts intersect with other moralities
    that are contested and constructed by politics, science, transnational
    agendas, and technologies of sexuality. The sexual and reproductive
    health interventions objectify sex that seems to be ‘neutral’, but in
    practices they have moral objectives.
    This volume of science, sexuality, and morality is in conversation
    with Foucault’s work, as he sees that sex has been a political site in
    the modern state as it is a means to access both the individual and the
    collective body (Foucault, 1978). There is a multiplicity of discourses
    surround sex produced by a series of mechanisms in various instituti-
    ons in which the moral theology of sex and the objectification of sex
    in rational discourses are practiced and create a complex network that
    connects one another (Foucault, 1978). Departs from this framework,
    this book is successful in capturing the ways in which development
    practices moralize sex and how the discourses on sex are articulated
    and contested in local contexts.
    The Sex in Development has three sections. The first is ‘The
    Production of New Subjectivities’ to bring the cultural analysis of
    12 0 | D I A N A T. PA K A S I

    sexuality. The second is ‘The Creation of Normativities as a Biopo-


    litical Project’ to unfold the construction of normativities as part of
    biopolitics in the modern state; while the third is ‘Contestations of
    Liberal Humanism Forged in Sexual Identity Politics’ to examine the
    production of sexual subjectivities in local contexts.
    The Adams and Pigg’s collection examines sex in the transnational
    perspective, departs from the Foulcadian perspective and Stoler’s work
    (1995) to examine how sex is constructed within a specific historical
    context and is negotiated from the perspective of post colonialism
    and transnational relationships. In light of the works they argue in
    the introduction that ‘science, medicine, and public health are idioms
    through which sexual matters are articulated, the relational dynamics
    of power and difference are often forged around contested meanings
    of the sexual’ (p.10). Science, medicine, and public health are the
    products of Western nations, which frame sexuality and translate their
    moral framework of sex through development projects in the Global
    South.
    The development projects on sexual and reproductive health in
    developing countries serve as attempts to modernize the nation. The
    global indicators of sexual and reproductive health developed by inter-
    national development agencies such as WHO, UNFPA, or UNAIDS
    are used as markers of development progress. This book shows how
    development programs, with scientific understandings or knowled-
    ge and technologies of sex, target local communities that have their
    own cultural framework of sex and how the effects of the encounter
    in the local’s everyday lives. The book positions development as an
    assemblage of practices, institutional linkages, and discourses related
    to the social production of scientific facts. Biological sciences become
    important in shaping moral assumption in the modern state’s deve-
    lopment, therefore ‘scientific facts’ are never neutral.
    In the Pigg’s essay of ‘Globalizing the Facts of Life’, biological facts
    are used in the production of knowledge on sex through trainings of
    sex education in Nepal. Sex education has become an important agen-
    da to prevent HIV/AIDS designed by public health expert as part of
    ‘institutional networks of internationalizing of biomedical knowledge
    and technology’. The sex education program targets particular groups
    (the ‘high risk’) determined by experts. The classifications define what
    the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant’ are and justified by scientific facts. Sex
    is biologized through development projects. In relation to this Pigg

    M A S YA R A K AT Ju rna l Sosiolog i Vol. 19, No. 1, Ja nu a ri 2014:115 -118


    SEX IN DEVELOPMENT | 121

    calls for a theoretical framework that addresses the interrelated of


    biology and culture in the conceptualization of sex.
    Sex education programs use manuals, curricula, and guidelines
    which Pigg calls as ‘international template materials’ represent a ne-
    utral and universal conception of sex as well as a standardization of
    information and pedagogical techniques. Nevertheless, the template
    does not fit in the Nepali notions of sex and the reality of sex that
    is dynamics and shifting. In sum, Pigg’s essay shows how the globa-
    lization of biologized notions of sex operates through sex education
    and develops ideas of normality. Pigg also invites us to rethink the
    notion of ‘facts’ about sex as they need to be understood in collecti-
    vities, in a network of processes, relations, and entities of human and
    nonhuman actors.
    How development projects construct the notion of sex and ‘nor-
    mal’ sex is also illustrated in Leslie Butt’s article of ‘Sexuality, the
    State, and the Runaway Wives of Highland Papua, Indonesia’. Butt
    shows how the state’s health development project – in her case is
    family planning program – conveys dominant discourses of a ‘good
    wife’, and being ‘modern’. The family planning program is designed
    by the central state and it reflects how the state controls and restricts
    sexual relationships within marriage, which is regarded as ‘normal’
    sex as part of its attempt to modernize and develop the nation. The
    state’s discourses on sexuality marginalize the indigenous people –
    the Dani – as the Other and control Dani women’s bodies to serve
    for the development goals. The state’s moral claims of sexuality and
    reproduction are promulgated by bureaucracies through the imple-
    mentation of health policies and disrupted the Dani’s moral claims.
    Butt’s article illustrates how new technologies of sexuality such as
    contraceptives introduced by the state can bring impact to social and
    sexual relationships among indigenous people in a such remote area
    in highland Papua.
    The ideas of ‘normal’ sex brought by the reproductive health pro-
    ject also operate as markers of racial differences. The Dani’s sexual
    practices are seen as ‘primitive’ and ‘tainted’. The racist attitudes are
    held by bureaucracies, health providers, and in-migrants in Papua. In
    sum, Butt’s essay provides how the family planning program objecti-
    fies sex as moral act that is targeted to the Dani. The Dani women’s
    bodies are political site of the nation’s progress and the state discourse
    of an ideal family and womanhood. The discourse serves as a discipli-

    M A S YA R A K AT Ju rna l Sosiolog i Vol. 19, No. 1, Ja nu a ri 2014:115 -118


    12 2 | D I A N A T. PA K A S I

    nary power to create the docile body of the Dani. However, Butt also
    shows that the ways in which Dani women challenge existing regimes
    of power and assert control of their sexuality and choice of partner.
    Overall, this volume makes an important contribution to unders-
    tand interrelationships between ‘scientifically neutral’ concepts of sex
    and sexuality formulated by public health experts and local construc-
    ts of sex and gender in developing societies. However, I expect this
    collection could provide more space for the marginal (such as the
    Dani) subjectivities (their narratives and experiences) in order to give
    a more complete picture of the contested and competing discourses
    on sexuality and morality in developing countries.

    DA F TA R PU S TA K A

    Foucault, M. 1978. The History Of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume


    1. R. Hurley (trans.). New York: Pantheon.
    Stoler, A. 1995. Race And The Education Of Desire. Durham and
    London: Duke University Press.

    M A S YA R A K AT Ju rna l Sosiolog i Vol. 19, No. 1, Ja nu a ri 2014:115 -118

    You might also like