Queer/Trans K’s

Diplomacy

Chinese diplomats attempt to control nationalist discourse in a way that papers over how certain bodies are affected by institutions

Callahan 2015

(February, William A., professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, Author of “China Dreams: 20 Visions of the Future”, “China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy” and “China: The Pessoptimist Nation”, “Textualizing Cultures:Thinking beyond the MIT Controversy” http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/578823#back - KSA)

The conclusion is not that Chinese students have been “brainwashed” by this impressive multimedia campaign (that still continues to this day) or are “pawns of larger forces” but to suggest that patriotic education/national humiliation education provides the dominant template for understanding Chinese identity and security. China’s diplomats, scholars, and students often exude national pride when times are good, but they quickly switch to national-humiliation themes when China faces an international crisis.In other words, if it is common for us to assume that the “general public” can be influenced by the media in the United States, why is it so difficult to accept that Chinese citizens, whose subjectivity emerges in the context of well-organized official media campaigns, cannot be likewise influenced? And isn’t it a proper critical stance to treat the “century of national humiliation” as a discourse that needs to be explained in terms of power relations, rather than as a source of “facts” that will explain China’s behavior? Elsewhere, I conclude that the “century of national humiliation” is less important as a set of facts than as a structure of feeling that guides a certain form of politics. It is necessary, then, to understand national humiliation not because it is “true,” but because understanding it is helpful for critiquing this particular narrative of hostile international politics.²² Certainly, individual Chinese express a wide range of views about their identity and history; but it is still important to understand the discursive economy of the [End Page 136] PRC’s propaganda system that not only censors information but also actively shapes all forms of education and entertainment.²³Against the background of the graphic display of mutilated Chinese bodies—including horrible photos of Japanese soldiers beheading Chinese men and raping Chinese women—that are commonly displayed in discussions of the Nanjing Massacre in the PRC, it might seem odd that Chinese students would complain about the prints picturing beheadings of Chinese soldiers on MIT’s home page. But that would be missing the point; the controversy is not about outrage at the violence of the images or the meaning of the individual photos and prints. It centers on the production and distribution of Visualizing Cultures.Although they might unproblematically consume the “war porn” of the Nanjing Massacre albums at home in China, when abroad some felt that it was their duty to assert control over images of ethnic Chinese people. As one student put it, he and his classmates were angry “not [at] the images themselves, but the lack of a ‘righteous’ standpoint.”²⁴ The “righteous” standpoint, he explains, is the one supported by the Chinese state, that is, patriotic education. As the Internet discussion shows, activists were particularly enraged that one of the authors had a Japanese-sounding name, thus reaffirming the securitization of China against Japan.²⁵ Securitization here involves a focus on identity as difference in a zero-sum game that distinguishes civilization from barbarism, and China from the rest of the world.We saw such popular passions erupt again in 2008, when Chinese citizens came out in force to defend the Olympic torch relay’s international “Journey of Harmony” against “foreigners” who criticized Beijing’s crackdown in Tibet. Rather than examine why Tibetans might protest Beijing’s rule, the dominant discourse among Han Chinese around the world narrated the “bias” of Westerners who had unfairly criticized the Chinese homeland. The Tibetan unrest was thus transformed from a serious domestic issue of racial politics into an international issue of pride and humiliation that pits China against the West.Beijing responded to international criticism in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics with a propaganda campaign that narrated “the real China” (zhenshi de Zhongguo), which Chinese officials and netizens expected foreign [End Page 137] journalists to report.²⁶ As China has grown in global power over the past few years, this media campaign to present a singular correct view of the PRC to international audiences has gained much traction: Confucius Institutes are proliferating in universities around the world, and China’s new English-language cable news channel, CNTV, spreads the word in a slick CNN-like style. The importance of China’s “image policy” was reaffirmed at the 2011 annual meeting of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which focused on developing China’s soft power and “cultural security.”²⁷Knowledge here shifts from being the product of expertise—that is, the result of scholarly enquiry—to be the product of emotional feeling that one can only properly appreciate through direct experience.²⁸ It becomes a national commodity, an issue of national sovereignty and discursive power (huayu quan), in which all Chinese, as a young Chinese diplomat recently told me, “instinctively” know the meaning of “harmony,” the PRC’s recently declared national value. It becomes “racialized” in the sense that only “Chinese” can talk about China (or at least have editorial control about how others discuss it, as the Chinese students’ association suggested). This sense of control sometimes takes blunt forms: the Chinese consulate in Manchester denied visas to any of the fifty-thousand people who worked or studied at the university for ten weeks in 2011; among other things, the consul-general was insulted by the critical discussion of China at a keynote speech that was sponsored by the Confucius Institute (and now is published as one of the articles in this special issue of positions).²⁹

Negotiations by global institutions work to suppress queer bodies in Asian countries

