Activities

Our Research Activities

India-Indonesia Comparative Research on Non Normative Sexuality of three constituency : sex worker, widow and young urban lesbian, supported by Ford Foundation, New York. The objectives of the research are :

To gain a deeper understanding of issues related to sexual practices of women inside and outside the institution of heterosexual marriage;
To document sexual strategies that are empowering for women, the conditions under which they occur and the legal, political and religious context in which they take place;
To develop indicators of sexual empowerment;
To evolve a culturally sensitive sexual rights framework for advocacy and consciousness raising;
To elaborate on principles of feminist research methodology related to the issue of sexualities and the right to sexual expression and empowerment;
To make the issue of sexuality more visible within the countries of research through publication of material in regional languages including the outcome of the research on sexuality;
To strengthen the research capacity within universities and NGO's on the issue of sexuality, and to contribute to teaching activities in this field;
To produce material to be used both for advocacy and for academic teaching purposes based on the research outcomes;
To contribute to the building of a theoretical and methodological framework to analyse sexualities in an Asian context.

2. Research on Female Non Normative Sexualities in Africa and Asia supported by Riek Stientra Foundation (on going)

The objectives are :

To bring together a group of Asian and African researchers who are linked to women’s/sexual rights groups and who want to do research to support their advocacy on women’s/sexual rights.
To train them in theories and methodologies of research on sexualities;
To assist them in developing a research design based on their own context;
To assist them during their fieldwork;
To assist them in analysing and presenting their data in order to help build a campaign on women’s/sexual rights.

Over the past decades both the women’s human/sexual rights discourse has developed and the struggles for their rights by members of same-sex or transgender/transsexual communities have gained wide attention. Scholarship on these issues is also growing, though in many instances it is still marginalized. Attention to issues related to female-bodied persons has lagged behind. The installation of the Chair on Gender and Women’s Same-Sex Relations Crossculturally at the University of Amsterdam is the first of its kind globally.

TRANS/SIGN interrogates the construction of sexual normalcy or heteronormative orthodoxy and promotes advocacy to increase the agency of those who oppose compulsory and normative heterosexuality. Heteronormativity works in a double-edged way. It disciplines those inside and it marginalizes and stigmatizes those outside of its borders. Non-heteronormative persons see themselves in relation to the heteronormative society that excludes them but rarely do they analyse the commonalities in the strategies by which they are 'othered', both from a crosscultual perspective and from the perspective of other sexually marginalized people. TRANS/SIGN research topics include the ways their identities and subjectivities are constructed, their social, economic, sexual and religious agency and the embodiment of that agency, as well as the role of the state, religion and NGO’s. The power of ‘normalcy’, or heteronomative orthodoxy, and the symbolic violence this entails for these marginalized persons need to be analytically deconstructed in order for effective actions to be built. Ultimately the research done within TRANS/SIGN will contribute to the struggle for sexual rights not only for the marginalized groups, but also for those living within the norm. Relatedly, the possibilities of social and sexual agency will be explored, particularly as it concerns the embodiment of resistance in so far as this exceeds the bounds of the habitus in which heteronormativity is lived and the socio-cultural space in which resistance is taking shape.