Archive for ‘Interviews’

April 21st, 2011

“Being a macho kills”

Sociologist, Oscar Guasch teaches sexual criminology and Sociology of Sexuality at the University of Barcelona. His activity articulates around the identification and reconstruction of the discourses and practices of ‘power’, the origins and political uses of heterosexuality, the social consequences of AIDS and the masculine identities and homophobia, among others. At present he is carrying out an investigation on prostitution among men in Barcelona.

In your writings you criticize the hegemonic gay movement basically for accepting to be tolerated at the price of laminating its diversity and for being incapable of legitimizing and exporting the love among men to the whole group of them.

There exist social processes that are born to free people but with the time become normalizers. The feminist movements, for instance, start to free women but certain feminisms becomes ‘state feminism’ or marxisism, which is born to free the proletariat but certain Marxism becomes proletariat dictatorship and real socialism. The gay movement is born to fight homophobia but in the end a certain part of it says exactly how homosexual people have to be. If you are poor, old and homosexual you do not have social visibility.

Why did the hegemonic gay movement become normalizer?

For a collection of factors. The ‘pink peseta’, that is the fact the ghetto, which is never volunteer but a strategy of the subordinate groups to survive in an hostile environment, generates an important market of consumption. The political context, which in Spain has surely to do with the ‘zapaterism’, that is with an attempt of redefinition of the left wing starting from social policies of visibility that cost no money such as the law regulating the homosexual marriage.

The existence of certain gay leaders who have used the movement to promote themselves, something that happens everywhere. A certain need of many homosexual people to be accepted, to be able to say ‘I am normal too, I can get married’ and a lot of well versed homophobia by many homosexuals, the fact of being able to say ‘I am a correct homosexual, I am not promiscuous, I am not effeminate, I am not a queen’. All this has created a context where a certain archetypal model of ‘gay to imitate’ was produced.

The crisis will change this all. Spain has passed in the last 15 years from the sheep to the convertible. In the next future we will become a modest country and this is going to create many social problems for what to acceptation is concerned. A lot of people will be demanding authoritarianism and order and there will be social rage casted on immigrants, probably on the homosexuals and trans they will find close because it is very complicated for a society to have its social status diminished.

What does it mean, as you state in ‘La sociedad rosa’ (the pink society) and in ‘Heroes, cientificos, heterosexuales y gays’, (Heroes, scientists, heterosexuals and gays) that ‘where the true men are defined as virile the fags reproduce themselves thanks to homophobia’?

The gay socially presentable is funny, nice, knows about fashion, is respectful, you can bring him to any party. Some accept the role of pleasant and friend of all the girls. I do not criticize the cabaret nor the irony but when this is done to fit in what the others expect from one.

Spanish Version

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April 15th, 2011

On gender, disaster risk reduction and sustainable development

“Gender equality in DRR does not mean merely addressing women’s
issues – it means addressing concerns of both men and women, the
relations between them and the root causes of gender imbalances”

Since 2005 Feng Min Kan (China) has been the Senior Coordinator for the Advocacy and Outreach Coordination Unit within the UNISDR (United National International Strategy for Disaster Reduction) secretariat in Geneva. In this position, she has fostered the idea that both gender equality and disaster risk reduction are imperative to achieve sustainable development.

One of the first things reported in “Making disaster risk reduction gender-sensitive” (published in 2009 by UNISDR, UNDP (UN Development Programme) and IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) is that “While women’s vulnerability to disasters is often highlighted, their role in fostering a culture of resilience and their active contribution to building it has not been adequately recognized”.

Disaster management has been traditionally considered as a men’s field. Women have not been really represented at policy and decision making level of disaster management, this also reflects the situation of women in disaster risk reduction at country level, therefore the gender perspective has not been really considered but the reality is that women bear a large proportion of population living in poverty. When people are poor they also live in the most vulnerable areas other people would not even think of living.

In a community for instance prone to the impact of floods, if most of the women do not have much formal education, also due to poverty, they won’t have real access to information nor will they probably understand what exactly the fact that a cyclone with a certain speed is coming implies. If they don’t, they cannot take actions to protect themselves and their families. In this kind of situation women are much more vulnerable than others.

The report also highlights physical and environmental vulnerabilities women face in many contexts. What are they?

In some cultures women are not supposed to learn to swim and climb for instance.

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April 1st, 2011

Meet Mauro Cabral

Argentinian historian and philosopher and trans and intersex activist. Mauro Cabral is co-director of GATE (Global Action for Trans Equality) and member of the Latin American Consortium on Intersex Issues (Consorcio Latinoamericano de Trabajo sobre Intersexualidad).