Ho 2008

(Josephine, the foremost feminist sex-radical scholar in East Asia, Founder and head of the Center for the Study of Sexualities at National Central University, Taiwan, “Is Global Governance Bad for East Asian Queers?” http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/251032#back - KSA)

Yet, as the new global order has evolved in recent years, such euphoric feeling has been punctured by growing retrenchment in the same region, as various states take up measures quite inhospitable to queer existence. Police raids on Taiwan’s only gay bookstore in 2003 and on gay home parties since 2004 fueled public impressions of gay decadence and its resultant spread of HIV; subsequent litigation further intensified fear and intimidation.3 Massive gatherings such as gay parties, exhibitions, performances, forums, and even picnics were banned in Singapore in 2004 and 2007.⁴ On the grounds that lesbian and gay rights have not achieved social consensus, gay-sponsored antidiscrimination legislation met with repeated defeat in Hong Kong, and broad-based antidiscrimination legislation ended up excluding sexual orientation in both Singapore and South Korea in 2007.5 Gay- and lesbian-oriented radio program content was criticized by broadcasting [End Page 457] authorities as outright obscene in Taiwan in 2004 and characterized by Christian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as “biased towards homosexual marriage and thus inappropriate for children” in Hong Kong in 2007.⁶ Thanks to the efforts of child-protection NGOs, helped in no small way by East Asia’s sensationalizing media, a heightened sense of vigilance is now pervasive; as a result, depending on the national context, legislation is either in place or under way to circumscribe all sexual communication and contact on the Internet. 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. 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 Second, East Asia’s 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. Curiously, these two developments often work together to boost the public image and political power of both the Christian NGOs and the liberal states. One cannot help but wonder: How do Christian NGOs achieve such influential positions within East Asian societies despite the Christian community’s minority status?⁸ And what do these recent developments reveal about liberal democracy’s own limits in promoting marginal issues of social justice in East Asia? This essay contends that answers to these important questions are located in our current context of global governance and global civil society. As a matter of fact, fortified by UN discourse and worldwide policy directives, set in place by aspiring nation-states in collaboration with local NGOs (the most aggressive ones being fundamentalist Christian), a new reign of civility, 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, recriminalization, and recurrent sex panic, not to mention new sex-repressive legislative reform measures. The analysis that follows centers on two major aspects of this development. 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. Second, the construction of “child protection” as a universal imperative in actuality both reinforces heterosexual monogamy and debunks cultural diversity as inherently confusing and thus harmful for children. [End Page 458] 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.Since the 1990s, “governance” 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 sustainability for a free market economy so as to remove all obstacles to free trade while ensuring the countries’ ability to repay debt. Viewed in this light, the release of the UN report Our Neighborhood: Report of the Commission on Global Governance (1995), and the urgency and speed with which global governance has been popularized and aggressively promoted in various regions, reflect efforts to forge new social realities for economic globalization. In place of state-oriented approaches to global politics, the UN report proposes a new conception (and the emerging operation) of the institutions, practices, and processes for organizing and negotiating global politics in the post – Cold War era. The new global order is to be conducted mainly through the multiple and flexible interactions among intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the UN, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF, and their various treaties; NGOs and their activisms; multinational corporations (MNCs) and their operation; and existing, but allegedly weakened, state governments. In addition to the usual powerful players in international politics, the UN secretary-general envisions NGOs as “indispensable partners” of the UN “in the process of deliberation and policy formation” as well as in “the execution of policies.”9 The UN thus enlisted an army of NGOs to raise public awareness of the need for international cooperation and to advance the report’s agenda, outlined as the “Charter for Global Democracy.”¹⁰ Participation in such UN projects in turn adds to the political weight of local NGOs, which now find themselves involved in global negotiations and international politics, and capable of formulating rules of conduct for nation-states.¹¹ 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.While the complex nature of and vast differences among transnational NGOs are said to mitigate the possibility of a benign and integrated global civil society working toward the common dual goals of human rights and democracy, the actual politics of NGOs working across national borders is much more volatile [End Page 459] and often variously implicated in different circles of political involvement.12 There is, after all, nothing intrinsically progressive or democratic about international civil society. 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 important, 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 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 “normal,” and thus acceptable, sexual practices and identities.14 Conversely, East Asia’s liberal states are increasingly aware of the political expedience of inviting the right NGOs to attend international gatherings so as to guarantee a presence but also safeguard their national image; the choice of delegation naturally favors the mainstream and normative over the marginal and difficult. Tensions and contradictions among NGOs of different origins and ideologies are also complex. 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 In these and other cases, the intermingling of NGOs of different calibers with state governments of different democratic forms 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.¹⁶Despite 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. The UN report calls for establishing a “global civic ethic” based on “a set of core values that can unite people of all cultural, political, religious, or philosophical backgrounds.”¹⁷ 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. The problems of universalism aside, the envisioned “global” and “civic” ethic — with its inherent assumptions about shared cultural commonality and cherished nationalistic civility — has tended to find its baseline of agreement in those areas most deeply entrenched in benign but unreflexive 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 [End Page 460] process find ready and unproblematic targets of critique — and what better choice than the subject of sexuality!¹⁸ 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.¹⁹The preference for such issues and their success in global negotiations has a lot to do with the specific nature of power under global governance. As Raimo Väyrynen points out:In the multicentric world, power not only is dispersed, but it also assumes more forms than the traditional power analysis suggests. For instance, power can also be symbolic and reputational, as well as material, and it may reflect conventions and narratives. The fluidity of “soft” power means that it is difficult to capture and use for specific purposes. 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.²⁰“Norms and institutions” 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. “Symbolic and reputational,” 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. 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. The norms underlying global propositions thus tend to gravitate toward “respectability” and toward “norms that repress sexuality, bodily functions, and emotional expression . . . the respectable person is chaste, modest, does not express lustful desires, passion, spontaneity, or exuberance, is frugal, clean, gently spoken, and well mannered. The orderliness of respectability means things are under control, everything in its place, not crossing the borders.”²¹

