{"id":1457,"date":"2005-07-07T10:07:11","date_gmt":"2005-07-07T02:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sex.ncu.edu.tw\/jo_article\/?p=1457"},"modified":"2016-12-30T22:22:48","modified_gmt":"2016-12-30T14:22:48","slug":"is-global-governance-bad-for-east-asian-queers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sex.ncu.edu.tw\/jo_article\/2005\/07\/is-global-governance-bad-for-east-asian-queers\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Global Governance Bad for East Asian Queers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\uff08\u9019\u7bc7\u8ad6\u6587\u539f\u672c\u662f2005\u5e747\u67087\u65e5\u6211\u5728\u6cf0\u570b\u66fc\u8c37\u300c\u7b2c\u4e00\u5c46\u4e9e\u6d32\u9177\u5152\u7814\u7a76\u6703\u8b70\u300d<\/span><\/strong>\u201cSexualities, Gender, and Rights in Asia: 1st<\/sup> International Conference of Asian Queer Studies\u201d<\/span><\/strong>\u4e0a\u7684\u4e3b\u984c\u6f14\u8b1b\uff0c\u5f8c\u4f86\u6539\u5beb\u6210\u8ad6\u6587\uff0c2008\u5e74\u767c\u8868\u65bcGLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies\u00a0<\/em>14.4 (Fall 2008) : 457-479.\u7b97\u662f\u6211\u7528\u5168\u7403\u6cbb\u7406\u548c\u5730\u7de3\u653f\u6cbb\u4f86\u601d\u8003\u6027\uff0f\u5225\u8b70\u984c\u7684\u7b2c\u4e00\u7bc7\u8ad6\u6587\u3002\uff09<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Abstract: The rise of transnational systems and networks of governance and norms since the 1990s and the emergence of the so-called \u201cglobal civil society\u201d hold out promises of equity for LGBT advocates and marginal groups in East Asia as pride marches, lesbian and gay cultural events, and booming queer Internet communities corroborate the impression that queer Asia may be much more than a concept. \u00a0Yet, there is a growing retrenchment in the same region as various states take up measures quite inhospitable to queer existence. \u00a0Christian NGOs in particular are quite aggressively raising social discontent and mobilizing opposition against the growing visibility of gay lifestyles and the equity demands launched by queer activism. \u00a0<\/strong>The present essay analyzes this new \u2018\u201creign of civility\u2019\u201d and its construction of \u201cchild protection\u201d as a universal imperative; it also demonstrates how developments in juridification are suturing up global governance, East Asia\u2019s liberal states, and conservative NGOs into a new power bloc that fosters anti-queer and anti-sex climates in the region.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The rise of transnational systems and networks of governance and norms since the 1990s has fostered the hope that a new global order, described by the UN as \u201cglobal governance,\u201d operating through shared goals, purposes, and values as well as consensus-formation, would be created in place of state authority and brute force.[1]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 The emergence of the so-called global civil society holds out further hope for democratic potentials that promote the spirit of responsible humanitarianism as well as respect for diversity, while weakening state power and domination in certain national contexts.\u00a0 In the developing liberal democracies of East Asia, optimistic LGBT advocates and marginal groups look to changing, and seemingly liberalizing, political regimes and expanding civil society as sites for possible leverage or gains, while pride marches, lesbian and gay cultural events, and booming queer Internet communities corroborate the impression that queer Asia may be much more than a concept.[2]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Yet, as the new global order has evolved in recent years, such euphoric feeling is punctured by growing retrenchment in the same region as various states take up measures quite inhospitable to queer existence.\u00a0 Police raid on Taiwan\u2019s only gay bookstore in 2003 and on gay home parties since 2004 fueled public impression of gay decadence and its resultant spread of HIV; subsequent litigation further intensified fear and intimidation.[3]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Massive gatherings such as gay parties, exhibitions, performances, forums, even picnics were banned in Singapore in 2004 and 2007[4]<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 On the grounds that lesbian and gay rights have not achieved social consensus, gay-sponsored anti-discrimination legislation met with repeated defeat in Hong Kong, and broad-based anti-discrimination legislation ended up excluding sexual orientation in both Singapore and South Korea in 2007.[5]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Gay- and lesbian-oriented radio program content was chastised by broadcasting authorities as outright obscene in Taiwan in 2004, or characterized by Christian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as “biased towards homosexual marriage and thus inappropriate for children” in Hong Kong in 2007[6]<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 Thanks to the efforts of child-protection NGOs, helped in no small way by East Asia\u2019s sensationalizing media, a heightened sense of vigilance is now pervasive with the result that, depending on the national context, legislation is either in place or underway to circumscribe all sexual communication and contact on the Internet.<\/p>\n

While such events are described as either the natural outcome of democratic processes or well-meaning universal measures of obscenity and crime prevention, two significant observations demonstrate otherwise.\u00a0 First, Christian-based NGOs were not only actively involved in many of these processes but quite aggressive in promoting social discontent and mobilizing opposition against the growing visibility of gay lifestyles and the equity demands launched by queer activism.[7]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Second, East Asia\u2019s new liberal states, interpreting democracy as majority rule, have made it conveniently workable to claim respect for diversity while staunchly upholding and reaffirming mainstream values.\u00a0 Curiously, these two developments often work together to boost the public image and political power of both the Christian NGOs and the liberal states.\u00a0 One cannot help but wonder: how do Christian NGOs achieve such influential positions within East Asian societies despite the Christian community\u2019s minority status?[8]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0And what do these recent developments reveal about liberal democracy\u2019s own limits in promoting marginal issues of social justice in East Asia?<\/p>\n

This essay contends that answers to these important questions are located in our current context of global governance and global civil society.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, fortified by UN discourse and world-wide policy directives, set in place by aspiring nation-states in collaboration with local NGOs (the most aggressive ones being fundamentalist Christian), a new \u201dreign of civility,\u201d widely popularized in the socially and politically volatile spaces of East Asia, is now producing detrimental effects on queer lives through increased media sensationalism, police-baiting, re-criminalization, and recurrent sex panic, not to mention new sex-repressive legislative reform measures.\u00a0 The analysis that follows centers on two major aspects of this development.\u00a0 First, the emerging global hegemony of morality has stepped up its assault on queer representations and queer interaction through new local legislation and litigation against queer social presence, as well as through mobilizing and transforming conservative vigilance into an active surveillance network that thrives on fanning sex panic.\u00a0 Second, the construction of \u201cchild protection\u201d as a universal imperative in actuality both reinforces heterosexual monogamy and debunks cultural diversity as inherently confusing and thus harmful for children.\u00a0 This hegemony of morality and its child-protection campaign constitutes an important and growing offensive by conservative forces as they navigate the new world order of global governance.<\/p>\n

