ABSTRACT
Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies is the first comprehensive reader of its kind to archive the research and the wide range of scholarly, political, and epistemological perspectives on “queering development,” a term introduced in the early 2000s (Jolly 2000; Lind 2003). Contributors address a wide range of topics, from LGBTIQ policy and planning, forms of LGBTIQ mobilization, the politics of humanitarian aid, and expressions and notions of queerness in transnational contexts. Together, they demonstrate the legacy of institutionalized heterosexuality within development discourse, specifically, as central to modernization discourses that assume a linear, teleological path to economic prosperity and cultural modernity. Importantly, a heteronormative notion of the family as central to progress, civilization, and modernity has a much longer history: heteronormativity underlaid and fueled processes of colonization, postcolonial nation-building, international relations, and national and local planning initiatives. And, as this volume demonstrates, it also became central to the post-World War II geopolitical focus on the “war on poverty” in the Global South, with its modernization aim of combatting poverty and maintaining political and economic stability in poor regions. Since the 1940s, funds have been channeled to Global South development efforts for family planning, to control birthrates and plan “responsible” parenting as a way to improve national economies and “modernize” societies (Adams and Pigg 2005). In these ways, sexuality and gender have always been central to states’ and global institutions’ efforts to improve living conditions and “develop” poor communities, nations, and regions.
