Is global governance bad for east Asian queers?

GLQ

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 457-479

  Ho, Josephine ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 54049136162     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2008-001     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. James N. Rosenau, "Governance, Order, and Change in World Politics," in Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, ed. James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4-5.
2. The spread of global governance is quite uneven across Asia. The discussion here will be limited to those nations in East Asia that share certain common features of (Confucian) cultural heritage but even more important the common experience of having been active players in Asia's economic boom in the 1990s. The former produces a context in which the state strives to manage developing democratic impulses while maintaining a lingering authoritarianism that stabilizes the ruling power; the latter produces a context in which traditional class reproduction is disturbed by globalization. Both factors contribute to states of confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety that help make the Christian NGOs' conservative agenda increasingly palatable.
3. All adult publications sold in the bookstore were wrapped in plastic and clearly marked for those eighteen and older only. Still, police ripped open the wrapping and charged the owner with disseminating obscenity. Gay groups repeatedly protested against the litigation; unfortunately, the gay owner still suffered a final conviction in 2005 ("No Guilt and Not Guilty, Say Homosexual Protesters," Taipei Times, June 16, 2004, www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/06/16/2003175251).
4. In front of media cameras, partygoers in their shorts or briefs were marched out of the building and required to take urine and blood tests at the police station ("Treatment of Homosexual Men Caught at Party Outrages Gay Rights Activists," Taipei Times, January 23, 2004, www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/01/23/2003092323). Still, thanks to token gestures of tolerance from the Taiwan government, Wikipedia describes Taiwan as "one of Asia's most progressive countries as far as LGBT rights are concerned" ("LGBT Rights in Taiwan," en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ LGBT_rights_in_Taiwan [accessed February 9, 2008]).
5. "Singapore Bans Christmas Because It Might Be Gay," Associated Press, December 9, 2004, www.yawningbread.org/apdx_2004/imp-168.htm; Alex Au, "A Ban(ner) Week in Singapore," Fridae, August 15, 2007, fridae.com/newsfeatures/article.php?a rticleid=2014&viewarticle=1.
6. "Sexual Orientation Discrimination Legislation for Hong Kong," www.ipetitions.com/petition/sodbhk/ (accessed February 10, 2008). Despite a massive petition drive by gay and lesbian groups to demand equal treatment under the law, Singapore's lawmakers voted in October 2007 to retain section 377A of the penal code, which decrees that any male person found guilty of engaging in "gross indecency" with another male, whether in private or in public, faces a jail term of up to two years ("Allow Space for Gays but Gay Sex Ban to Stay: Singapore PM," Fridae, October 24, 2007, fridae.com/newsfeatures/ article.php?articleid=2124&viewarticle=1&searchtype=all). The South Korean Ministry of Justice announced a bill in October 2007 to criminalize discrimination on twenty grounds, including race, sex, educational status, and sexual orientation. In the end, sexual orientation was removed from the list of inclusions ("Exclusion from Non-Discrimination Bill Mobilises Korea's LGBT Community," Fridae, November 23, 2007, fridae.com/newsfeatures/article.php? articleid=2098 &viewarticle=1&searchtype=all).
7. "Sister Radio in Sex Sounds Row," Taipei Times, May 16, 2004, www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/05/16/2003155678. The case was repealed one year later after much protest. In the case of Hong Kong, one militant fundamental Christian NGO, Alliance for the Protection of Family, filed the complaint and demanded that all gay programming henceforth must include opposite (Christian) views in order to meet parity standards for broadcasting, while religious programs are automatically exempt from this requirement under the principle of religious freedom. The case is now under review, and the final ruling will have far-reaching impact on the advocacy of any unpopular views ("Gay Marriage Show Sparks TV Row in Hong Kong," Fridae, January 24, 2007, www.fridae.com/newsfeatures/article.php?articleid =1844&viewarticle=1) .
8. Such aggressiveness may remind the reader of the Christian Right in the United States. Researchers maintain that the Christian Right's political activism focuses on different targets domestically and internationally, with the former concentrated on "issues such as gay rights and school vouchers" and the latter on "United Nations population policy, women's rights, and children's rights." See Doris Buss and Didi Herman, Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xviii. Christian-based NGOs in East Asia, however, merged these issues and turned gay rights into an issue that threatens women's rights and children's rights with its obvious challenge to the institution of the family as well as its insistent demand on sexual openness and diversity.