Global Governance and the Reign of Civility and Respectability<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the 1990s, \u201cgovernance\u201d has been used by such international organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to evaluate the political status of countries in need of aid as well as their suitability for a free market economy so as to remove all obstacles to free trade while ensuring the countries\u2019 ability to repay debt.\u00a0 Viewed in this light, the release of the United Nations report Our Neighborhood: Report of the Commission on Global Governance <\/em>(1995), and the urgency and speed with which global governance has been popularized and aggressively promoted in various regions, reflects efforts to forge new social realities for economic globalization.\u00a0 In place of state-oriented approaches to global politics, the UN report proposes a new conception (and the emerging operations) of the institutions, practices, and processes for organizing global politics in the post-Cold-War era.\u00a0 The new global order is to be conducted mainly through the multiple and flexible interactions among inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), such as the UN, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF and their various treaties; NGOs and their activism; multi-national corporations (MNCs) and their operation; and existing, but allegedly weakened, state governments.\u00a0 In addition to the usual powerful players in international politics, the UN secretary general envisions NGOs as “indispensable partners” of the UN \u201cin the process of deliberation and policy formation” as well as in “the execution of policies.”[9]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 The UN thus enlisted an army of NGOs to raise public awareness of the need for international cooperation and to advance the report\u2019s agenda, outlined as the “Charter for Global Democracy.”[10]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Participation in such UN projects in turn adds to the political weight of local NGOs, who now find themselves involved in global negotiations and international politics, and capable of formulating rules of conduct for nation-states.[11]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 The resulting complex, explicit, implicit, and evolving system of interlocking unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral bodies of rules and documents gradually assumes the role of global principles and values, while new circuits and networks of power continue to emerge.<\/p>\n

While the complex nature of and vast differences among transnational NGOs are said to mitigate the possibility of a benign and integrated \u201cglobal civil society\u201d working toward the common dual goals of human rights and democracy, the actual politics of NGOs working across national borders is much more volatile and often variously implicated in different circles of political involvement.[12]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 There is, after all, nothing intrinsically progressive or democratic about international civil society.\u00a0 Internationally based NGOs have been known to set up branches in Third World nations not only as channels for needed funding and aid, but more importantly as a field where Western values and interests can exercise their influence and foster checks and balances to resist local state domination and control.[13]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Well-meaning development projects executed by well-meaning NGOs may intend to promote population management, disease prevention, and maternal and child health, yet they often end up intentionally or unwittingly shaping ideas about what constitutes \u201cnormal,\u201d and thus acceptable, sexual practices and identities.[14]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Conversely, East Asia\u2019s liberal states are increasingly aware of the political expedience of choosing the right NGOs to international gatherings so as to guarantee presence but also safeguard their national image; the choice of delegation naturally favors the mainstream and normative over the marginal and difficult.\u00a0 Tensions and contradictions among NGOs of different origins and ideologies are also complex.\u00a0 Within this new global public, emergent indigenous social movements could even find themselves suffering more from policy directives enforced by world powers at the urging of other NGOs than from the usual culprit of the authoritarian state.[15]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 In these and other cases, the intermingling of NGOs of different calibers, with state governments of different democratic formations, further complicates regional differences, resulting in complex webs of conflicting and collaborating forces that range far beyond the circuits of power described by the so-called boomerang pattern of transnational advocacy.[16]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Despite the structural complexity of this expanding global civil society, the consensus-building negotiations of global governance are predisposed to favor visions and values that congeal toward mainstream normative values, now expressed as global commonalities.\u00a0 The UN report calls for establishing a \u201cglobal civic ethic\u201d based on “a set of core values that can unite people of all cultural, political, religious, or philosophical backgrounds.”[17]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 As appealing as this imaginary brotherhood or sisterhood may sound, such core values have had only partial success and mostly on broad topics such as universal human rights or global environmental concerns, but even there, disputes and cultural differences run deep.\u00a0 The problems of universalism aside, the envisioned \u201cglobal\u201d and \u201ccivic\u201d ethic\u2014with its inherent assumptions about shared cultural commonality and cherished nationalistic civility\u2014has tended to find its base-line of agreement in those areas most deeply entrenched in benign but un-reflexive humanism, areas where long-standing differences are glossed over and long-held prejudices and fears remain buried and unchallenged, areas where modernization and the civilizing process find ready and unproblematic targets of critique\u2014and what better choice than the subject of sexuality![18]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 This also explains the compelling success in the global ratification of international agreements on measures directed at, in particular, (sex) trafficking, child pornography, pedophiles, and Internet content monitoring.[19]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The preference for such issues and their success in global negotiations has a lot to do with the specific nature of power under global governance.\u00a0 As Raimo Vayrynen points out:<\/p>\n

In the multicentric world, power not only is dispersed, but it also assumes more forms than the traditional power analysis suggests.\u00a0 For instance, power can also be symbolic and reputational<\/em>, as well as material, and it may reflect conventions and narratives.\u00a0 The fluidity of \u201csoft\u201d power means that it is difficult to capture and use for specific purposes.\u00a0 One implication of this state of affairs is that, in the multicentric world, traditional power resources alone cannot assure stability and progress; the management of power must be based also on norms and institutions<\/em>. (italics added)[20]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNorms and institutions\u201d refer to structural constraints embodied in various international conventions and agencies and more significantly in local legislations; in other words, they tend to presume normative lifestyles and values that are to be regulated by legal frameworks.\u00a0 \u201cSymbolic and reputational,\u201d on the other hand, signals a form of power that rides mostly on gestures and tokens and consequently is extremely sensitive and apprehensive about possible scandal, which finds its most potent embodiment in things sexual.\u00a0 In other words, the nature and structure of the world of diffused power also render it vulnerable to populist demands, demands that are usually inclined to sidestep the difficult, the unpopular, and, in particular, the stigmatized.\u00a0 The norms underlying global propositions thus tend to gravitate toward \u201crespectability,\u201d and toward: \u201cnorms that repress sexuality, bodily functions, and emotional expression\u2026the respectable person is chaste, modest, does not express lustful desires, passion, spontaneity, or exuberance, is frugal, clean, gently spoken, and well mannered.\u00a0 The orderliness of respectability means things are under control, everything in its place, not crossing the borders.\u201d[21]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Such norms of civility and respectability, with their inherent proclivity for order and control, are most relevant for our understanding of East Asia\u2019s new liberal democracies and their increasing collaboration with Christian NGOs in the construction of what looks more and more like what Jock Young has described as \u201cexclusive societies.\u201d\u00a0 What interests me the most about Young\u2019s theory is his attention to the ever-expanding exclusionary system of crime prevention (detailed in the next section) and its correlation with the increase of \u201cdifference and difficulty,\u201d the pluralization and fragmentation of identities and lifestyles, and the fears and responses they engender.[22]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0While Young\u2019s analysis centers mainly on changes in technologies of social control that constitute the changing nature of state, civil society, and public realm in post-war United States, his observation is illuminating for our understanding of recent developments in East Asian democracies as the latter scramble to rein in increases in incivilities and active challenges to rules that accompany profound transformations in political and economic restructuring.\u00a0 As contemporary conflicts around sexual relations tend to acquire \u201cimmense symbolic weight\u201d in the process,[23]<\/strong><\/a> such exclusive measures also tend to concentrate on the sexual realm and its emergent diversity.<\/p>\n

