Gillian Fletcher

The Cultural Queasiness Factor: Intersections of Gender, Sexuality and HIV Prevention in Burma/Myanmar

Abstract The Ministry of Health in Burma/Myanmar considers HIV its first priority in disease prevention, and HIV prevention represents a significant element of the work of many of the international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) based in the country (CBI, 2006; Ministry of Health, 2008). Yet inBurma/Myanmar, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, there is a “cultural queasiness” around HIV. This queasiness is a dis-ease of the emotions, transmitted through the ongoing linking of HIV transmission with “bad behaviour” (resulting, in part, from HIV preventions own repeated use of a “risk group” approach). Indeed, the mere existence of HIV prevention work, inand of itself, sparks waves of cultural queasiness because it transgresses the norms regarding which topics are considered appropriate for public airing, and which are not. Through reference to empirical research involving in-depth interviews and observation of field work practice, this article demonstrates how the desire to minimise this queasiness can result in disavowal of the experiential and emotional complications so deeply embedded in HIV prevention and HIV transmission. Thus HIV prevention both is affected by, and reinforces, cultural queasiness.

Advancing Sexuality Studies: a short course on sexuality theory and research methodologies

Critical Sexuality Studies is an emerging field of academic enquiry linked to an international network of advocacy agencies, activists, and political issues. This paper reports on the development of an advanced short course in sexuality theory and research, drawing on Critical Sexuality Studies and aiming directly at academics in developing countries working in sexuality issues. Over a three-year period, a new curriculum was developed by an international team. The course was piloted in two continents, refined, revised, and released globally under a Creative Commons licence in 2010 on a dedicated website. This paper documents the project and its progress to date.

‘You just wanna be like everyone else’: exploring the experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer sportspeople through a languaging lens

Coalter claims that ‘while sport might provide the context for the development of positive experiences, the social process of participation is the key to understanding what is happening’. In this paper, I will draw on empirical data to describe ‘what is happening’ for gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer-identified (GLBQ) people who play club or team sports in Victoria, Australia. I will also build on Coalters work by introducing the concept of languaging; ‘a social process in which we … construct realities for each of us to see, occupy and to talk into’. I will argue that it is the process of languaging within the context of a sports team or a club that can either (1) enable heterogeneous inclusion, where a shared love of sport exists alongside awareness and acceptance of heterogeneity in other areas of peoples lives (e.g. ability, sex, ethnicity, religion and sexuality), or (2) constrain the space for inclusion through reinforcement of a dominant, assumed homogeneous, norm (in which difference represents a threat).

Of Baby Ducklings and Clay Pots Method and Metaphor in HIV Prevention

In this article, I report on my decision to undertake a process of elicitation, development, and examination of metaphors for experiences of HIV prevention work in Burma/Myanmar. I cover the theoretical basis to that decision, my rationale for using metaphor elicitation as method when researching the rhetoric and practice of HIV prevention in Burma/Myanmar, the process I used, and some of the resultant metaphors. I also demonstrate that this process resulted in the opening up of a space for talking about HIV prevention that avoided recourse to standard prevention rhetoric, thereby enabling a new and deeper understanding of the gap between this rhetoric and people’s actual practice or experience.

Accommodating conflicting realities: the messy practice of ethical (self) regulation

Abstract When I began to undertake qualitative PhD research in Myanmar, I found myself caught between the demands of an ethics approval process that required researcher certainty about ‘risk’, and the reality of a research site where I would be able at best to part-glimpse the risks people faced. I found space to work through holding to the process of critical ‘languaging’; paying ongoing attention to power dynamics within interviews while engaging in ‘a social process in which we jointly construct realities for each of us to see, occupy and to talk into’ (emphasis in original). In this article, I reflect on the tensions between ethical process and research practice and argue that researchers should consider critical languaging as an important ethical tool.