9. Christians might be considered a minority in these nations, yet their colonial lineage and financial advantage afford them the opportunity to occupy morally mainstream positions through establishing schools and relief agencies, and individual Christians also occupy positions of political and social influence. Their role as independent social service providers also facilitates their later transformation into government franchises.
10. "NGOs and the United Nations," Global Policy Forum, www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/docs99/gpfrep.htm (accessed February 7, 2008).
11. Charter for Global Democracy (Charter 99), www.i-p-o.org/global- democracy.htm (accessed February 7, 2008).
12. The states, of course, have made arrangements to ensure that no such dramatic turn takes place. After all, indigenous NGOs in East Asia are mostly financially illequipped to attend such international functions and must rely on the state governments to supply funding and bestow legitimacy to the delegation. It is little wonder that the chosen delegates almost always come from those mainstream NGOs friendly with the government. (Where nation-state status is questionable, such as Taiwan, the funding blatantly comes from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where NGO participation in international conventions is considered a matter of national diplomacy.)
13. Kenneth Anderson and David Rieff, "'Global Civil Society': A Sceptical View," in Global Civil Society 2004/5, ed. Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, and Mary Kaldor (London: Sage, 2004), 27-29, www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/yearbook04chapters.htm.
14. The concentrated presence of international NGOs in the economically booming but ideologically restrained People's Republic of China serves as a prime example of such political motivation. While proudly presenting their grantees in China at a 2008 convention, an officer of a famous U.S. NGO apologetically explained that because of the strategic policy decisions at her foundation, they could not offer grants to other Chinese-related territories such as Hong Kong or Taiwan.
15. Kate Bedford's seminal study of the World Bank's lending policies highlights one set of such maneuvers geared toward fine-tuning local heteronormative arrangements to collaborate with global economic transformation. See Kate Bedford, "Loving to Straighten Out Development: Sexuality and 'Ethnodevelopment' in the World Bank's Ecuadorian Lending," Feminist Legal Studies 13 (2005): 295-322.
16. New "moral" strings added to U.S. funding policies by President Bush since 2004 aim to exclude those NGOs, domestic or international, that support sex workers' rights or needle-exchange programs, as well as other harm-reduction strategies and HIV/AIDS prevention advocacy. This moral decree is already having a serious impact on Asia's nascent sex workers' rights movements, which are hard-pressed not only by the continued illegal status of sex work but more profoundly by the insistence of First World antitrafficking NGOs that women's migration toward economic betterment and their choice of sex work are nothing but forms of trafficking and exploitation.
17. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 13.
18. Our Global Neighbourhood, wwww.libertymatters.org/chap2.htm (accessed April 1, 2007).
19. In many Asian countries where nation-statehood is still a relatively recent achievement, "civic" is often understood as something closely aligned with nationalistic sovereignty. In the 1910s, the early years of the Republic of China, opponents of masturbation exclaimed: "Masturbation is the draining of national energy!" Civic duties to the nation thus denote things serious and solemn, to the absolute exclusion of things sexual.
20. Significantly, such international agreements rarely promote sex-positive measures. Lesbian and gay rights, sex work rights, freedom to access sexual information, rights to sexual pleasure, and so forth encounter either defeat and frustration or total neglect and disdain.
21. Raimo Väyrynen, "Norms, Compliance, and Enforcement in Global Governance," in Globalization and Global Governance, ed. Raimo Väyrynen (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990), 27. Italics added.
22. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 136.
23. Jock Young, The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime, and Difference in Late Modernity (London: Sage, 1999), 65.
24. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Culture, Society, and Sexuality: A Reader, ed. Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton (London: University College London, 1999), 143.
25. Jürgen Habermas, Life World and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, vol. 2 of The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 357-73.
26. Western readers may be more familiar with the liberal concept of sex liberation or sexual freedom. In Taiwan, feminist sex radicals chose the term sex emancipation in 1994 to describe their project so as to highlight its linkage to the Enlightenment tradition and its vision of self-liberation of the oppressed. See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, "Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern," in Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse (London: Sage, 1992), 5-41.