Statistically, situations related to intersexuality have place in one over 2,500 births. Every time a child whose sexual and reproductive anatomy varies from both male and female bodily standards is born, his o her body is forced into surgical and hormonal treatments aimed to ‘normalize’ the appearance of his or her genitals. Among the international frameworks on Human Rights, at present only the not binding Yogyakarta Principles make a specific call for States “to ensure that no child’s body is irreversibly altered by medical procedures in an attempt to impose a gender identity without the full, free and informed consent of the child in accordance with the age and maturity of the child and guided by the principle that in all actions concerning children, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”. in their article 18 on “Protection from Medical Abuses”

In what sense is intersex children’s genital mutilation a feminizing procedure?

The majority of the different interventions done to normalize intersex children’s bodies are addressed to create female genitals because from a medical point of view they are technologically easier to make than male genitals.

Is it also a political issue?

In medicine it is basically a technical issue which, from the intersex activism is remitted also to the running of stereotypes that have to do with the fact that sexuality and the male gender are intrinsically dependent on the existence of a functional penis and that it is therefore easier to become a woman than a man if there is not a male body sustaining such masculinity. However, the issue could be seen the other way around and think that masculinity is more fragile because it has more requirements… These are activist interpretations on decisions doctors make without them appearing in an explicit way.

Spanish Version

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March 24th, 2011

On sexual and reproductive rights, Meet Jacqueline Sharpe

Jacqueline Sharpe is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist from Trinidad and Tobago and the president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), a global service provider and a leading advocate of sexual and reproductive health and rights working in 150 countries. Its areas of action include abortion, access, adolescents, advocacy and AIDS/HIV.

Although there is an area of over-lap between them, sexual and reproductive rights are two separate issues.

Sexual rights include the right of all people to make free and responsible decisions about all aspects of their own sexuality, including deciding to be sexually active or not and protecting and promoting their reproductive and sexual health; The right to be free from discrimination, coercion and violence in one’s sexual life, and when making sexual decisions; The right to expect and demand equality, full consent, mutual respect and shared responsibility in all sexual relationships and to pursue a satisfying, safe and pleasurable sexual life.

On the other side reproductive rights include the rights of couples and individuals to freely and responsibly decide the number, spacing and timing of their children; The right to have the information, education and means to make the above decisions; The right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health and the right to make decisions free from discrimination, coercion and violence.

Sexual and reproductive rights are included in international conventions such as CEDAW (see blogroll), the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, and the Plan of Action which emerged from the International Conference on Population and Development (El Cairo, 1994).

In the IPPF’s webpage it is stated that “young people (those who are btw 10 and 24 years old) face the barriers of cost, stigma and fear of going to a clinic. The lack of information targeted at their needs and (in many countries) the need for parental consent, limits young people’s  awareness of the issues of sex and sexuality. High rates of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections are powerful evidence that programmes are failing to meet their needs”.

How does IPPF work to meet young people’s needs?

We strongly believe that young people should be aware of their sexual and reproductive life to make decisions. Since we recognize and respect that people have belief systems what we try to do is provide young people with information, education and services and also to have them negotiate their values so that the decisions they make are congruent with themselves.

IPPF works with religious leaders in several countries also to have young people negotiate with them. In the Family Planning Association of Trinidad and Tobago, for instance, we have a specific project on youth sexuality in the context of preventing HIV and we have been working with the Anglican church. We started with one priest and now have several church communities wanting to participate in our programme. I think it is something that has to be done project by project and place by place.

In addition to provide services to young people we also want to encourage them to participate in the organization. At the moment 20 percent of the board directors of IPPF are people under the age of 25.

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March 16th, 2011

AIDS treatment in and out of gender

PART TWO

“It is known that after acute HIV infection women present with higher CD4 counts and lower viral loads than men.  We were interested in looking at whether this difference influenced clinical outcomes.  It is debatable whether these sex differences confer clinical benefits and we hypothesized that they would”, says Elizabeth Connick. She works at the Department of Medicine, University of Colorado, Denver, Aurora, and is one of the authors of the study “Sex, Race and Geographic Region influence Clinical Outcomes Following Primary HIV-1 Infection”, recently published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.  She was involved since the beginning in the Acute Infection and Early Disease Research Program (AIEDRP) and was principal investigator at one of the sites of the program funded by the National Institute of Health. It was a multicenter, observational cohort of more than 2000 primarily North American individuals (26 sites in the US, 10 in Australia, 2 in Canada and one in Brazil) diagnosed with acute and recent HIV infection whose data were prospectively collected in a database.

“I thought it would be a great opportunity to analyze the data base to answer that question.  When you look in a population of HIV positive people you don’t know how long somebody has been infected.  It is hard to know what stage they are in their disease and to judge whether men and women are progressing at different rates”.