What is unique about East Asian exclusive societies is that \u201can exclusive civil society,\u201d made up of Christian NGOs and morally like-minded conservative NGOs, has now emerged in the newly invigorated public sphere.\u00a0 It is an exclusive civil society that embraces mutual interpenetration with the state so as to help better manage what is perceived as the unruliness of contemporary sexual libertarianism.\u00a0 As compliance with standards of civic respectability has become a token of legitimacy and political correctness in international relations, this new deployment of normative power also tends to favor a global social milieu in which non-normative sexualities are deemed possible threats or undesirable practices.\u00a0 Significantly, it is in the legal <\/em>domain that this suturing of global governance, nation-state aspirations, and pastoral impulses of Christian NGOs into a reign of civility and respectability is most concretely effected, as fragile nation-states, with the help of Christian NGOs weaving anxiety and uncertainty into popular support, fortify themselves into new regulatory states by increasingly regulating sexual acts, identities, information, and exchanges through codified laws aligned with so-called global standards.\u00a0 The fiercest battles have been fought in the legal domain as marginal NGOs working toward sexual justice and freedom of expression struggle against the soft-power-turned-iron-rule of governance.<\/p>\n

The Juridification of Global Governance<\/strong><\/p>\n

The UN Commission on Global Governance decrees that governance be underpinned by democracy on all levels and ultimately \u201cby the rule of enforceable law.\u201d \u00a0Nations are thus strongly encouraged to bring their laws into alignment with UN decrees.\u00a0 With the blessing of the UN, conservative NGOs in various East Asian countries have been rallying legislators to amend old laws and institute new laws concentrated in sex-related areas, and in accordance with a conservative agenda now described as concretizing UN standards.\u00a0 This significant re-deployment of power, which J\u00fcrgen Habermas has aptly described as \u201cjuridification\u201d in our late modern era, asserts itself by having more and more formal laws created in the socio-cultural sphere, the private sphere, and the body-related sphere, the density of which leaves little social space outside the reach and definition of the law.[24]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 In fact, with the active involvement, if not total initiative, of mainstream women\u2019s NGOs in collaboration with conservative Christian NGOs, legislation that aggressively regulates sexual conduct, contact, and information\u2014in the name of modern civility and gender equity\u2014has already come into place all over East Asia despite resistance by sex emancipationist feminists.[25]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 These include the regulation of sexual harassment, sexual assault, artificial insemination, HIV-status, new sex-related drugs such as RU486, and ,most importantly, sexual information and interaction on the Internet.\u00a0 The increasing codification of conduct previously located in the private realm is interpreted by such mainstream NGOs as enhancing protection for women and children, and by the state as proof of responsible government, ready to be presented to the international community as evidence of democratic progress toward a rational \u201crule of law.\u201d\u00a0 Yet for those who now fall victim to such jurisdiction, the laws have practically redefined their daily life practices as nothing short of criminal.<\/p>\n

In many East Asian countries, NGO-sponsored conservative legislation and surveillance of sex-related activities and information on the Internet have made it quite difficult for queers to conduct their most common forms of flirtation and sexual negotiation.\u00a0 In Taiwan, where nation-statehood is fragile and juridification fiercely underway as a top priority for Christian NGOs, any sexually explicit message on the Internet (such as describing the size of one\u2019s penis or inviting a bottom or a master to collaborate in sexual play), even in clearly marked adult chat-rooms or adult BBS\u2019s, is now considered harmful for the young and thus subject to indictment.[26]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Local gay and lesbian groups have joined human rights groups in 2006 in demanding that the Constitutional Court examine such legal clauses to ascertain whether they violate basic freedoms of speech and expression as decreed by the Constitution.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the Justices of the Constitutional Court came up with only an equivocal response that again affirms the importance of child protection over freedom of speech.[27]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 It is now obvious that the child-protection (anti-sex) legislation has greatly exacerbated the already existing social and sexual stigma of marginal sexualities and their practices, not to mention bringing actual litigation against many individuals.\u00a0 Increasingly, social differences are no longer dealt with through the communicative reason of public debate; instead, the force of law is directly applied.\u00a0 Non-negotiable disciplinary management has now replaced rational debates and communication in dealing with gender and sexual diversity.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, as NGOs find more and more room for involvement in national and transnational politics in the age of global governance, NGO-status has also become desirable and even profitable currency.\u00a0 Significantly, aggressive Christian groups in East Asia have learned to refrain from presenting themselves as \u201cChristian\u201d groups or churches to the public; instead, they have created parallel civil society organizations to soften their religious image. \u00a0Describing themselves as conducting the business of \u201csocial movements,\u201d a string of such parallel civil society organizations has come into being since the 1990s in various East Asian countries and areas.[28]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 As only officially-registered NGOs are eligible for government funding and franchise application, the transformation does bring important and practical benefits, but it also crowds out marginal and difficult NGOs who do not necessarily tow the mainstream line.[29]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0Such parallel civil society organizations also make it more convenient to rally other social movement groups around topical though conservative causes such as media monitoring.[30]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 The NGO-ization of Christian groups has been so successful that one of them has even won quite a few NGO-related international awards, thus greatly enhancing its social status and power of influence in national politics.[31]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 The flexibility with which Christian groups in East Asia adapted to this age of secularism and NGO operation often obscures their origin to such an extent that it is increasingly difficult to recognize their true nature, which also complicates the struggle of social movements in general when opposing views stand starkly against each other on the same issue within the civil society.<\/p>\n

With its pernicious effect clearly in sight, juridification also holds out the prospect of protection by the law.\u00a0 East Asian queers, like queers everywhere, had hoped that new anti-discrimination legislation could help mitigate the social ills of homophobia and sex phobia.\u00a0 Yet as we have witnessed so far, such proposed legislation, if it comes up at all, has already been rejected in Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong.\u00a0 Ironically, the obstacles have a lot to do with two NGO conglomerates whose recent aggressiveness has received increasing encouragement from the general system of global governance.<\/p>\n

The first NGO conglomerate that poses a problem is, surprisingly, mainstream women\u2019s (not necessarily feminist) NGOs in East Asian countries.\u00a0 While pushing for general anti-discrimination legislation, most women\u2019s NGOs are reluctant to incorporate sexual orientation in their claims, fearing that sexual stigma would hinder women\u2019s own hard-fought equal rights claims.[32]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0UN-sponsored \u201cgender mainstreaming\u201d may have propagated the gender analytic with its implicit biological framework, but that analytic has often elided discussions about sexual orientation and gender variance.\u00a0 After all, gender mainstreaming aims to mainstream gender, not gender marginalities, much less sexual marginalities and diversity.\u00a0 On the issue of sexuality, the core feminist project of sexual self-determination has continuously restricted itself to heteronormalcy and the right to refuse unwanted sexual advances, which in turn converges nicely with Christian NGOs\u2019 advocacy of abstinence-oriented sex education.\u00a0 In that sense, such a feminist agenda may not cohere with queer sex rights at all.<\/p>\n

