About Us
SPW
Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW) is a transnational program based at the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA). Launched in 2002, as the International Working Group on Sexuality and Social Policy (IWGSSP), in 2006 its name changed to Sexuality Policy Watch and, since its inception, SPW has collaborated extensively with researchers and activists from a wide range of countries and is a credible source of updated information on facts, research findings, and public debates on the politics of gender and sexuality.
Due to the scope of our work, SPW publishes in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. This is reflected in the design of our website. Part of the content published, such as our regular newsletter and relevant research reports, is available in all three languages, but otherwise the subject matters vary accordingly.
Why sexuality?
Sex is always political, and its politicization involves the continual attempt to draw boundaries between “good” and “bad” sex, based on “hierarchies of sexual value” in religion, medicine, public policies and popular culture. These hierarchies function in much the same ways as do ideological systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious chauvinism. They rationalize the well-being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble. But in some historical periods, negotiations over sexual “goodness” and “badness” become more sharply contested and more overtly politicized (Adapted from Gayle Rubin, 1984).
In 2006, when SPW changed its name and created its first website, the world landscape was complex and already rather shadowy. The promising climate of the immediate post-Cold War years was rapidly waning under the combined effects of the ongoing penetration of neoliberal rationality, expanding cross-cultural re-politization of the religious and, not less importantly, the “war on terror” vigorously waged by the Bush administration. Under such circumstances we recaptured the reflection developed by Gayle Rubin, in her 1984 classical paper “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” to clarify SPW’s vision. In doing so, we remarked that the sexuality-related social and political conflicts Rubin warned us about, far from being resolved, were more prevalent than ever and were manifesting on a global scale.
Looking retrospectively, the mid-2000 fraught contours of gender and sexuality-related rights and wider social dynamics signaled towards what would come next. Less than ten years later anti-gender mobilizations – whose main arguments had been maturing since the 1990s – erupted concomitantly across European and Latin American countries. Not much later, Brexit was approved and Trump “unexpectedly” won the US presidential election.
In between, a fierce attack on gender jeopardized the Peace Agreement Referendum in Colombia installing a serial pattern of anti-gender cyclones feeding drastic ultra-right turns that would gradually reshape the political landscapes of the Americas and Europe. This was followed by the the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil, in 2018 and, after six more years, it is not excessive to say that the 2024 European Parliament elections, which resulted in major victories of the far right, constitutes the most recent chapter of this somber cycle.
In all these cases and others – such as Milei’s 2023 election in Argentina – these perfect electoral storms were preceded and fueled by varied anti-gender cyclones. Today, the phantasm of gender, to recapture Judith Butler’s frame, can be said to be omnipresent in the political undercurrents underway across the Americas and Europe, with many more ramifications beyond these boundaries. In 2024, anti-gender politics is micro-politics, macro-politics and, increasingly, a novel form of geopolitics whose full contours we have not yet properly grasped.