Community, identity, orientation: sexuality, gender and rights in ASEAN

ABSTRACT

The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) escalated its community building project significantly over the last decade, culminating in the launch of a reformed and substantially integrated ASEAN Community at the end of 2015. This article considers what might follow from this newly reformed and rhetorically people-focused version of ASEAN for matters of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE). In claiming to be people-oriented and people-centred, and by developing a regional rights regime, ASEAN opens itself to standards by which it can be measured and held to account. We critically review ASEAN 2025: Forging Ahead Together, and consider civil society's response, focusing on the critique offered by the ASEAN SOGIE Caucus, the peak civil society organisation for ASEAN SOGIE matters. We focus on three themes: identity, visibility politics, and rights. We argue that while ASEAN falls short of its own rhetorical standards, these same standards support a politics which keeps rights in contestation, enabling civil society to push for accountability to international standards, and a more democratic politics.

KEYWORDS:

• SOGIE
• ASEAN
• human rights
• LGBTQ
• sexuality
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony J. Langlois

Anthony J. Langlois, associate professor, Flinders University, is a critical human rights theorist with a focus on LGBTQ rights protection in Southeast Asia.

Cai Wilkinson

Cai Wilkinson, senior lecturer in international relations at Deakin University, is an international studies scholar with expertise in the politics of “traditional values” and LGBTQ activism.

Paula Gerber

Paula Gerber specialises in human rights law and its impact on LGBTI people and is deputy director of Monash University's Castan Centre for Human Rights Law.

Baden Offord

Baden Offord, Dr Haruhisa Handa Chair of Human Rights, director of the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, is an expert in LGBTI, cultural studies, human rights and Southeast Asia.