Of 2277 seroconverters in the database 5.4% were women. The majority of men (77%) were ‘white’, whereas the majority of women (55%) were ‘nonwhite’. Almost half of the women in the study were from the southern United States. The average age for women was 32 and for men 34.  In the discussion of the paper the authors underline the selection bias in terms of who got into the study. “Similar to other HIV seroconverter studies, bias was introduced by recruitment techniques that relied heavily on screening subjects who were viewed as at risk for HIV infection. Consequently, there were disproportionately more ‘white’, homosexual men and fewer women and ‘nonwhites’ compared to the general population of persons with newly acquired HIV infection in North America”.

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March 8th, 2011

Meet Maria Lai

“We exist in as much as the others interpret us”

In spite of having always been in poor health Maria Lai, at almost one hundred years of age, keeps writing and producing works of art.

When I get to the house in the heart of Sardinia where she lives with her sister, I have a very high curiosity to ask her what her secret is. But it is enough for me to see her curious eyes and how she bends her own body to laugh, just like a child, that I understand it myself. Maria Lai is a child for whom life is a big play that, if she could, would play over again, “better  though”, for another century.

“Everybody asks me ‘at your age, why don’t you give up working?’ and I answer ‘why don’t you give up breathing?’ I am really lucky for having always played and keep doing it. All my plays have been a thrust to daydream, to tell lies. Only afterwards did I realize they called it art”.

She informs me right away that she doesn’t like to be interviewed “because I’m not important and in the end it’s always about gossiping”. I ask her how we can do it to avoid it. “First of all let us forget it is an interview”. We try it, sitting at the wooden table of the big house looking at the mountains where she has spent most of her childhood until the war, when she left the island to study art, first in Rome and then at the academy of art in Venice.

“When I got to Venice I was 23 years old but I looked like 13 with my short hair and 1.40 meters height”. Sardinia was considered to be the third world and she, therefore, a savage.  She was the only woman in her course. “I was such a surprise that everyone expected me to leave soon, but I kept attending class everyday, even if Arturo Martini, my professor, used to humiliate me, often talking dirty to make me run away. He belonged to a generation that didn’t admit women in art”.

She did not pay attention to it and even pretended she did not understand. “I was aware I was not worth it but I was also aware that I could not live without his words”, she remembers. “I was not looking for his friendship, I wanted to understand”.

Notwithstanding the drama of the war, the bombings, the far away family she did not have news of, in Venice she felt peaceful and “despite everything I also felt I was in the right place, as I always do when entering unknown dimensions”, she says. “To me it was a great occasion to rummage through myself until I found the ball of thread”.

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January 25th, 2011

“Gender-based violence is systematically being questioned throughout a fallacy”

Forensic doctor, since 2008 Lorente is the delegate of the Spanish government for Gender-based Violence.

In an article of yours recently published in Pikara magazine entitled “El posmachismo está aquí”( Post male-chauvinism is here) you state that “The critical reaction towards equality is not very different from those that took place before when trying to put an end to privileges of blood, religion or race”. What privileges do you think you have for being a man today in Spain?

I think I am a little different man in this sense. Since I was a child I was aware of the privileges that I had for being the son of a rural town doctor, but I did not want them because they did not depend on me. I wanted to be more myself in the sense of being one more, to be able to keep in touch with more people, to break the norms of behaviour that were supposed I would have followed for being the son of the doctor, for being a man.

Nevertheless men do have privileges, the fundamental of which is being a man in an unequal society. It is not the fact of obtaining certain things as much as that all of them are designed so that there are men who can benefit from them. This does not mean that all men do it, but we have an added value, especially as far as the concept of authority as a reference is regarded.

When I’ve talked about gender-based violence my words have had more weight and credibility than those of many women with more experience and knowledge. Not to mention that delegating certain elements of care and affection to the woman and profiting from this situation without ever questioning why something doesn’t work is an injustice that we cannot allow neither as a society nor as men. There should be no situation where a man doesn’t have to take responsibility for the simple fact of being one.

Spanish version

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January 13th, 2011

Chronicles from Juárez

For Ciudad Juárez 2010 ended with more than 3,000 violent deaths. The rate of murders in the city, adjoining with the United States, raised considerably during the last years until being one of the highest in the world since it became the scenario of brutal confrontations between drug cartel gangs of Juárez and the close Sinaloa.

More than 28,000 people have died in Mexico during the last four years since president Felipe Calderón began an offensive against the drug cartels in December 2006 by sending to the city 10 thousand soldiers with the objective of closing the door to the 90 percent of the cocaine towards the United States with the use of military force. According to many militarization would be responsible of the increase of violence.

