Hetero-normativity and multiple discriminations suffered by women

I would like to start with a few stories based on discrimination.

One night a mother was feeding her daughter. She was placed in on a sac, hung from the ceiling and beaten by a broom again and again. On another occasions, the daughter was made to kneel on a pile of rocks, her arms stretched out, both hands holding a glass of water and told to hold back that position for hours, unless she wanted to be mercilessly beaten again. When she was not beaten, she was forced to do manual domestic labour often dealing with male traditional chores, like fixing broken pipes or standing in front of the door all night long. All that simply because she was lesbian.

About 4 years ago IGLHRC worked with an organization based in Costa Rica to document violence against lesbians. Costa Rica tends to have some more progressive laws than many other countries. Still, the following story happened: two women involved, one of them was physically abusing the other. One day the beating was particularly terrible, and the victim called the police. Domestic violence law in Costa Rica encompasses lesbian and gays couples. However, when the police came, looked at the two women, started laughing, pushed their car back and watched.

Two years ago a report was received from the group Lesbiradas in Guatemala: in that report there was a particular prosecution of what we usually call butch women that present a more masculine gender expression. One of the challenges we are currently facing is to challenge the meaning of the words. There was a series of rapes of butch women. A butch woman would be walking along the street, some men would encourage her to enter the bar, buy her lots of drink and rape her. This happened in a systematic way – none of them felt they could go to the police to seek justice.

The last story comes from a Latino HIV-AIDS organization in New York: their landlord has just refused to renew their lease because the landlord presumably said the other tenants in the building were uncomfortable with the presence of transgender women waiting to go into the office. This course is being taken to court right now by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Those stories are some indications of the various ways in which lesbians, women having sex with other women, women whose gender expression is more masculine or transgender women, face not only discrimination but also violence, abuse, and in many cases with no access to justice.

And to keep in line with the title of the panel we receive stories and documentation on women who come from other marginalized communities that face double, triple, quadruple forms of discrimination, maybe within their own community, within their family and certainly by the police, by judges, by prosecutors, by health service providers: i.e. all of the folks we look to secure our human rights.

As far as definitions and categories are concerned, IGLHR decided to change its mandate 3 years ago: we decided to move from an LGBT organization to a sexual rights organization. We decided to make this shift because we felt that the category of LGT did not correspond to the reality of people’s live: many people do not define themselves as lesbian or gay. Sometimes due to the fact that in their community it is not possible, because it would be is too risky or dangerous, or because that kind of organization on sexual conduct or identity does not fit with the way one person self-defines.

Another example on the difficulty of definitions was given by a report on state sponsored homophobia in Southern Africa where we worked with Human Rights Watch. The title fo the report is “More than a name”. A woman in a rural community in South Africa had sex with another woman and she presented in a more masculine way. When asked if she had sex with another woman she said yes, when she was asked if she was lesbian she said no: her self definition was more her gender expression. She did not consider herself a woman or a man, for her, identity category of lesbian did not fit.

Of course the name presupposes what we do. Claiming the name lesbian, bisexual and gay can be an empowering moment and can be a way in which we organize and connect with the LGBT community or around the world. It allows us to see ourselves part of a global movement. But on other situations to stay rigidly attached to those categories may leave behind those who we want to work with.

It is a real issue for us and also what is also very clear is that as LGBT we have an unfortunate number of partners in struggle and prosecution. We have been working on a framework, and I think this is very critical.

We have been doing work on sexuality baiting. We tried to understand why control of women’s sexuality has become a fundamentalism in many parts of the world. It is frightening to see that fundamentalists disagree on religion but agree on women’s sexuality or controlling any form of conduct that contravenes any social being or cultural norm. Hetero-normativity is a way to try to explain how homophobia, how the fear of women’s sexual autonomy, the rigid gender norm based on concept that we have two categories of people: men and women. Those who do not conform to these strict categories are outside or other. Reality of intersex people is a good example that construction of men and women does not even fit at a biological level, let alone how people function in society.

Some of the directions we are moving at in IGLHR is looking at the intersection between discrimination based on sexual conduct, sexual preference, gender identity, gender expression and economic and cultural rights.

We do know that for women who are black, poor, from indigenous communities, those issues are even more difficult to resolve. We also know that discrimination is done in the name of family and culture.

IGLHR would be happy to receive testimony and stories to help make an analysis on this area.

Susana Fried
Program Director IGLHR
Worked for Women’s rights issues with the centre for Women’s Global Leadership and Unifem