Aside from the mainstreamers, feminist sex radicals do exist in East Asia, but their presence and power of influence are continually circumscribed by mainstream feminists who denounce sex-positive views as un-feminist.[33]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0In Taiwan, where feminist sex radicals spearheaded liberal and radical views on female sexuality, the challenge of sex-positive views was taken as so threatening to the feminist image that a string of purges took place.\u00a0 Sex emancipationist feminists were ex-communicated in 1995 from Taiwanese Feminist Scholars Association, the feminist scholars group that they had helped found.\u00a0 Feminist personnel who supported sex work rights were fired from a leading feminist organization, the Awakening Foundation, in 1997.\u00a0 As so-called \u201cstate feminists\u201d were invited to join state cabinet in 2000, they have worked mostly to turn their own hetero-normal agenda into state policies and laws in regard to child care and prevention of domestic violence.[34]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Simply put, most women\u2019s NGOs in East Asia are not ready to tackle the force of sexual stigma that surrounds issues of sexual diversity or sexual pleasure.\u00a0 Some even capitalize on such social inhibition by demanding, to the dismay of queers, more protective surveillance or correction institutions as well as sex-phobic legal codes, all in the name of protecting women or, ominously, children.<\/p>\n

In addition to the cold shoulder of mainstream women\u2019s groups, queer causes face real and formidable foes in East Asia\u2019s Christian-based conservative NGOs.\u00a0 Spurred on by a sense of imminent crisis in the profound social change resulting from globalization, but feeling \u201cliberated\u201d by the ideas of pluralism and multiculturalism to propagate their discriminatory discourses and their vendetta against anything non-normative, conservative religious (Christian) groups have become dramatically outspoken in their concerted opposition to gay rights in recent years.\u00a0 In Hong Kong, Alliance for Family, an anti-gay Christian front, brought a four-page advertisement in one major local newspaper on April 29, 2005, detailing the dangers of homosexuality and calling on Hong Kong residents to rise up against the proposed anti-discrimination legislation that, according to the Christian group, would unleash the danger of gay sex for public health in addition to eroding the monogamous heterosexual family.\u00a0 This was the first massive and open demonstration of conservative forces against queers in Hong Kong.[35]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0In Taiwan, city legislators associated with Exodus International, an international Christian organization that advocates \u201cfreedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ,\u201d demanded in 2006 that Taipei city government withdraw its annual funding for gay civic causes, which had been the city\u2019s pledge to diversity.[36]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 In South Korea, a powerful conservative Christian lobby triumphed by persuading the legislative body that if the non-discrimination bill were passed, “homosexuals will try to seduce everyone, including adolescents; victims will be forced to become homosexuals; and sexual harassment by homosexuals will increase.”[37]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

It is obvious that the religious Right in East Asia has stepped up its efforts to stop anti-discrimination legislation.\u00a0 With a long-standing global missionary network, loaded with historical ties to the colonial past and its hierarchies, the Christian-based opposition has, in a perverted way, usurped the strategies and energies created by marginal social movements and now works aggressively to characterize queer existence as an alarming global trend that will damage the young and fragile.[38]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 For the traditionally family-oriented Chinese, the \u201cqueer scare\u201d has not only displaced social and parental anxiety and fear induced by globalization onto local queers and the latter\u2019s proposed anti-discrimination legislation, but also encouraged litigation against previously acceptable queer practices.\u00a0 The prosecution and eventual conviction of Taiwan\u2019s only gay bookstore, GinGin\u2019s, in 2005 for \u201cdissemination of obscene materials\u201d serves as a sobering reminder that the law is now being employed to make a statement about queer cultural visibility.<\/p>\n

It is noteworthy that in East Asia both mainstream women\u2019s NGOs and conservative Christian NGOs have chosen to abide by the most basic form of \u201csexual fundamentalism\u201d\u2014the notion that there is a singular, ideal sexuality (heterosexual, marital, procreative) and two genders (man and woman), and that those conforming to this standard have a right to police and control others, often by creating and enforcing new legislation.\u00a0 With the help of shame and stigmatization, legal regulation of sex and the body helps produce other effects of power, including an increasingly conservative social milieu and a chilling effect on sexual dissidence.\u00a0 Since such highly justified regulatory measures not only strengthen state power but also improve state legitimacy, conservative NGOs have enjoyed state support in fortifying the moral regime that now surrounds marginal sexualities in East Asia and elsewhere.\u00a0 Conversely, when such sexual fundamentalism pervades major conservative NGOs, women\u2019s NGOs, and the tabloid media in Asia, emergent sexual practices, values, and activism easily become occasions for moral\/sexual panics.\u00a0 The media consistently scrutinize the daily lives of already out marginal sexual subjects, probing and exposing intimacies, demonizing alternative lifestyles, confirming stereotypes and prejudices, and sometimes even fabricating sex scares.\u00a0 While gay activism rarely receives media coverage, gay saunas, lesbian bars, and arrests at gay home parties regularly come under media scrutiny, and the stories are always narrated from a conservative and normative point of view.\u00a0 Media reports characterize safe sex measures (such as the presence of used condoms) as evidence of promiscuity and lifestyle stimulants as narcotics.\u00a0 As sexual hysterias have become a mainstay of East Asian media, they are unfailingly and flexibly used by the conservative NGOs and the state to encourage social vigilance against the non-normative.<\/p>\n

Such sexual regulation has met with fierce resistance from radical sex groups in East Asian countries where the forces of modernization have only begun to take root.\u00a0 Yet, as social mobility and keen competition in the newly prospering East Asian states continue to make the reproduction of class unpredictable, there is plenty of (middle-class) class anxiety to be galvanized and transformed into fear for the safety of children and aggressive efforts to keep them safe (safe from anything characterized as harmful or distracting to their \u201cnormal\u201d development into designated class, gender, and sex positions).\u00a0 Middle-class parents thus make up the staunchest supporters of conservative NGOs in the latter\u2019s crusade to purify the world.\u00a0 And as East Asian nations race toward liberal democracy on this wave of middle-class self-affirmation, the Christian NGOs\u2019 active promotion of the imperative to protect children greatly contributes to the codification and juridification that helps boster state power and state legitimacy.<\/p>\n

The Child Protection Imperative<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you understand that children are the stem cells for the culture? \u00a0The environment that you put them in is what they grow up to be. \u00a0And if you can control what they hear, if you could control what they’re told, if you have access to their minds \u2026 you can make them into just about whatever you want them to be. <\/em>\u2014James Dobson, Focus on the Family, USA<\/p>\n