Among the main targets the opposing cartels members, police officers, social activists (the last one Susana Chávez, 36 years old, poet fighting for the clearing up of the well-known female homicides in that border, killed and mutilated of one hand last week) and journalists.

Besides the war among the cartels, corruption (with police officers who round off their starvation wages protecting the bosses), perverted effect of delocalization and an urban extremely degraded area with one high school for 500 thousand inhabitants, reign in the city.

This is where Sandra Rodríguez and Luz del Carmen Sosa work as reporters at El Diario de Juárez. In 2010 they were awarded with the Reporteros del Mundo prize (in memory of Julio Fuentes and Julio Anguita, correspondents of the Spanish awarding newspaper El Mundo and who were killed in Afghanistan and Irak respectively) for “having shown an extraordinary courage in every sense, signing their chronicles in spite of knowing that they put their lives at a risk” and for being “firm defenders of the freedom of expression in their country, denouncing the fight among cartels for the control of drug, the indiscriminate murders of women and the general atmosphere of violence going on in the streets of Mexico”.

Spanish version

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December 15th, 2010

Meet Nadia Ghulam

Farmer, stock-breeder, wells builders, water seller, owner of a bicycle’s repair-shop, Mullah’s assistant and occasional religious police, even cook for one day for a group of Talibans. All this was Nadia Ghulam during the ten years she was a boy. The happy little girl with her long circling skirt she had been had left the day a bomb had hit her house in Kabul burning the 60 percent of her body. She was eight years old then, or at least that’s what she guesses. Nadia doesn’t remember very well those two years she spends her time half inside and half outside the hospital. “But I do remember Mujahideen bursting into the houses taking us in –and even into the hospital- and forcing us to leave, the pain of my wounds, the fact of being homeless and always starving and the voice of the bombs”.

While her mother is always with her two younger sisters, her elder brother and her father live with an aunt of theirs or they sort out their lives. When they have no house and Nadia is out of the hospital, they go to people’s houses, first families, then strangers, or sleep in shelters. “It is curious, and also a little sad”, she says between bites of melanzane (aubergines) alla parmigiana I then find out not to be only an Italian but also an Afghan typical dish (the latter use goose cheese instead of mozzarella and parmisan). “Here in Spain I read Anne Frank’s diary. She explained how it was I don’t know whose birthday, that they had made a cake and then had it…I kept thinking: unbelievable. Because during war there are no cakes”, she says. “She also explained they used to have vegetables and we never did”.

Nadia is around ten years old. Her father tells her and her mother that her teenage brother, Zelmai, was shot in the streets and is not working in Pakistan as they had been thinking for more than a year. “I then understood why my father had little by little stopped living. He was his pride”. Almost simoultaneously Soraya, her doctor’s assistant, tells her that with the arrival of the taliban women won’t be able to work. “I thought, so what am I going to do? If my father is ill, my brother isn’t here and my mother is like that, what are we going to eat? I have always been a person who relieves in her own things and who doesn’t like other people’s help. I say, if this person works and has his things, why can’t I have mine? I cannot be waiting for the others, you know?”.

Spanish version

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December 5th, 2010

Meet Tamara Adrián

Lawyer and professor of commercial law at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB) and at Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), in 2004 Adrián was the first Venezuelan citizen appealing to the Constitutional Assembly for the recognition of her identity. In spite of having a gender reassignment surgery in 2002 in Thailand she still legally has a male’s name, the name she was born with. Until today she has not received any answer on her petition yet. On 18 October 2010 Adrián postulated as judge of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice with the side objective of also “claiming transsexuals’ rights and testing the tolerance of a country with homophobic institutions”. The resolution on her postulation (she has already passed the first selection phase) will probably be public by the end of the year. She is a lesbian, a feminist, a member of the Latin American and Caribbean Region of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA-LAC board) and the founder of the DIVERLEX association (Difference and Equality through the Law) working for the implementation of legal measures protecting sex and gender related human rights.

From a legal point of view what is the situation of transsexuals and transgender in Venezuela?

We simply don’t exist. There exist no public politics for the recognition of one’s identity, nor for medical treatment or protection against discrimination in all fields: labour, studies, etc.

You underwent sex-reassignment surgery in 2002 but your ID still says you have a male’s name. What does this mean in your daily life?

For some day-to-day activities, like the gym or the grocery store, I use a fake ID, always letting civil servants know it is and that they can denounce me if they want to, which until now no one has. Anyway, my transsexuality is not visible so also when using my real ID people generally think that there is some mistake behind the name they see. At the same time I am a well known person in my country and that makes everything easier. But for the majority of the transsexuals in Venezuela daily life is not easy at all, that is why I am carrying out this struggle, for civil responsibility and for the respect of human rights, so other people in the future can achieve their constitutional right to the ‘self-determination’ more easily.

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