by Sonia Corrêa
Introduction
I was motivated to write this commentary after reading a series of articles that revisit the conditions in which a transnational agenda of the repudiation of “gender” took shape in the 1990s (Butler, 2004; Case, 2017; Garbagnolli, 2017; Mikolsci and Campana, 2017: 723-745; Kuhar and Patternote, 2017; Viveros, 2017: 220-241), having examined this development on previous occasions (Corrêa, Petchesky and Parker, 2008; Corrêa, 2009). What follows is fundamentally based on those earlier writings, on the analysis developed by Girard (2007), and on my personal memories. I had the privilege of closely following several of the 1990s debates in which anti-gender politics – which is now sweeping over the Americas, Europe, and Africa – gradually took form. These occasions were the Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development (1992), the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (ICPD, 1994), the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (IV WSSD, 1995), and the ICPD and Fourth WCW +5 and +10 Reviews (1999, 2000, 2004, and the Conferences Summit of 2005).
In the literature above mentioned there are discrepancies in respect to the chronology of the emergence of anti-gender politics. Prominent is the version that gender was attacked at the IV WCW during the Beijing negotiations. Some observers, however, see its emergence in Cairo, but there are also those who identify UNCED (Rio 92) as the initial moment of this saga. This blurring of dates and facts is understandable because in this series of conferences, novel policy definitions in respect to reproduction, gender, and sexuality were adopted in each that would be added to in the next. At each new stage of this process of developing norms, there were conservative reactions. It is not easy to retrace the details of this process without having been there, so I thought that it would be useful to revisit this trajectory from the standpoint of my position as a contributor to and observer of this complex process. I have written this commentary so that it is set down before my memories fade.[1]
March 1995: the first signs of the bonfire
In March 1995, I arrived at the United Nations headquarters in New York to participate in the final stage of the Third (and last) Preparatory Committee for the IV WCC, which would be held in Beijing in September of that year. In the previous week, the UN Copenhagen Summit on Social Development had taken place, and six months earlier we had participated in the harsh negotiation of the ICPD in Cairo. At the Copenhagen Summit, we, the feminists involved in the UN conferences of the period, of which a large number were from the Global South, had organized a hunger strike to ensure the inclusion in the final document of references to the deleterious impacts of structural adjustment programs on health and education in our countries. The final text of the Summit Program of Action included language adopted at the Vienna International Conference on Human Rights (1993) affirming women’s rights as human rights as well as ICPD definitions of reproductive health and rights, although, during the proceedings, these definitions had been systematically attacked by the Holy See and its allies. The text was also peppered with gender language, especially with regard to the sexual division of labor in the realm of social reproduction. This gender vocabulary, it should be noted, was never the subject of any controversy.
When I arrived in New York, however, I was told was by my feminist colleagues who had attended the last Beijing PrepCom that the term gender was in brackets. This means that gender was no longer considered a consensual definition as had been the case in Cairo and Copenhagen. Activists were also very concerned to see debates entirely paralyzed because the female diplomats coordinating the negotiations were not prepared for the fierce attacks on gender and other related controversial issues which had suddenly erupted.
After being briefed in the corridors, I entered one of working rooms and saw a very tall Sudanese delegate vigorously demanding gender be bracketed. He had the support of other Islamic and non-Islamic, mostly Latin American, countries. As I had been told, the female chair of the session was unable to contain his lengthy and very aggressive speech. The not-so-invisible hands of the Vatican were also detectable. While the Holy See kept silent, the delegations of Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, its faithful Latin American surrogates, supported the Sudanese diatribe.[2]
According to Girard (2007), what then happened was that in the third and last week of the preparatory committee, as soon as the terminology of sexual rights and orientation was incorporated into the text under negotiation, the Holy See, supported by Sudan, Malta, and Honduras, requested that gender be put in brackets and demanded from the secretariat a precise definition of its content. Meanwhile, gender was virulently attacked in the gatherings of civil society organizations involved in the process leading up to Beijing.
As soon as I left the negotiating room, Joan Ross Frankson, a Caribbean feminist then on the team of WEDO, told me about the pamphlet “Against Gender” that had been distributed a few days earlier to delegates (especially from the Global South). The pamphlet had been produced by a US Catholic right-wing organization, the Women’s Coalition for the Family, led by the journalist Dale O’Leary.[3] The text distorted an article by Anne Fausto-Sterling on intersexuality (Fausto-Sterling, 1993:20-25) and argued that when using the term “gender”, feminists (described in the pamphlet as “generally homosexual”) claimed the existence of five distinct genders. Joan was indignant and told me:
These nefarious people have not only troubled the negotiations, they have offended us… How can they say that feminists believe in the existence of five genders? We know quite well that gender is what explains the inequality between men and women in all spheres of life.