The immense power of the cultural imaginary of the child can be partially glimpsed in the extraordinary success of the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.\u00a0 The convention is the most universally accepted human rights document in history, ratified by every country in the world except 2 (at last count, 192 total). \u00a0By ratifying this document, national governments commit themselves to protecting and ensuring children’s rights, and they agree to hold themselves accountable for this commitment before the international community.[39]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0As the convention protects children’s rights by setting standards in health care, education and legal, civil and social services, many Asian countries are urged by their NGOs to bring national laws and practices in line with the UN\u2019s definition of children\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n

While the convention beckons forth its own global vision of child protection, the adoption of the child-protection imperative proves not only useful but effective in managing local issues and struggles.\u00a0 Three areas of intense NGO vigilance in Taiwan are instructive for my discussion here.[40]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 To begin with, the perennial oppression of pornography and sex work had glimpsed some hope for relief in the 1990s as an indigenous feminist discourse of sexual freedom spread throughout East Asia, opening up social space for more liberal views on sexual representation and transaction.\u00a0 The advent of cable television and the Internet also provided channels for communication and transaction beyond existing state measures of control.\u00a0 Fierce debates thus erupted between feminist sex radicals and various conservative voices (from the medical profession to the Christian groups to the women\u2019s groups) as they fought for popular support.\u00a0 Yet with the advent of the child-protection imperative through amendments and new legislation enacted by 2000, adults seeking their right to freedom of (sexual) speech and information suddenly found themselves interpellated as parents or would-be parents with solemn duties to perform in order to safeguard the well-being of all children.\u00a0 And as age and generation stratification still constitutes a core belief and institution in Asian societies, constitutional rights to freedom of expression and information proved fragile when faced with the higher calling of protection of offspring.\u00a0 Deeply-ingrained sex negativity eventually triumphed over newly-affirmed entitlement to autonomy and pleasure.<\/p>\n

The second area has to do with the institutionalization of homosexual relationships.\u00a0 Lesbian and gay couples of a previous generation were unable to gather enough force to challenge the heteronormative system.\u00a0 All they could hope for was to be able to pass and lead a secluded life.\u00a0 Yet since the 1990s, with the aggressive activism of an indigenous gay liberation movement, a new generation of lesbians and gays has emerged who may still suffer from prejudice and discrimination individually but who have acquired enough collective presence to make demands on society.\u00a0 Anti-discrimination bills are drafted in various nations, and the right to marry constitutes an additional demand.\u00a0 It almost looks as if growing social tolerance might allow for stable gay relationships.\u00a0 At this critical moment, Christian NGOs have come forth in various alliances to ensure the family institution stays heterosexual.\u00a0 Unable to issue any argument against lesbian and gay love, the issue of children is raised as Christian NGOs caution against the radical changes that will take place in the home and in schools if homosexual marriages are legally recognized.[41]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0Once again, duties to the young prove to be formidable obstacles to social change.<\/p>\n

The last and most recent development directly bears on the child as fetus.\u00a0 Abortion in East Asia is a complicated issue connected to socio-historical conditions as well as life politics.\u00a0 In difficult times of limited means and resources and before the use of oral contraceptives became common practice, abortion, in keeping with state policies of population control, had been a popular and acceptable solution for unwanted pregnancies in marraige.[42]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 The social meaning of abortion was transformed after the 1980s as a rapid increase in premarital sex shifted the demography of abortions, and in response to the social condemnation of abortion, indigenous myths about how \u201cthe fetus\u2019s spirit will haunt the mother\u201d began to spread as various temples devised special rites to ease the mother\u2019s guilt and dread by helping put the fetus\u2019s spirit to rest.\u00a0 Guilt and shame gradually replaced pragmatism as the dominant emotion associated with abortion, which articulated nicely with developing Christian right-to-life discourses.\u00a0 The introduction of abortifacients (emergency contraceptives) such as mifepristone (better known as RU486) since the late 1990s has brought hope that the social stigma and danger associated with abortion would no longer plague women.\u00a0 However, reading this development as encouraging irresponsible sexual conduct in the midst of a blatant sex revolution, Christian NGOs in Taiwan quickly responded by urging the state to institute regulatory measures that included parental consent for minors, waiting periods, and mandatory consultation. \u00a0In the meantime, as much as the Chinese value fertility for the sake of family lineage, the availability of artificial insemination procedures still met with resistance from Christian NGOs, who believe that only the natural family should give birth to children, and from mainstream women\u2019s NGOs, who fear the procedure would revive the age-old belief that women are nothing but child-bearing vessels for patriarchy.[43]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 Through deliberative democracy, it was determined that artificial insemination procedure should be accessible only to married couples, which effectively excludes lesbians and gays.\u00a0 The insistent involvement of the conservative NGOs in debates surrounding abortion and artificial insemination boils down to requiring that the fetus be produced only through normal heterosexual sex conducted in state-sanctioned marriage.[44]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Underneath the emotional investment in the child and fetus is a deeply-rooted fixation on the heterosexual monogamous family, which alone can guarantee the child\u2019s proper birth, upbringing, acculturation, gender socialization, and emotional maturity.\u00a0 The child, understood as the future of humankind, also carries a preemptive authority that decrees heterosexuality to be elemental to the survival of the family, the clan, and the nation, a noble obligation that queers have been shown to deliberately evade.\u00a0 The popular complaint that \u201cgayness will cause the family (and the nation) to perish\u201d aptly expresses the deep-rooted anxiety of reproduction-oriented East Asian cultures.[45]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0Here, Christian anti-gay doctrines and Asian heterosexual family traditions, often at odds with each other, oddly converge on the issues of the family and child protection.\u00a0 And the result is none other than a rejuvenation and legitimation of parental power, which had been greatly diminished and challenged in the sweeping influence of modern individualism, but is now amplified to fortify the state into an all-powerful overseeing parent.[46]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The child, now understood as supremely innocent, must thus be kept safe from harmful influences that could distract it from the hetero-normative track of \u201cdeveloping to its fullest\u201d\u2014and influences that clearly encompass anything queer.\u00a0 To ensure the intactness of that innocence, new forms of discipline and regulation are created that end up affecting all adults, queer or straight.\u00a0 All things sexual, whether gay or straight or other kinds, must be kept out of sight; all sexual knowledge and representation, gay or straight or other kinds, must be considered taboo; all non-normative sexualities are presented as pathological; all interactions must be desexualized.\u00a0 In collaboration with this protectionist mode of thinking, child-protection <\/em>discourses quickly become aligned with like-minded anti-sex women-protection<\/em> discourses.\u00a0 And without a critical perspective, it is only a matter of time before they become fetus-protection<\/em> discourses, as is already the case in East Asia.\u00a0 This continuously broadening circle of protection works to strengthen the conservative NGOs\u2019 power of influence, which in the final analysis contributes significantly to the grand project of state legitimacy as well as global governance.\u00a0 The child-protection imperative constitutes the ultimate trump card in enforcing the most rigid forms of social control, and this has become a key point of struggle for East Asian queers.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation\u2019s good, though always <\/em>at<\/em> the cost of limiting the rights \u201creal\u201d citizens are allowed.\u2014<\/em>Lee Edelman, No Future<\/em><\/p>\n

