Abstract
This article explores how cross-cultural research on sexual and reproductive rights can be vulnerable to ethnocentrism, and in what way ethnocentrism can be reduced in such research. Against the background of feminist debate on equality and difference, it discusses how the concepts of sexual and reproductive rights, within the parameters of development discourse, can reinforce hierarchical dichotomies of North–South, modern–traditional and actor–structure, and undervalue southern women's agency. An analytical framework that combines the entitlement approach and the three-dimensional model of gender is proposed to diminish ethnocentrism and counter homogenization and generalization. This framework aims at balancing agency, actor and structure, and allowing for differences, heterogeneity and contradictions.
