Abstract
This chapter looks into this question through the contested norm of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights. I examine the relationship between human rights and storytelling, and how the latter is being used as evidence, a mobilisation tool and means of localising the global normative packages. Moving on to the UNDP’s project Being LGBT in Asia, the first UN initiative addressing LGBT rights in the region, I trace the ways in which personal stories are chosen. Instead of training and empowering the narrators, norm translators focus on the selection and organisation of typical stories in order to highlight structural restraints in defined areas and justify normative changes. Furthermore, the selected personal stories maintain the centrality of individuals in human rights advocacy, while redefining and shifting the meaning of individuality and personhood to include local norms such as family roles.
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Notes
- 1.
The evolution in technologies, media channels and Internet companies complicates the implications of storytelling in human rights (Gregory 2006; Jørgensen 2018). The use of audio-visual media, for example, intensifies the competition between human rights organisations and the production of short victim stories meeting the requirement of the media, which lead to compassion fatigue instead of participatory empathy.
- 2.
One critique on the Yogyakarta Principles given in Bosia’s (2014) analysis is that it pre-assumed that all people had a gender and a sexual orientation while negating the experiences of different gendered systems and sexual acts without relying on the dual system of gender and sexual orientation. In the special issue on LGBT human rights in Contemporary Politics (2009), Seckinelgin and Long provided accounts on how Western or global activists failed to recognise the non-conforming expressions of sexual minorities in Africa , India and Iran, resulting in more harm and violence inflicted on local movements.
- 3.
The state is not a unitary actor, and the attitudes on the LGBT norm differ across ministries, levels of administration and public institutions. The governmental agencies interacting closely with the LGBT community or the “risk population,” for public health or legal protection reasons, such as the Centre for Disease Control, local governments in Yunnan or the All-China Women’s Federation, were familiarised with the norm if not yet socialised into it (Wang 2015). Meetings with activists (13 January 2017) suggested that the attitudes at educational or publicity departments tended to be more conservative, reflected in the failed cases against the Ministry of Education on the homophobic contents in textbooks since 2015 and the controversial ban on homosexual contents in netcasting in 2017. Here I focus on China’s statements on the international level in relation to human rights institutions and conventions.
- 4.
Details of the project are clarified here. First, in the UNDP introduction, the project ran from 2014 to 2018, whereas the first rounds of community dialogues already took place in 2013 and the overall project might be extended to 2020. I focus on the project activities operated and recorded from 2013 to 2018. Second, the formal title of the project is “Being LGBTI in Asia ,” though in the introductions of other donors and conference presentations, it has also been referred as “Being LGBT in Asia” without the “I.” For the unification of the term use, I will cite it as the latter. Third, the detailed funding history of the project is as follows: In 2014, the Embassy of Sweden in Bangkok joined the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UNDP as funding partners. Faith in Love Foundation (Hong Kong) and The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade became donor partners in July 2017 and August 2018 respectively. In September 2018, the UNDP signed an MOU with the Ministry for European Affairs and Equality (Malta) to share information and technical assistance on laws, policy documents and initiatives concerning LGBT people.
- 5.
This framing of tradition delivers a paradoxical message: tradition is accommodating and restraining the demands of normative change at the same time. It implies that the present practice is a deviance from tradition, yet we should not restore or go back to tradition to improve or develop. The tradition provides ideational space for new norms to replace the present frameworks in a way that is not contradictory to the tradition.
- 6.
This included but was not limited to Qiubai’s lawsuit against the Ministry of Education on homophobic materials in textbooks (2016), Mr C’s lawsuit on employment discrimination against transgender persons (2016), Fan Popo’s lawsuit against the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television on censorship of LGBT films (2015).
- 7.
Original footnote in the report regarding the story’s source: Cai Limei. “Eyes on juvenile mental health (second edition): Why a 17-year-old became a ‘fake girl,’” Southern Country Morning News, 7 November 2011.
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Lu, X. (2021). Personalising Human Rights. In: Norms, Storytelling and International Institutions in China. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56707-1_5
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