Just How Do We Create Change

When it comes to primary prevention of all forms of violence against women, including sexual violence, what is it that we seek to change? How can we help to generate this change, and why do we think certain methods of generating change will work better than others? In this chapter, I will argue that our understanding of these crucial questions is hampered by two interlinked contradictions inherent in much prevention work.

Evaluation as work in progress: stories of shared learning and development

Culture change programs that attempt to identify, challenge, and change inequities and discrimination represent major challenges for evaluators: these are shifting sands, subject to many external factors that cannot be accounted for or measured using ‘objective’ measures. Yet, effective, methodologically coherent evaluation of such projects is essential for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. This article reports on the evaluation of two programs from Victoria, Australia, that use sport as a vehicle for building cultures of respect. The methodology that underpinned both evaluations is described and the authors discuss the challenges (and benefits) experienced during the evaluation process. These challenges and benefits can be summarized under two main headings: relationships and expectations. Effective relationships based on trust led to open and frank communication, and this was essential to manage the multiple and often contradictory expectations that often accompany large, complex evaluation projects.

Pleasure bound: Victorian sex rebels and the new eroticism

The poor Victorians, they’ve been constantly rebuked for their sexual repression by daring rebels. Somehow, these rebels became the archetypes of Victorian culture – such as the beloved Pre-Raphaelites. Of course, Michel Foucault valiantly tried to dismiss the myth of Victorian sexual repression by arguing that instead there was an explosion of discourses about sex, but even he admitted that there were many silences on the everyday level – the discourses came from experts such as psychiatrists and other doctors.

In a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives

This wide-ranging book traverses the Brandon Teena case (subject of the feature film Boys Don’t Cry, for which Hilary Swank won an Oscar); the human geography of rural versus urban spaces; art, architecture and cinema (including the Austin Powers films, The Full Monty, The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry); postmodernism and modernism; Marxist politics, class and race; drag kings and riot dyke punk bands; slam poetry and other phenomena through which Judith Halberstam argues for concepts of queer time, queer space and queer subculture. That Halberstam uses the term ‘queer space’ in the body of the book but its title refers to ‘queer place’, is indicative of one of the key challenges here: a lack of overall coherence. There is a profusion and confusion both within and between themes, in definitions and in language use. Perhaps the clearest example of this can be found in Halberstam’s shifting usage of the word queer. Early on she states: ‘For the purposes of this book, “queer” refers to nonnormative logics and organisations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time’ (6) but then applies the word differently. For example, she labels as queer men who live in rural settings, participate in ‘undetected’ male-to-male sexual activity, yet present to their friends, families and communities as heterosexual. She also claims Brandon Teena as queer, despite his obvious desire to live within normative logics and organisations as a heterosexual male, with traditionally male friends, in a decidedly heterosexual rural community. Indeed, it is Halberstam’s treatment of Brandon Teena in this book that proved most troubling for this reviewer (a point to which I will return). Halberstam’s knowledge of, and confidence in referring to, the diverse fields already noted, is above question. The same is true of her knowledge of, and desire to theorise, the complex territory of liminal genders. Ultimately, however, this is a book that promises much in terms of, or arguments for, connections between queer time, queer space and queer subculture, but fails to deliver. Instead, this book celebrates a perceived community of queer outsiders who continue to resist ‘fairly conservative social projects aimed at assimilating gays and lesbians into the mainstream of the life and the family’ (153–4) and who ‘believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of the paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (2). This celebration of community is valuable and life-affirming. It is also another example of the book’s lack of coherence. Halberstam ends Chapter 4 by calling for ‘a vision of community, possibility, and redemption through collaboration’ (96), yet states categorically in the final chapter that ‘quests for community are always nostalgic attempts to return to some fantasised moment of union and unity’ (154). Halberstam is consistent throughout this book in her rejection of ‘gays who are, in the end, just like everybody else’ (94). She is also somewhat dismissive of those whose bodies have been ‘deliberately reorganised in order to invite certain gazes and shut down others’