Some years after, reflecting on this episode, Rosalind Petchesky recalled how the 1995 attack on gender had perplexed many feminists attending the preparatory committee, who had never read Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler, or Fausto-Sterling: “We were provoked to explain gender to ourselves and to others” (Girard, 2007, p. 338).
Before and after Beijing
It is, however, necessary to revisit Rio 1992 to better understand how and why this Vatican “gender trouble” erupted in the final stage of the route to Beijing. At UNCED, in Rio, no language on gender, sexuality, or the right to abortion was included in the text negotiated by states. The UNCED document adopted the classic definition of equality between the sexes inherited from the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights and language on family planning and reproductive health, the latter term being quite new, having entered the conversation amongst UN member states through the WHO shortly before UNCED.
As prosaic as this language may seem today, it provoked fierce attacks and political maneuvers on the part of Holy See delegates. In Rio, the Vatican deliberately reactivated the longstanding North-South controversy about population control policies to foment a political opposition between poverty and the right to development, on the one hand, and “fertility control” (in their view, family planning and reproductive health) on the other. These insidious games were also enabled by some large global environmental networks that, in preparation for Rio, had openly called for strict demographic control as a necessary measure to “protect nature”.
Consequently, in the course of the Rio negotiations, the feminist agenda on reproductive autonomy found itself squeezed between these powerful forces and once again faced the old resistance of a number of Southern countries to considering contraception a right. Seeing these complicated dynamics, several feminist networks attending the UNCED civil society forum decided that it was vital to invest time and energy in the International Conference on Population and Development, scheduled for 1994 in Cairo. Our feeling was that if we did not, a major political disaster could occur.
This decision, taken in the heat of the Aterro do Flamengo, which was the site of the NGO UNCED Global Forum, is at the origin of the rich and highly conflictive process leading to Cairo. ICPD conceptual and policy outcomes, in turn, triggered the sudden attack on gender witnessed in March 1995 in New York. This is because it was in the process leading up to ICPD that, for the first time ever, the term gender entered the UN intergovernmental vocabulary. Until then, the term was used in UN-sponsored research and analyses, but not yet as a parameter to guide state policies. Furthermore, and more critically, ICPD politically legitimated much more than gender, such as the concepts of reproductive health and reproductive rights; abortion was recognized as a serious public health problem, universal sexuality education policies were recommended, and the various forms of families were fully affirmed.
However, as in Copenhagen six months later, at no point in the arduous clashes surrounding these various topics was gender seen as controversial. This was so, apparently, because, as Dale O’Leary (1997) admits in her book, in ICPD, the Holy See and its allies invested their energy in blocking the recognition of abortion as a major public health problem and of multiple forms of family. These were rather unsuccessful efforts, as both definitions were preserved in the final document.
I also want to also posit the hypothesis that the smooth acceptance of gender in ICPD can also be explained by the stream of gender theory that entered the Cairo document. As my friend Joan said, “gender” in the ICPD Program of Action concerned the inequality between men and women rather than the confusion of sexuality. Case (2017) suggests that gender reached Cairo through American feminist legal scholars and practitioners, and this is partly correct. From my perspective, gender entered ICPD after gaining traction in the field of gender and development, whose frontiers transcended the United States. In these domains, feminists from both North and South applied the lenses of gender to critically examine the socio-cultural layers superimposed on biological sex that determined the roles and spheres of the masculine and the feminine and justified inequalities in access to power and resources (Razavi and Miller, 1995; Moser, 1993).
What happened, however, is that gender left Cairo immersed in sexuality, even though not all feminists participating in the process recognized that at the time. Already in the first preparatory committee for ICPD, in April 1993, lesbian activists had included in their demands for the conference a claim of non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and this was supported by a few countries. Subsequently, adolescent sexuality and, above all, language on sexual rights were included in the draft document. Although the term sexual rights did not survive the negotiations, it was debated in the plenaries.
On the last day of the Cairo conference, as I walked towards the plenary, I eavesdropped on a French-speaking African delegate commenting to his colleague: “Il y a trop de sexe dans ce document!” (there is too much sex in this document). This blossoming of sex should not be a surprise because, at least since Foucault (1999), we have known that sex is critically situated at the intersection between population management and the discipline of bodies. According to Gloria Careaga, the Mexican researcher and activist, after Cairo, international networks of lesbian women made a robust investment to ensure sexuality not be buried in the Beijing inter-state process. In her words,
Before Cairo there was no deep discussion among us about sexual rights… There was a lot of confusion about the concept. Heterosexual women thought this was a lesbian issue and lesbians thought it was a heterosexual problem. We lesbians felt that we had a responsibility to defend sexual rights (in the IV CMM case) (Girard, 2007, p. 323).
