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Proposal for Plenary/Conference - World Social Forum - January, 2004 The World Social Forum is, at its best, a platform for developing challenges to the existing paradigms of globalisation. It is also a space that prides itself on its diversity, its challenging of boundaries and exclusions created by a dominant few and imposed on the many. Yet while this forum include in their discourses issues such as class-, gender-, and descent-based oppression and marginalisation, sexuality as a site of exclusion remains ignored. We are happy about the inclusion of "patriarchy, gender and sexuality/rights" as one of the main thematic axes of the World Social Forum, 2004, and are eager to be involved in a process to ensure that the theme is reflected in the large plenaries/conferences that will take place at the WSF. To initiate such a process, we have outlined below a proposal for a conference on Sexuality, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism and hope that this will be a first step towards concretising the discussion of sexuality at the WSF. Sexuality, Nationalism and Fundamentalism In a rapidly changing socio-political scenario, national boundaries have become at once more porous and more rigid than ever before. As global economic and cultural capitalism increases its hold, essentialised notions of "nations" and "communities" re-assert themselves in response. This ‘closing in’ is used by fundamentalist forces to create narrow definitions of what is indigenous to a culture and, therefore, desirable, fostering greater intolerance for any practice or discourse that is perceived to be ‘foreign’. These notions require and create essentialised difference -such as black-white, Muslim-Hindu, woman-man, homosexual-heterosexual- that becomes grounds upon which social, economic, and political superiority are justified, with marginalised communities excluded from the conception and space of the nation. We need to examine how women bear the burden of the tightening of cultural norms, how lesbians and gay men are dismissed as just another import from the West, how the attribution of ‘unnatural’ sexual proclivities to Muslim men is part of the effort to link anti-nationalism with homosexuality. It is precisely such concerns that this seminar will address. We aim to look at how sexuality is constructed as a basis of discrimination and how it is appropriated to construct other differences within increasingly masculine and communal nationalist formulations. These are issues that are at the centre of any understanding of nationalism, fundamentalism and society -we cannot understand the complicated workings of fundamentalism and sexism without an analysis of sexuality and sexuality- based discrimination. Core issues to be explored in the seminar
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Links between globalisation,
fundamentalism, and sexuality -how these forces interact with and feed off
each other to construct and divide individuals and communities along lines of
essentialised differences. 