The title of the present essay is a spin-off from the feminist political philosopher Susan Moller Okin\u2019s 1997 essay, \u201cIs Multiculturalism Bad for Women?\u201d\u00a0 Okin\u2019s argument is that multiculturalism, a justice- and equality-oriented worldview, may help to preserve some minority cultural values and practices that are oppressive to women and violate the demands of modern gender equality.[47]<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While I do not share Okin\u2019s views entirely, the structure of her logic is illuminating for the issues discussed in the present essay.\u00a0 For what appears to be justice- and equality-oriented global governance is shown to be helping propagate juridical tendencies and policy strategies that violate the basic demands of equality and diversity and are oppressive to queers, freaks, and other disenfranchised, disinherited, criminalized, and pathologized populations created by increasing modernization, civilization, juridification, and not least of all, global governance.<\/p>\n

Saskia Sassen has proposed that the relocation of various components of sovereignty unto supranational or non-governmental institutions could create \u201cinstitutional voids resulting from the shrinking regulatory umbrella of the state\u201d that strengthen \u201cthe ascendance of women\u2026as subjects of law and the formation of crossborder feminist solidarities.\u201d[48]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0It is true that in many parts of East Asia and elsewhere, women have risen in status and have built cross-border solidarities, but as I have tried to demonstrate in this essay, the ones who have soared on the wings of global governance are specific groups of women, including women with class privilege, women of the heterosexual persuasion, women of Christian vigilance, and women with conservative views of sexuality.\u00a0 They have transformed themselves into subjects of law by creating legislation that subsumes many more (queer and sexually non-conforming) subjects under law.\u00a0 By doing so, they have helped broaden, rather than shrink, the regulatory umbrella of the state.\u00a0 The conjunction of social change and social anxiety, of nationalistic uncertainty and global aspiration, has created fertile ground for conservative maneuvers that often ride on the sweeping force of moral hysteria and social stigma against sexual dissidence.<\/p>\n

If the Christian NGOs readily inserts their conservative agenda into the normative nature of global governance, and if mainstream women\u2019s NGOs easily align themselves with the state and its schemes of governance, then are queer NGOs immune from such opportunism or co-optation?\u00a0 If global governance has proven to be not so good for East Asian queers, how should they respond to its continued spread?<\/p>\n

The lesson of the Independent Gay Forum is still newly present, and we have already been cautioned by activist scholars such as Lisa Duggan about the co-optation of mainstream gay groups by the discourse of neo-liberalism and the fluidity of NGO affiliation.[49]<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0In East Asia, the same tension and possibility exists.\u00a0 Internal struggle has never been absent from the gay community as mainstreaming gays and militant queers diverge on strategies and issues.\u00a0 Yet one is also encouraged by the fact that at the December 2005 WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong, queer groups from quite a few East Asian states lined up with other social movement groups (labor, farmer, women, sex worker) in fierce protest against WTO policies.\u00a0 Such collaboration has proven to be both educational and solidarity-building.\u00a0 Queer groups from across Asia have also banded together to protest local legislation and litigation in, for example, Hong Kong and Taiwan that threaten to jeopardize queer existence.\u00a0 When marginal groups confront the state machine and its legal arms, valuable lessons about governance are learned.\u00a0 East Asian queer groups have also been a common presence at rallies for workers and sex workers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea for the past ten years.\u00a0 The alliance provides a sobering experience for groups that have lingering hopes that the state will live up to the ideals of diversity and equality.\u00a0 Such coalition politics beckons forth a power that continues to contest any firm grasp of identity formation, a power that continues to constitute new and unexpected modes of intimate alliance, a power that is always quick in forging and consolidating new coalitions, and, of course, a power that continues to resist the temptation of the new state-NGO power bloc.\u00a0 It is toward this alternative kind of global solidarity that East Asian queers are struggling.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Notes<\/strong>:<\/span><\/p>\n

This essay is revised from the author\u2019s keynote address to \u201cSexualities, Gender, and Rights in Asia: First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies,\u201d Bangkok, Thailand, July 7-9, 2005.\u00a0 The author would like to thank Naifei Ding and Kuan-Hsing Chen for reading the first draft and providing insightful suggestions.\u00a0 Heartfelt gratitude is also extended to the journal\u2019s two anonymous reviewers for their meticulous reading and invaluable suggestions, which helped bring about major revisions in this essay.<\/span><\/p>\n

