Sex in Development

Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective

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Edited by Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg

Duke University Press

Due/Published May 2005, 360 pages, paper

ISBN 0822334917

A timely collection, Sex in Development examines how development projects around the world intended to promote population management, disease prevention, and maternal and child health intentionally and unintentionally shape ideas about what constitutes "normal" sexual practices and identities. From sex education in Uganda to aids prevention in India to family planning in Greece, various sites of development work related to sex, sexuality, and reproduction are examined in the rich, ethnographically-grounded essays this volume brings together. These essays demonstrate that ideas related to morality are repeatedly enacted in ostensibly value-neutral efforts to put into practice a "global" agenda reflecting the latest medical science.

Sex in Development combines the cultural analysis of sexuality, critiques of global development, and science and technology studies. Whether considering the resistance encountered by representatives of an American pharmaceutical company attempting to teach Russian doctors a "value free" way to offer patients birth control or the tension between Tibetan Buddhist ideas of fertility and the modernization schemes of the Chinese government, these essays show that attempts to make sex a universal moral object to be managed and controlled leave a host of moral ambiguities in their wake as they are engaged, resisted, and reinvented in different ways throughout the world.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Leslie Butt, Lawrence Cohen, Heather Dell, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Shanti Parikh, Heather Paxson, Stacy Leigh Pigg, Michele Rivkin-Fish

"This important and timely book makes a case for thinking in new directions about sexuality in relation to the 'scientization' of development policies. It will become an important reference work for future scholarship in anthropology, public health, and gender and sexuality studies, and, one would hope, in development studies."--Rayna Rapp, coeditor of Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction