ABSTRACT
Reacting to decades of single-minded attention to abuse, victimisation and torture by feminist and human rights activists, writers on sexual rights since 2000 have shifted the balance towards ‘pleasure’. At issue here is the principle that ‘positive’ or affirmative rights – those that explicitly enhance capabilities, the range of freedoms and the enabling conditions necessary to exercise them – are as important as ‘negative’ rights – those that prohibit abuses and violence (Petchesky 2000; Garcia and Parker 2006; Corrêa et al. 2008). With respect to sexuality, the ICPD Programme of Action (1994) defined sexual health in terms of people being ‘able to have a satisfying and safe sex life’ aimed at ‘the enhancement of life and personal relations, and not merely counselling and care related to reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases’ (para. 7.1). A decade later, Paul Hunt, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health 2002-8, likewise defined sexual health as ‘a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being related to sexuality, not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction, or infirmity’. In addition to his inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the list of ‘fundamental human rights’ related to sexuality, Hunt remarked that ‘sexual health requires a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence’ (Hunt 2004: 14-15). Implicit in these definitions is an awareness that positive and negative rights are inseparable: ‘Not only does a person’s right to fully develop and enjoy her body and her erotic and emotional capacities depend on freedom from abuse and violence, and on having the necessary enabling conditions and material resources [to make such enjoyment possible]; it may also be that awareness of affirmative sexual rights comes as a result of experiencing their violation’ (Petchesky 2000: 97). Nonetheless, as religious and ideological conservatism have strengthened their hold on policymaking in many national and international arenas, it remains far easier and more acceptable to oppose abuse, discrimination and hate crimes than to assert pleasurable and safe sexual experiences as a positive right – particularly for unmarried women, young people and all varieties of sexual and gender outlaws. This is because of not only external threats (the political risks of being accused, from the left and the right, of ‘hedonism’, ‘narcissism’ and ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Satanist’ values) but also internal divisions, including the confusions and disagreements among feminist and lesbian, gay, transgender and intersex activists about what positive, collective values for sexual pleasure and wellbeing we actually share. At the same time, restricting advocacy to negative freedoms has unacceptable costs:
The negative, exclusionary approach to rights, sometimes expressed as the right to ‘privacy’ or to be ‘let alone’ in one’s choices and desires, can never in itself help construct an alternative vision or lead to fundamental structural, social, and cultural transformations. Even the feminist slogan ‘my body is my own’, while rhetorically powerful, may be perfectly compatible with the hegemonic global market, insofar as it demands freedom from abuse but not from the economic conditions that compel a woman to sell her body or its sexual or reproductive capacities [in other words, radical changes in those conditions].
