Queer Activist Intersections in Southeast Asia: Human Rights and Cultural Studies

Abstract

The practice of human rights elicits a range of theoretical positions and problems in relation to advocacy across Southeast Asia. This raises questions about the universal nature of human rights, the problem of cultural imperialism and the dynamic of the local and the global. These questions become heightened when connected to queer or LGBT issues. This paper focuses on the intersections of queer scholarship, activism and human rights in relation to LGBT asylum seekers from Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia in order to explore the potentialities, possibilities and difficult challenges queer activists and scholars face in translating human rights principles, values and actions across and between modes of activist communication. A special purpose of the paper is to explore how the discipline of cultural studies and its attention to everyday lives, identity, self-reflexivity and socio-cultural context offers a scholarship that is specifically attuned to the problematics and complexity of human rights and queer activism and their application in researching these Southeast Asian contexts.

Keywords:

• human rights
• cultural studies
• Southeast Asia
• activist scholarship
• queer studies
• asylum
• everyday life

Acknowledgments

I sincerely thank the Centre for Pacific and American Studies, The University of Tokyo, for the generous collegial and financial support I received during my time as the 2010–11 Chair (Visiting Professor) of Australian Studies, which made this paper possible. Other financial support came from the Australia–Japan Foundation. Thank you to Vera Mackie for her inspiration as well as expert collegial and scholarly guidance.

Notes

1. See Offord (1999); Offord and Cantrell (2001); Offord (2003a); Offord (2003b); Offord (2011).

2. This paper develops and extends theoretical issues flagged in Offord (2011, pp. 135–52).

3. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Malaysia’s Mahathir bin Mohamad and several Chinese leaders were vociferous advocates of ‘Asian Values’ while many local activists across Southeast Asian nations dismissed such arguments as authoritarian and anti-democratic (Altman, 2000, pp. 211–28).

4. Graeme Turner argues: “cultural studies has helped place the construction of everyday life at the centre of contemporary intellectual enquiry and research in the humanities’ (2012, p. 15).

5. Jeffrey Weeks discusses this convergence at length in The world we have won (2007).

6. A different version of this section appears in Offord (2011).

7. Former British colonies such as Singapore and Malaysia inherited anti-sodomy legislation from Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code. In Singapore Section 377A of the Penal Code criminalises homosexual conduct.

8. See: Altman (2001); Berry, Martin and Yue (2003); Offord (2003); Boellstorff (2007); Wilson (2006); Blackwood and Wieringa (2007).

9. Also see D’Cruz (2008).

10. This refers to any state, non-Western or Western.

11. Despite this absence, the work provides a very useful re-evaluation of the “Asian Values” debate.

12. This development is only being flagged as it is not directly relevant to the purpose of this article. Other recent commentary on these principles from a queer studies perspective includes Waites (2009, pp. 137–56).

13. I have also provided advice to the Canadian Government and to CNN.

14. See http://www.masliah-soloway.com/ms.bios.html, accessed 1 November 2011.

15. See the CNN interview at http://edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2011/02/15/hoye.pa.philly.deportation.cnn, accessed 1 November 2011.

16. These excerpts are from affidavits dated between 2005 and 2011 and have been de-identified and aggregated to protect the identities of the asylum seekers. Files with author.

17. A different version of this section appears in Offord (2011, pp. 135–52).