Sexual rights of the other

The thesis investigates the Danish approach to sexual rights in development through the national development agency’s (DANIDA) strategy for sexual and reproductive rights (SRHR) and a small side project sponsored by Danida on LGBT rights in the global south. In doing so, the thesis utilizes post-colonial and post-structural perspectives of among others Chantal Mouffe and Homi K. Bhabha to investigate how the strategies produce discursive meachnisms of exclusion, stereotypes and antagonisms. This involves looking at the conceptions and discursive constructions of sexuality and gender as essentialist identity categories, as well as constructions of pervasive and essentialist gender roles and antagonisms between competing identity claims, as LGBTs are constructed as the fixed but deviant ‘sexual other’ which becomes constitutive for maintaining the colonial order and heteronormativity. The thesis thus analyses mechanisms of exclusion within the strategies, and how these serve to invisibilise alternative gendered, sexual or kinship identifications, interests and expressions, constructing the stereotype of ‘the victimized and a-sexual third world woman’. This leads to conclusions and reflections on how a division of SRHR and LGBT sexual rights interests forms a reductive perspective to the complex intersections of sexuality, gender and development, as well as the construction of heteronormativity and the positioning of heterosexual reproduction as the primary collective sexual rights interests within developmental approaches to sexual rights