27. At the urging of Christian child-protection NGOs, article 235 of the criminal code, which originally indicted the commercial production and sale of pornography for dissemination of obscenity, is now generously applied to individual Internet sex messages. Article 29 of the Child and Juvenile Sexual Transaction Prevention Act (1995, with a number of amendments in the following years) further criminalizes any Internet message or content that hints at or discusses sexual transaction in whatever indirect fashion. For a detailed analysis of this gradual process of juridification in Taiwan, see Josephine Ho, "From Anti-Trafficking to Social Discipline: The Case of Taiwan," in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, ed. Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005), 83-105.
28. For the English version of Constitutional Court Interpretation no. 617 pertaining to article 235 of the criminal code (dissemination of obscenities), see www.judicial.gov.tw/CONSTITUTIONALCOURT/EN/p03_01.asp?expno-617 (accessed February 20, 2008).
29. For the English version of Constitutional Court Interpretation no. 623 pertaining to article 29 of the Child and Juvenile Sexual Transaction Prevention Act (inducing people to engage in unlawful sexual transactions), see www.judicial.gov.tw/CONSTITUTIONALCOURT/EN/p03_01.asp?expno-623 (accessed February 20, 2008).
30. Taiwan's Garden of Hope Foundation hired a veteran journalist, Hui-jung Chi, as its new CEO in 1992. Since then, the foundation has benefited greatly from her experience and expertise in public relations and has come to describe its various campaigns as "social movements," adopting strategies of emergent social movements in organizing marches, rallies, petitions, fund-raising drives, and so forth for conservative causes. Chi herself admitted to such a maneuver in a 1997 interview (in Chinese). See www.ccea.org.tw/soc/17. htm (accessed February 14, 2008). The most aggressive of such civil society organizations that tackle sex- and gay-related issues in East Asia include Hong Kong's Society for Truth and Light, Hong Kong Sex Culture Society, Hong Kong Alliance for Family; Taiwan's Garden of Hope Foundation, End Child Prostitution Association Taiwan, Exodus International, Center for the Study of Bio-Ethics; Singapore's Liberty League; and South Korea's Assembly of Scientists against Embryonic Cloning.
31. NGO-ization proves to be highly profitable. The annual budget of two of the largest Taiwanese Christian NGOs, Garden of Hope Foundation and Catholic Good Shepherd Sisters Foundation, has grown tenfold since the transformation, with hundreds of full-time staff members and many more volunteers. Delegates from these conservative NGOs also enjoy privileged membership on most of the important policy-setting committees in the government, setting policy priorities that empower and benefit their cause while creating formidable obstacles for queers and other marginal groups.
32. Christian-based NGOs have been most keen in organizing a media monitoring alliance with other NGOs. As public discontent with the tabloid media runs high, the conservative agenda has successfully diverted social energy away from questions of ownership and control to questions of content and morality.
33. Probably the most aggressive of such Christian NGOs, Taiwan's Garden of Hope Foundation, has won international NGO awards repeatedly, including Kellogg's Child Development Award, World of Children Awards (2005); Changemakers Innovation Award, Ashoka Foundation (2005); and Citigroup's NGO of the Year, Asia-Pacific Region, Resource Alliance (2004). The awarding agencies may be merely corporate subsidiaries, and the awards more significant in image than in actuality, but the international status of such awards carries a weight that makes them irresistible to the aspiring Taiwan (non-)state.
34. The hesitation and reluctance remain undocumented except through reports from frustrated LGBTQ representatives who attended such negotiation meetings. Years of experience with political correctness have taught many NGO groups never to put their criticism of marginal views into writing for fear of being cited and rebuked. It is the underdog NGOs who tend to be explicit about their own nonconforming views in trying to open up social space.
35. Mainstream feminist writings on sexuality center mostly on the dangers of sex, pornography, and pleasure.
36. The Chinese term state feminism describes the vision that encouraging housewives to become political agents and enter the public realm of the state apparatus en masse can help realize feminist ideals. The sheer presence and number of women would then swallow up the public realm, feminizing the state and forcing it to take up the job of caring, which has been women's domain and responsibility. It is with this vision in mind that mainstream feminists developed an unusually high interest and investment in the project of state building.
