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ABSTRACT
Although attention to the links between health and human rights is growing globally, the full potential of a progressive human rights approach to health has not yet been explored, and it is even more faintly understood in the United States than in the rest of the world. At the same time, global claims for sexual rights, particularly for those identifying as gay, lesbian, transsexual, or bisexual, are increasingly being made as human rights claims.
All of these approaches to rights advocacy risk limiting their own transformative impact unless advocates critique their own strategies. Paradoxically, using health as a way to bring attention to nonheteronormative sexualities can be both helpful and potentially dangerous, especially when coupled with human rights.
Recognizing sexuality as a critical element of humanity, and establishing a fundamental human right to health, can play a role in broader social justice claims, but the tendency of both public health and human rights advocacy to "normalize" and regulate must be scrutinized and challenged. (Am J Public Health. 2001;91:861-864)
This commentary highlights some elements of a "health and human rights" approach to sexuality that might prove useful to health policy and practice in the context of diverse sexualities. At the same time, it perversely unsettles some of those very same concepts. In part, this is to better capture the challenges that those working for global sexual rights, a contentious but increasingly recognized area of human rights work, face on a daily basis. It also suggests that neither "human rights" nor "health" should be employed without an examination of the ways in which each concept functions. Finally, it suggests that the process of theorizing and practicing an integrated approach to sexuality by linking the worlds of health and human rights will undoubtedly result in practices and positions that are more than mere sums of our current understanding.
A health and human rights approach to sexuality can, if used critically, be part of politically astute and self-conscious coalition strategies. Because of its focus on one category of marginalized persons-here, persons of nonheteronormative sexualities-this approach can contribute both to reviving calls for social justice in health for the most diverse range of people and to transforming the nature and practice of state accountability...