This conceptual and political agitation would trigger the Vatican “gender problem” six months later at the Third Preparatory Committee for the IV CMM. Butler (2004) accurately captures this critical injunction when analyzing the attack on gender that materialized in New York in the following terms:
It is no surprise to me that the Vatican has referred to the possibility of including the rights of lesbians (in the text) as anti-human. That may be true. Admitting lesbians into the realm of the universal can undo the human, at least in its current forms, but it also implies imagining the human beyond its conventional limits (p. 190).
This means that the March 1995 assault did not target gender as it was originally inscribed in the ICPD document. It aimed at containing the proliferation of sexualities and genders that flourished around the term, which means that the war on gender ever since has implied raiding sexual and reproductive rights, sex education, and abortion as a health issue.
Curiously, despite this initial furor, during IV WCW itself, once again, the term was not subject to major controversy. Although there were no big fights, when the final document was adopted, the Holy See commented that “gender is grounded in biological sexual identity, male or female” and that any “dubious interpretations based on world views which assert that sexual identity can be adapted indefinitely to suit new and different purposes” were to be excluded. A similar explanatory declaration was requested by Paraguay.
In contrast, in the negotiations, the Vatican and its allies openly assaulted Vienna’s definition of women’s rights as human rights, which was contested in the name of John Paul II’s thesis on the dignity of women. They also fiercely objected to paragraph 106k, which recommends the revision of punitive abortion laws, paragraph 96, which defines women’s sexual rights, and, above all, the language on sexual orientation inserted in the chapter on human rights. The last two topics were exhaustively debated until the very end of the conference. The only feminist loss was sexual orientation as a non-justifiable basis of discrimination being defeated by a small margin at 3 a.m. in the very last plenary.
A quarter of a century later, in revisiting the Beijing scenario, I wondered what might have happened between March and September 1995 to explain the tactical retreat of the Holy See in relation to gender. I have no definite answers. The tautological note of the group created by the secretariat of the IV CMM establishing that gender should be defined in the Platform for Action according to its ordinary use in UN documents might have temporarily appeased the Vatican. Or, perhaps, as in Cairo, the Vatican was fighting so many battles that gender had to be relegated to a second level priority. We may also consider that despite the anger manifested in New York, in March 1995, six months later, Vatican intellectuals had not yet fully matured their position on gender so as to fiercely contest it.
This cautious approach would, however, be temporary. In 1999 and 2000, during the Cairo and Beijing Plus Five Reviews, gender would be attacked head-on throughout the negotiations. Whenever the term arose in the debates, its meaning was questioned, and the various delegations – Islamic and non-Islamic – requested its elimination, arguing that the term was not about women´s rights but rather a proxy to justify homosexuality, pedophilia, and other “sexual perversions”. It is noteworthy that these are more or less the same arguments used in anti-gender politics today.
The 1999-2000 negotiations were much harder than Cairo and Beijing, as a clear anti- feminist front had already materialized amongst UN member states. Furthermore, the mode of operation of Southern countries clustered under the Group of 77 and China (G77) had changed. In 1993, in the preparations for ICPD, G77 took the political decision to operate as a consensual bloc in relation to economic issues, leaving member states free to take individual positions on other issues. This greatly facilitated the consensus reached in the ICPD + 5 and IVV CMM + 5 negotiations, as it left the space open for Global South countries to express varied views in relation to gender, sexuality, and reproduction.
When the Plus Five process began, however, G77 was functioning as a closed bloc in relation to all matters. This shift was justified as an effect of the 1999 Asian financial crisis, which pushed Southern countries to tougher negotiation positions in global policy arenas. Even so, the new modus operandi had, quite evidently, been mobilized internally by a group of G77 Holy See allies that included Islamic countries with significant political weight in the bloc, such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Iran. This new rule, in fact, aimed at silencing the plurality of positions in relation to gender and sexuality matters that existed within the group, which enabled the Cairo and Beijing consensus five years earlier. It was then that we feminists named this new formation within G77 and its Holy See connection the “Unholy Alliance”. The group was extremely well organized and had the political and financial support of the US religious right.[4] But even so, once again, the Holy See and its allies were defeated, including with regard to the term gender, extensively used in the final documents of both Plus Five reviews.
