The failure of the World Bank to address sexuality

Putting ‘World Bank’ and ‘sex’ in the same sentence may at first sight look strange. But the fact is that as the boundaries of the World Bank’s areas of intervention (and its supposed expertise) have expanded consistently over the years, it is almost inevitable that its actions and prescriptions will overlap with more aspects of people’s lives — including sexuality.

Since the 1960s the World Bank has been involved with reproductive issues, the relations between women and development and, more recently, HIV and AIDS. Sexuality issues play a major role in all these areas, and it would seem inevitable that they would emerge in the World Bank’s discussions as well.

The research that led to this article consisted of an attempt to identify how the World Bank’s official documents have addressed issues related to sexuality. The research seeks to identify key ideas and meanings that may change over time, but which do so according to strict rules and maintain a consistent trajectory, linking power and knowledge: discursive formations.

The analysis of the World Bank’s documents revealed that it does not address this fundamental component of some of the most pressing health emergencies of our time. Rather, its economic rationality and technocratic viewpoint have effectively silenced and sanitised the discourse on sexuality. In doing so the World Bank is limiting the sexuality and gender-related issues that can be tackled in the context of its programmes, and is constraining efforts to advance fundamental sexual rights. Nevertheless, unexpected results may arise from that process, so it does not necessarily further a comprehensive conservative agenda.

Three specific discursive formations dealing with issues related to sexuality were characterised in this study: women-gender; sexual-reproductive-health; and sex-as-a-risk. The analysis led to the following conclusions:

• Technical and scientific principles are assumed to have precedence in dictating norms and priorities in general, whether with regard to public policy or to people’s private lives.
• A restricted view of ‘health’ — namely, the absence of disease — takes precedence over any consideration of rights or pleasure.
• Groups of specialists — medical doctors and, even more powerfully, health economists — are assumed to know ‘what is better for you’ (‘you’ being the individual or society), thus effectively producing a normalised, de-politicised and de-sexualised (paradoxical as it may seem) view of sexuality.

These conclusions show that the public discourse of the World Bank is yet another important arena where the establishment of an affirmative conception of sexual rights has to be fought for, potentially with repercussions on a global scale.

Kenneth Camargo Jr
Social Medicine Institute, Rio de Janeiro State University, Maracan‹ - Rio de Janeiro - RJ - Cep 20550-900, Brazil
kencamargo@gmail.com