Behind the Veil of Discourse

ISS-researchers blogging from the field

Tags: Indonesia , Nicaragua , Civil Society Building , Promoting Pluralism
Additional tags: Sexual rights participation complexity

A few weeks into their field assignments, the ISS researchers have started to unpack their questions and issues, venturing into complexity beyond the veil of discourse.

Blogging from Nicaragua, Ana Victoria Portocarrero contemplates the holistic and multidimensional nature of development processes as she reflects on a workshop about sexual rights. And in Indonesia, Rima Irmayani adds yet new perspectives and questions around the discourse and practice of the term ‘participation’. Both blogs remind development practitioners of the importance to engage social situations with openness and curiosity, a tall order in a sector that is still dominated by engineering approaches and the myth of modernity.

Development with Human Bodies

Ana Victoria Portocarrero

Pedro was shot three times in the war[1]. One of those shots left half of his body insensible: from his navel to the feet. It was three decades ago, and since that moment Pedro can’t walk, he can’t feel his legs, neither his hips.

I met Pedro today, in a workshop about reproductive and sexual rights organized by the Fund for Gender Equity and Sexual and Reproductive Rights (FED/HIVOS) with FED's partner organizations in Nicaragua. Pedro was surrounded by women (most of them biologically, one of them by choice[2]). All these women work in women’s organizations around the country, and most of them work with rural women.

Today, these women and Pedro talked about pleasure, desire, sex, in the context of rights but also as mechanisms of control of some people’s bodies. They also related sexual rights with other rights, as the right to education, health, economic resources, and others.

Pedro told us that he felt that his life was ended when those three shots took him the possibility of feeling part of his body, of having children, and of experiencing pleasure and have a sexual relationship with his wife. However, to experience these difficulties made him start to explore the other half of his body, from the navel to the top. From this exploration, many new experiences were born, and with them, a different conscience of his own existence, the conscience of having a body, of being able to feel pleasure in a different way. Pedro also realized that the other half of his body was very alive. ‘I can’t feel half of my body, but I can feel the other half’, said Pedro to the audience.

I learned a lot from Pedro today. I learned that the body, as one body, does not exist, because it is not one body, it is not homogeneous. There are many and very diverse bodies, with many diverse needs, ways of experiencing pleasure, ways of relating to its context and desires.

So, I learned that it is not enough to talk about development with a face, or development with a human body, but we should talk about development with human bodies, fluid bodies, with its options, its needs, its specific realities. This is particularly important when working on topics of gender and sexualities, that take place in the body. But it is also important in general for the development industry, that sometimes forgets that the centre of its practice should be the human being.

These human beings don't have a compartmentalised body in which they experience things in separated ways. On the contrary, people experience pain and satisfaction in the same body, and sometimes these pains and satisfactions are interrelated. In that sense, it is senseless to advance some agendas, without considering others. This happens a lot with the topics of gender and sexuality, that are seen as non-priority, or as frivolous topics that are not as important as poverty reduction, for example. However, it is also dangerous to determine peoples’ multiple needs and potentialities in a normative universalistic way, assuming that what is applicable to one person is applicable to everybody else.

As Pedro showed in the workshop, his needs and potentialities as a man with different capacities, are not the same of a blind black heterosexual woman, or of a rural young peasant, or of a urban white transsexual student. All these people have their own stories, contexts, and set of identities that produce very different experiences of their bodies.

My own reflection after he left, was that we, as development practitioners and researchers, can’t continue stuck in one piece of the development puzzle, but we should understand this piece in relation to the other ones, and we should be able to see the whole puzzle as well. But I also learned that we will never know enough about other people’s needs unless we pay attention to their particularities.

[1] I am referring to the civil in the 80s in Nicaragua, between the Sandinista army and the counter-revolutionary forces, after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979.

[2] A trans-gender activist was in the workshop.

What We Meant by Participation

Rima Irmayani

Today is the sixth day I spent in Poso. I have been spent much of my time here in the village. The more I talk with common people the more I get ideas about what the meaning is of ‘being participated’ in the post-conflict reconstruction programme that is the topic of my research.

During interviews with community members, they associate participation with ‘gotong royong’ or ‘kerja bakti’ which means people working together to clean public facilities or road in the village in the regular basis. Although there are some reasons on what motivates people to work together, most of them said that they are required by village leaders to work, otherwise village police will visit and ‘advice’ them to join in the ‘kerja bakti’ next time. A visit from village police means a moral punishment.

Community participation also means that villagers are formally invited to a meeting. They will not come to the meeting if they are not invited. And being invited means appreciation for their existence. People who are not invited sometimes perceive this as a strong signal that in the eyes of the powerful, they are less educated, less wealthy and less worthy. Women, even when they participate they are not given space to talk during the meeting. But vocal people are also often left out, as they might disturb the meeting process by openly voicing their concerns.

So I thought I was well on the way to figuring out the dynamics of participation. But then on the way to the village, I saw a meeting in the village hall. The meeting was about information dissemination about people's rights on health insurance. Although the head of village had announced this meeting and invited everyone to come, only the elderly attended the meeting. Later, I asked some of the absentees why they did not go to the meeting. They said it is better to go to the cacao field or to do something that can give them money than only sitting and listening.

I am slowly gaining some insights into the meaning of participation for this particular community, but at the same time, I am still puzzled. What is the role of participation in rebuilding peoples’ lives? What does this tell us about programming in post-conflict setting? And what is the relationship between security – which comes up frequently during interviews - with being participated. With these questions on the table, my quest continues.