My view is that this latter defeat motivated the theological investments against gender that subsequently took shape in the Vatican. Before that, few texts of the crusade against gender had been published: in 1997, The Gender Agenda, by Dale O’Leary, and L’Évangile face au désordre mondial (The Gospel in Face of the World Disorder), by the Belgian Michel Schooyans and, a year later, a letter by the Peruvian bishops signed by Don Alzamora Revoredo. In 2001, Problem of Gender, written by a German theologian associated with the University of Navarra in Spain, was made available in various languages, including Spanish. This text was a contribution to one key piece of the vast theological production already underway in Rome: the Lexicon of Ambiguous and Discussed Terms on Family Life and Ethics, published in 2003. A year later, the Vatican released the Catholic bishops’ Charter on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World, in which the following can be read on the first page:
In order to avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning. In this perspective, physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary. The obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a variety of levels. This theory of the human person, intended to promote prospects for equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality. (Vatican, 2004, page 1)
Latin America as a target
Like the Catholic Church, the crusade against gender has always been transnational. Having been gestated in the high spheres of intergovernmental arenas and theological lucubration, since 2013 it has been propagated in Europe and Latin America (Corrêa, 2017; Mikolsci and Campana, 2017; Patternotte and Kuhar, 2017) and more recently in the US (BIBLIO) in grassroots political movements.
In Europe, the meaning and scale of anti-gender mobilizing that erupted in the Manif pour tous in France (2013) was not immediately grasped because most observers were reluctant to admit that European gender and sexual democracy could be at risk. In Latin America, I dare say, what has occurred has been by and large a syndrome of denial. The extensive and profound colonial legacy of Catholicism and the impacts of the evangelical expansion of the last twenty years have led most to interpret attacks on gender after 2013 as “more of the same”. Even though I witnessed all the processes described in this commentary, I realized more completely what was happening when I more fully grasped the dynamics simultaneously underway in Europe.
This sort of denialism has been, however, entirely shaken by the recent anti-gender “perfect storm”, following Serrano’s interpretation (2017) of the referendum for the Peace Agreement in Colombia, and can also apply to the attack on Judith Butler, in São Paulo in 2017, the presidential elections in Costa Rica (Murillo, 2018), and, principally, the Brazilian elections of that same year. Under these rapidly shifting circumstances, it is crucial to recognize that although these crusades have only taken shape in the last five years, the region has been on the radar of the Vatican and its allies for much longer.
In 1997, O’Leary herself, when analyzing what she depicts as the “global feminist conspiracy”, gave great attention to Latin American feminism. In a book where references to American feminism prevail and very few mentions are made of European feminism, several pages are dedicated to Latin America. O’Leary analyzes the outcomes of the feminist Encuentro conference of San Bernardo (1990) and a number of CLADEM documents while dedicating a whole section to the exegesis of the Mexican feminist Marta Lamas’ elaborations on gender. This emphasis is not unfounded, firstly, because in Latin America, the political, cultural, and intellectual transformations of gender and sexuality of the last quarter of the 20th century were unequivocal. Perhaps more significantly, in the landscape of Global South feminisms that participated in the 1990s UN conferences, Latinas were the most familiar with critical theories of gender and sexuality.
Just as importantly, Latin American positions on gender and related matters altered the geopolitical game leading up to Cairo. Very early in the process, the “herd” of Latin American states, starting with Brazil and Mexico, rapidly drifted away from the Vatican’s influence on the family, reproduction, gender, and sexuality. This shift has enabled North-South consensus on these matters. In particular, in the +5 Review processes of 1999 and 2000, Latin America led an open rebellion against the new voting rules established in the G77. A new negotiating group was then created named Some Latin American, African, and Caribbean Countries (SLAACC), which ensured a positive final consensus on these matters, including on gender, after long and fierce debates. At the end of the Beijing +5 Review, the Indian feminist Gita Sen and I interpreted the emergence of SLAACC as a breakthrough. We projected a future in which a strong consensus could be built in the Global South around an intersectional agenda of social justice, gender justice, and erotic justice.
We were wrong. The successes in shaping a transnational gender politics in the 1990s can be measured by the fury with which gender is now attacked north and south of the equator. As a result, la lucha continua.
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[1] This paper was originally published in Portuguese in a special issue of Cadernos Pagu in early 2018; the original version can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1590/18094449201800530001
[2] The scene as a whole seemed to confirm that, as we had predicted, the conversations between the Vatican and Islamic states we witnessed in Copenhagen were heading towards a potential alliance against feminist propositions. A few years later, this intuition would be confirmed.
[3] In 1997, O’Leary published the book The Gender Agenda, in which she more fully developed her critique of gender feminism and “its deleterious effects”. The book can be considered the first piece of anti-gender propaganda. It inaugurated a vast literature on the subject that took very sophisticated forms, including theological doctrinal writings.
This alliance was, in fact, transparently recalled in a virtual seminar convened by Focus on the Family to retrace how anti- abortion rights and “pro family” Catholic organizations engaged with and worked at the 1990s and 2000s UN conferences.