Browsing by Subject "Sexual politics"

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Open Access
Creating Clarity: Ethnic and Sexual Politics of United Kingdom's Human Trafficking Discourse
(2011-05-06) Purohit, Bhumi
Human trafficking has become a prominent political issue in the United Kingdom since 2001, with all major parties in the country agreeing on the importance of abolishing trafficking. However, the political discourse is riddled with two frameworks, with each party supporting one or the other at various times: trafficking as a border security issue versus trafficking as a human rights issue. In order to examine the relationship of this discursive political dichotomy with the journalistic understanding of the issue, the paper examines discourse on sex trafficking among four major newspapers, each with a different political affiliation: The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, and The Independent. The study finds that the nineteenth century perception of innocent, and usually white and virgin women being lured into trafficking by “evil” foreign traffickers is still implicitly present in modern-day journalistic discourse. The presence of these ethnic and sexual politics, which influence the border security and human rights frameworks, respectively, confound the reality of trafficking with a discursive myth. The journalistic discourse thus has a policy implication of victims needing to fit the discursive mold of a trafficked person in order to receive human rights protections. Though finding a factual account of trafficking is difficult, adding voices of trafficked persons to narratives may create a clearer picture of the issue, and lead to better protections for trafficked persons in U.K. policy.
Open Access
Revolution in the Sheets: The Politics of Sexuality and Tolerance in the Mexican Left, 1919-2001
(2020) Franco, Robert
Tolerance is considered foundational for a multicultural society to defuse tensions over race, religion, and sexuality. However, critics of tolerance point out that its reliance on the consent of the majority to extend equal rights to a minority, along with its liberal method of individualizing prejudice, does not result in equality. This project historicizes tolerance by examining the trajectory of its adoption by leftist political parties in Mexico to address concerns over sexual identity and difference. It demonstrates that the embrace of tolerance was not only a political strategy for electoral gain, but also a method to maintain a masculinist party. By endorsing a policy of tolerance through the expansion of the principle of private life, leftist parties claimed solidarity with the feminist and sexual liberation movement rather than engage with their criticisms of the heterosexism of leftist militancy.
Issues of sexuality, particularly homosexual and reproductive rights, were in an uneasy, if not antagonistic, relationship with the revolutionary politics of left-wing organizations such as the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) since their foundation. However, between 1976 and 1981, leftist parties shifted their stances. Adopting a policy of tolerance, party leaders hoped to reconcile the growing lesbian, gay and feminist movements with their rank and file because these social movements provided the potential votes that could launch the Left out of electoral obscurity. Revolution in the Sheets traces the limits and outcomes of this strategy. Tolerance did little to stem homophobia or sexism among leftists in Mexico. Furthermore, militants rejected the tolerance policy because sexual politics were the primary outlet for rank and file leftists to dispute intra-party tensions, vocalize intimate grievances, and distinguish themselves from one another for political gain. In the end, the shift to tolerance – a defining feature of the conflicts over the cultural turns that marked the last decades of the twentieth century – was a contingent product of intimate feuds, electoral strategy, and interpersonal relationships.