[1] James N. Rosenau, \u201cGovernance, Order and Change in World Politics,\u201d in Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics<\/em>, ed. by James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) , 4-5.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> The spread of global governance is quite uneven across Asia.\u00a0 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\u2019s economic boom in the 1990s.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Both factors contribute to states of confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety that help make the Christian NGOs\u2019 conservative agenda increasingly palatable.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> All adult publications sold in the bookstore had been wrapped in plastic and clearly marked for those eighteen and above only.\u00a0 Still, police ripped open the wrapping and charged the owner with disseminating obscenity.\u00a0 Gay groups repeatedly protested against the litigation; unfortunately, the gay owner still suffered a final conviction in 2005.\u00a0 (\u201cNo Guilt and Not Guilty, Say Homosexual Protesters,\u201d Taipei Times<\/em>, June 16, 2004, www.taipeitimes.com\/News\/taiwan\/archives\/2004\/06\/16\/2003175251<\/a>.)\u00a0 In front of media cameras, party-goers in their shorts or briefs were marched out of the building and required to take urine and blood tests at the police station (\u201cTreatment of Homosexual Men Caught at Party Outrages Gay Rights Activists,\u201d Taipei Times<\/em>, January 23, 2004, www.taipeitimes.com\/News\/taiwan\/archives\/2004\/01\/23\/2003092323<\/a>).\u00a0 Still, thanks to token gestures of tolerance from the Taiwan government, Wikipedia describes Taiwan as \u201cone of Asia’s most progressive countries as far as LGBT rights are concerned.\u201d \u00a0(\u201cLGBT Rights in Taiwan,\u201d en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/LGBT_rights_in_Taiwan<\/a> [accessed February 9, 2008]).<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> \u201cSingapore Bans Christmas Because It Might Be Gay,\u201d Associated Press http:\/\/www.yawningbread.org\/apdx_2004\/imp-168.htm<\/a><\/em>; Alex Au, \u201cA Ban(ner) Week in Singapore,\u201d August 15, 2007, fridae.com\/newsfeatures\/article.php?articleid=2014&viewarticle=1<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> \u201cSexual Orientation Discrimination Legislation for Hong Kong,\u201d www.ipetitions.com\/petition\/sodbhk\/<\/a> (accessed February 10, 2008). Despite a massive petition drive by gay and lesbian groups to demand equal treatment under the law, Singapore\u2019s lawmakers voted in October 2007 to retain section 377A of the penal code, which decrees that any male person found guilty of engaging in \u201cgross indecency\u201d with another male, whether in private or in public, faces a jail term of up to two years (\u201cAllow Space for Gays but Gay Sex Ban to Stay: Singapore PM,\u201d October 24, 2007, fridae.com\/newsfeatures\/article.php?articleid=2124&viewarticle=1&searchtype=all<\/a>. 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.\u00a0 In the end, sexual orientation was removed from the list of inclusions (\u201cExclusion from Non-Discrimination Bill Mobilises Korea\u2019s LGBT Community,\u201d November 23, 2007, fridae.com\/newsfeatures\/article.php?articleid=2098&viewarticle=1&searchtype=all<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> \u201cSister Radio in Sex Sounds Row,\u201d Taipei<\/em> Times<\/em>, May 16, 2004. \u00a0www.taipeitimes.com\/News\/taiwan\/archives\/2004\/05\/16\/2003155678<\/a>.\u00a0 The case was repealed one year later after much protest.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The case is now under review, and the final ruling will have far-reaching impact on advocacy for any unpopular views (\u201cGay Marriage Show Sparks TV Row in Hong Kong,\u201d January 24, 2007, fridae.com\/newsfeatures\/article.php?articleid=1844&viewarticle=1<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Such aggressiveness may remind the reader of the Christian Right in the United States.\u00a0 Researchers maintain that the Christian Right\u2019s political activism focuses on different targets domestically and internationally, with the former concentrated on \u201cissues such as gay rights and school vouchers\u201d and the latter on \u201cUnited Nations population policy, women\u2019s rights, and children\u2019s rights.\u201d\u00a0 See Doris Buss and Didi Herman, Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics<\/em> (Minneapolis\/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xviii.\u00a0 Christian-based NGOs in East Asia, however, merged the issues and turned gay rights into an issue that threatens women\u2019s rights and children\u2019s rights with its obvious challenge to the institution of the family as well as its insistent demand on sexual openness and diversity.<\/span><\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Christians may have been considered a minority in these nations, yet their colonial lineage and financial advantage afforded 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.\u00a0 Their role as independent social service providers also facilitates their later transformation into government-franchises.<\/span><\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> \u201cNGOs and the United Nations,\u201d Global Policy Forum, www.globalpolicy.org\/ngos\/docs99\/gpfrep.htm<\/a> (accessed February 7, 2008)<\/span><\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Charter for Global Democracy (Charter 99), www.i-p-o.org\/global-democracy.htm<\/a> (accessed Februry 7, 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> The states, of course, have made arrangements to ensure that no such dramatic turn takes place.\u00a0 After all, indigenous NGOs in East Asia are mostly financially ill-equipped to attend such international functions and must rely on the state governments to supply funding and bestow legitimacy to the delegation.\u00a0 It is little wonder that the chosen delegates almost always come from those mainstream NGOs friendly with the government.\u00a0 (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.)<\/span><\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Kenneth Anderson and David Rieff, \u201c\u2019Global Civil Society\u2019: A Sceptic View,\u201d in Global Civil Society 2004\/5<\/em>, ed. Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, and Mary Kaldor (London: Sage, 2004) , 27-29.\u00a0 www.lse.ac.uk\/Depts\/global\/yearbook04chapters.htm<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> The concentrated presence of international NGOs in the economically booming but ideologically restrained People\u2019s Republic of China serves as a prime example of such political motivation.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Kate Bedford\u2019s seminal study of the World Bank\u2019s lending policies highlights one set of such maneuvers geared toward fine-tuning local heteronormative arrangements to collaborate with global economic transformation. \u00a0See Kate Bedford, \u201cLoving to Straighten Out Development: Sexuality and \u2018Ethnodevelopment\u2019 in the World Bank\u2019s Ecuadorian Lending,\u201d Feminist Legal Studies<\/em> (2005) 13: 295-322.<\/span><\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> 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.\u00a0 This moral decree is already having a serious impact on Asia\u2019s nascent sex workers\u2019 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 anti-trafficking NGOs that women’s migration toward economic betterment and their choice of sex work are nothing but acts of trafficking and exploitation.<\/span><\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics<\/em> (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 13.<\/span><\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Our Global Neighbourhood<\/em>, www.libertymatters.org\/chap2.htm<\/u> (accessed April 1, 2007).<\/span><\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> In many Asian countries where nation-statehood is still a relatively recent achievement, \u201ccivic\u201d is often understood as something closely aligned with nationalistic sovereignty.\u00a0 In the 1910s, the early years of the Republic of China, opponents of masturbation exclaimed: \u201cMasturbation is the draining of national energy!\u201d\u00a0 Civic duties to the nation thus denote things serious and solemn, to the absolute exclusion of things sexual.<\/span><\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Significantly, such international agreements rarely promote sex-positive measures.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> Raimo Vayrynen, \u201cNorms, Compliance, and Enforcement in Global Governance,\u201d in Globalization and Global Governance<\/em>, ed. Raimo Vayrynen (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1990), 27.<\/span><\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference<\/em> (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1990), 136.<\/span><\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> Jock Young, The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity<\/em> (London: Sage, 1999), 65.<\/span><\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> Gayle Rubin, \u201cThinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,\u201d in Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader<\/em>, ed. Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton (London: U College London, 1999), 143.<\/span><\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> J\u00fcrgen Habermas, Life World and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason<\/em>, vol. 2 of The Theory of Communicative Action<\/em> (Boston: Beacon,<\/em> 1987), 357-73.<\/span><\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> Western readers may be more familiar with the liberal concept of sex liberation or sexual freedom. But in Taiwan, feminist sex radicals chose the term \u201csex emancipation\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0 See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, \u201cEmancipations, Modern and Postmodern,\u201d in Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern<\/em>, ed. by Jan Nederveen Pieterse (London: Sage, 1992), 5-41.<\/span><\/p>\n

[26]<\/a> 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For a detailed analysis of this gradual process of juridification in Taiwan, see Josephine Ho, \u201cFrom Anti-Trafficking to Social Discipline: The Case of Taiwan,\u201d in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights<\/em>, ed. Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005), 83-105.<\/span><\/p>\n

[27]<\/a> For the English version of Constitutional Court Interpretation no. 617 pertaining to article 235 of the criminal code (dissemination of obscenities), see www.<\/u>judicial.gov.tw\/CONSTITUTIONALCOURT\/EN\/p03_01.asp?expno=617<\/a>, accessed February 20, 2008.\u00a0 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 transaction), see www.judicial.gov.tw\/CONSTITUTIONALCOURT\/EN\/p03_01.asp?expno=623<\/a>, accessed February 20, 2008.<\/span><\/p>\n