37. To the dismay of gay rights organizations and activists, even after the newspaper campaign, this antigay NGO still won the "human rights education project" in 2005 from Hong Kong's Education and Manpower Bureau, with exclusive rights to train teachers as well as to produce education materials-on the subject of human rights-for middle schools all over Hong Kong. And in the extracts from the teaching course outline, the Society of Truth and Light is already saying that one theme it will discuss is "excessive use of human rights."
38. "Taipei Hosts Gay Civic Event; Religious Group Contests," United Evening News, August 25, 2006, gsrat.net/news/newsclipDetail.php? ncdata_id=3013.
39. "Exclusion from Non-Discrimination Bill Mobilises Korea's LGBT Community," Fridae, November 23, 2007, fridae.com/newsfeatures/article.php? articleid=2098&view article=1&searchtype=all.
40. See the Web site of the Hong Kong Alliance for Family, www.hkchurch.org/family/sub/1.htm (accessed February 10, 2008).
41. The convention is the first legally binding international instrument that incorporates the full range of human rights-civil and political rights as well as economic, social, and cultural rights. Yet, while it decrees that children be protected from abuse, violence, deprivation, and economic exploitation, the most active and fruitful NGO efforts in East Asia have been those that aim at protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation. This focus on the negative aspects of sex reflects significant historical shifts in feminist movements and discourse. Just as the iconoclastic sex-liberation discourse in the United States in the early 1970s was eventually eclipsed by women's painful narration of rape and abuse experiences that culminated in the "Take Back the Night" rally in 1978, the celebratory pro-child-sexuality milieu of late 1970s was also eclipsed by protection-oriented discourse on child innocence and vulnerability that culminated in moral panics such as the McMartin Preschool sex-scare case in the 1980s. Steven Angelides has documented the feminist evasion of the issue of child sexuality in his important essay, "Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality," GLQ 10 (2004): 141-77. A similar shift has also taken place in Taiwanese feminism, where talk of subject-centered female sexuality and sexual emancipation in 1994-95 was silenced as mainstream women's groups chose to focus on victim-centered sexual harassment and sexual violence from 1996.
42. The case of Taiwan supplies the most emblematic example for my observation here because, given its unique and tumultuous process of ongoing democratization and uncertain nation-state status, it has afforded social movements the most fertile ground for active yet limited intervention. Moreover, Taiwanese gender/sexuality activists have produced the most sophisticated discourses on women's issues and lesbian and gay issues, which are now being disseminated throughout Asia.
43. Such views are most clearly stated on the Web page of the Hong Kong Alliance for Family, while opposition to the homosexual marriage bill in Taiwan took more veiled forms. See www.hkchurch.org/family/sub/2.htm (accessed February 10, 2008).
44. Only when conception was out of wedlock did it entail family shame, and even then, the shame mostly had to do with the fact that the woman was not married and had already consented to have sex with men.
45. Buss and Herman write about a shift in the Christian Right's UN rhetoric on defending the "rights of poor women" in its opposition to abortion (Globalizing Family Values, 58). The argument about "rights of poor women" is also invoked by conservative Christian NGOs in Taiwan but only in relation to their opposition to surrogate motherhood, which they see as serving the needs of the rich exclusively.
46. To safeguard the welfare of children from the earliest moment possible, article 32 of the Child Welfare Act of Taiwan (2003) even prohibits pregnant women from ingesting any substance (cigarettes, alcohol, betel nuts, LSD, or other intoxicating drugs) that might be considered harmful for the fetus. Nor are they allowed to engage in activities deemed dangerous for the fetus.
47. Uttered by Taiwan's ruling party legislator Hou Shui-Sheng in 2004, this quotation coincides with Lee Edelman's delineation of the politics of "reproductive futurism," in which the figure of the child represents the possibility of the future against which the queer serves as a negating drive. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
48. I thank my colleague Ding Naifei for reminding me that the convergence of the "colonial-modern" (Christian) and the "feudal-cultural" (in various Chinese contexts, transfer of ancestor-worship to children-fetish) is a historical phenomenon quite typical of many East Asian societies.
49. Susan Moller Okin, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ed. Joshua Cohen and Matthew Howard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 7-24.
50. Saskia Sassen, "Towards a Feminist Analytics of Today's Global Economy," Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4 (1996-97): 7.
51. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 43-66.