Going Beyond the Comfort Zone: Reflections on the ISS Sexuality Research Initiative Interculture Dialogue on Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Rights in Development

Abstract

The Intercultural Dialogues on “Going Beyond the Comfort Zone: Sexuality, Reproductive Health and Rights in Development”, held at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University, The Hague, from June 3 to 6, 2013, was one of the first activities of the newly formed Sexuality Research Initiative (SRI) at the ISS. In this set of reflections, we discuss the methodology of intercultural dialogues and the outcome of this first meeting of SRI as an example of how to take up sexuality in development studies. The SRI decided to take Gender, Technology and Development, 18, 1 (2014): 131–145 up both decolonial feminism and feminist activism as two approaches that problematize mainstream development views of sexuality, which are dominated by medicalized and Westernized understandings of embodiment, gender, and power relations. SRI adopted a feminist approach to knowledge production, using active listening and co-production as ways to design and analyze a research issue. In these reflections, we pay special attention to the methodology of intercultural dialogues as a way to include diverse understandings of sexuality, gender and embodiment, and as a way go beyond gender-bound and culturally fixed understandings of sexuality. We explain how different research areas (involving sexual politics, queer ecology, sexual violence, politics of knowledge, tuberculosis, youth sexuality, middle-class sexualities and sexual reproductive rights and health) emerged through the intercultural dialogue process, through which SRI was able to create the space for participants to identify connections and common interests for further research.