[28]<\/a> Taiwan\u2019s Garden of Hope Foundation hired a veteran journalist, Hui-jung Chi, as its new CEO in 1992.\u00a0 Since then, the foundation has benefited greatly from her experience and expertise in public relations and has come to describe its various campaigns as \u201csocial movements,\u201d adopting strategies of emergent social movements in organizing marches, rallies, petitions, fund-raising drives, and so forth for conservative causes.\u00a0 Chi herself admitted to such a maneuver in a 1997 interview (in Chinese).\u00a0 See www.ccea.org.tw\/soc\/17.htm<\/a>, accessed February 14, 2008.\u00a0 The most aggressive of such civil society organizations that tackle sex- and gay-related issues in East Asia include Hong Kong\u2019s Society for Truth and Light, Hong Kong Sex Culture Society, Hong Kong Alliance for Family; Taiwan\u2019s Garden of Hope Foundation, End Child Prostitution Association Taiwan, Exodus International, Center for the Study of Bio-Ethics; Singapore\u2019s Liberty League; and South Korea\u2019s Assembly of Scientists against Embryonic Cloning.<\/span><\/p>\n

[29]<\/a> NGO-ization proves to be highly profitable.\u00a0 The annual budget of two of the largest Taiwanese Christian NGOs, Garden of Hope Foundation and Catholic Good Shepherd Sisters Foundation, has grown ten fold since the transformation, with hundreds of full-time staff members and many more volunteers.\u00a0 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 groups.<\/span><\/p>\n

[30]<\/a> Christian-based NGOs have been most keen in organizing a media monitoring alliance with other NGOs.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

[31]<\/a> Probably the most aggressive of such Christian NGOs, Taiwan\u2019s 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\u2019s NGO of the Year, Asia-Pacific Region, Resource Alliance (2004).\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

[32]<\/a> The hesitation and reluctance remain undocumented except through reports from frustrated LGBTQ representatives who attended such negotiation meetings.\u00a0 Years of experience in political correctness have taught many NGO groups never to put their criticism of marginal views into writing for fear of being cited and rebuked.\u00a0 It is the underdog NGOs who tend to be explicit about their own non-conforming views in trying to open up social space.<\/span><\/p>\n

[33]<\/a> Mainstream feminist writings on sexuality center mostly on the dangers of sex, pornography, and pleasure.<\/span><\/p>\n

[34]<\/a> 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. \u00a0The 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\u2019s domain and responsibility. \u00a0It is with this vision in mind that mainstream feminists developed an unusually high interest and investment in the project of state-building.<\/span><\/p>\n

[35]<\/a> To the dismay of gay-rights organizations and activists, even after the newspaper campaign, this anti-gay NGO still won the \u201chuman rights education project\u201d in 2005 from Hong Kong\u2019s Education and Manpower Bureau, with exclusive rights to train teachers as well as to produce education materials\u2014on the subject of human rights<\/em>\u2014for middle schools all over Hong Kong.\u00a0 And in the extracts from the teaching course outline, the Society for Truth and Light is already saying that one of the themes it will discuss is “excessive use of human rights.”<\/span><\/p>\n

[36]<\/a> \u201cTaipei Hosts Gay Civic Event; Religious Group Contests,\u201d United Evening News<\/em>, August 25, 2006, Metropolitan Section, gsrat.net\/news\/newsclipDetail.php?ncdata_id=3013<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[37]<\/a> \u201cExclusion from Non-Discrimination Bill Mobilises Korea\u2019s LGBT Community,\u201d November 23, 2007.\u00a0 fridae.com\/newsfeatures\/article.php?articleid=2098&viewarticle=1&searchtype=all<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[38]<\/a> See www.hkchurch.org\/family\/sub\/1.htm<\/a>, accessed February 10, 2008.<\/span><\/p>\n

[39]<\/a> 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. \u00a0Yet, 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 <\/strong>abuse and exploitation.\u00a0 This focus on the negative aspects of sex reflects significant historical shifts in feminist movements and discourse.\u00a0 Just as the iconoclastic sex liberation discourse in the United Stats in the early 1970s was eventually eclipsed by women\u2019s painful narration of rape and abuse experiences that culminated in the \u201cTake Back the Night\u201d 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.\u00a0 Steven Angelides has documented the feminist evasion of the issue of child sexuality in his important essay, \u201cFeminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality,\u201d GLQ<\/em> 10 (2004): 141-77.\u00a0 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\u2019s groups chose to focus on victim-centered sexual harassment and sexual violence from 1996 on.<\/span><\/p>\n

[40]<\/a> The case of Taiwan supplies the most emblematic example for my observation here because, given its unique and tumultuous process of on-going democratization and uncertain nation-state status, it has afforded social movements the most fertile ground for active yet limited intervention.\u00a0 Moreover, Taiwanese gender\/sexuality activists have produced the most sophisticated discourses on women\u2019s issues and lesbian and gay issues, which are now being disseminated throughout Asia.<\/span><\/p>\n

[41]<\/a> Such views are most clearly stated on the Webpage of the Hong Kong Alliance for Family, while opposition to the homosexual marriage bill in Taiwan took more veiled forms. \u00a0See www.hkchurch.org\/family\/sub\/2.htm<\/a> (accessed Feb. 10, 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n

[42]<\/a> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

[43]<\/a> Buss and Herman write about a shift in the Christian Right\u2019s UN rhetoric on defending the \u201crights of poor women\u201d in its opposition to abortion (Globalizing Family Values<\/em>, 58).\u00a0 The argument about \u201crights of poor women\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

[44]<\/a> 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. \u00a0Nor are they allowed to engage in activities deemed dangerous for the fetus.<\/span><\/p>\n

[45]<\/a> Uttered by Taiwan\u2019s ruling party legislator Hou Shui-Sheng in 2004, this quotation coincides with Lee Edelman\u2019s delineation of the politics of \u201creproductive futurism,\u201d in which the figure of the child represents the possibility of the future against which the queer serves as a negating drive.\u00a0 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive <\/em>(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).<\/span><\/p>\n

[46]<\/a> I thank my colleague Naifei Ding for reminding me that the convergence of the \u201dcolonial-modern\u201d (Christian) and the \u201dfeudal-cultural\u201d (in various Chinese contexts, transfer of ancestor-worship to children-fetish) is a historical phenomenon quite typical of many East Asian societies.<\/span><\/p>\n

[47]<\/a> Susan Moller Okin, \u201cIs Multiculturalism Bad for Women?\u201d in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?<\/em> ed. Joshua Cohen and Matthew Howard (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1999), 7-24.<\/span><\/p>\n

[48]<\/a> Saskia Sassen, \u201cTowards a Feminist Analytics of Today\u2019s Global Economy,\u201d Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies<\/em> 4 (1996-97): 7.<\/span><\/p>\n

[49]<\/a> Lisa, Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy<\/em> (Boston: Beacon, 2003) chap. 3.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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