The state will always crush anti-diplomatic sentiment in an effort to preserve the squo

Tan 2005

(December, See Seng, Professor of International Relations at RSIS, Deputy Director and Head of Research of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, BA Honors from Manitoba; MA from Manitoba, PhD from Arizona State University, Previously an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, “Non-Official Diplomacy in Southeast Asia: ‘Civil Society’ or ‘Civil Service’?” http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/387965/pdf - KSA)

Likewise, another prominent analyst has noted that "in the long run it is Asia that seems more likely to be the cockpit of great power conflict. The half millennium during which Europe was the world's primary generator of war (as well as wealth and knowledge) is coming to a close". Hence, "for better or worse, Europe's past could be Asia's future" (Friedberg 1993/94, p. 7). Still another analyst (based in Southeast Asia) has rendered the even more interesting assertion that "certain primordial impulses, like ... a type of domination founded upon classical raison d'état [that are] inherent in the human condition will somehow remain dormant as long as the peoples and governments of the AsiaPacific preoccupy themselves with the business of making money" (da Cunha 1996, p. x). That such prognostications about impending interstate conflict in the region have, in retrospect, generally been off the mark is not at issue here (Alagappa 2003, pp. ix-xv). That they serve to preserve and promote the reason-of-state principle and, in doing so, re-instantiate long-standing diplomatic conventions and norms perceptibly threatened by non-official diplomatic attempts at institution-building through hyperrealist interventions clearly underscore an inherent proclivity towards maintenance of the diplomatic status quo

Diplomatic conversations in Southeast Asia always favor the state and uphold the discursive methods that exclude “deviant” bodies and results in the ignorance of human rights violations

Tan 2005

(December, See Seng, Professor of International Relations at RSIS, Deputy Director and Head of Research of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, BA Honors from Manitoba; MA from Manitoba, PhD from Arizona State University, Previously an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, “Non-Official Diplomacy in Southeast Asia: ‘Civil Society’ or ‘Civil Service’?” http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/387965/pdf - KSA)

Ostensibly, non-official diplomacy provides venues for "thinking the unthinkable", as it were. Members of the ASEAN-ISIS and CSCAP, for example, pride themselves on dealing with issues deemed sensitive or even taboo by governments and consequently excluded from the official diplomatic agenda. This is an equivocal claim at best, however. On one hand, it is arguable whether political-security issues are particularly sensitive in the light of the institutionalized and mostly bilateral security ties between ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) member states. Indeed, that ASEAN's very formation had to do with political-security rather than economic reasons (as originally mandated), has never been in doubt except for sceptics of ASEAN cooperation. On the other, the issue of human rights (that is, civil and political rights and freedoms) for ASEAN regimes (and, one suspects, for dominant sectors of civil society as well) clearly is; again, it was non-official diplomatic agents who evidently took the lead in encouraging a security dialogue on the matter, but arguably a "government-endorsed" dialogue (Hernandez 1994; Katsumata 2003; Kraft 2000). Nevertheless, that non-official diplomatic discourse seems almost always to gravitate to official positions only serves to highlight everpresent dispositions and practices at patrolling and taming aspects of discourse deemed radical, unruly, and hence potentially subversive to the state. To be sure, non-official channels of diplomacy also stand at risk of being relegated by states, which can either endorse or ignore the former depending on their preferences. In other words, non-official diplomacy is an arena in which raison d'état elements are incessantly at odds with anti-diplomatic elements such that the contemporary diplomatic culture of Southeast Asia today is partly defined by the "invasions and distortions" that threaten its very purposes (KeensSoper 1973).

Diplomacy inherently has power dynamics sequestered within it

Banks 11

(September, Daniel, PhD, Cofounder of DNAWorks, theatre director, choreographer, educator,dialogue facilitator directed at the National Theatre of Uganda (Kampala), the Belarussian National Drama Theatre (Minsk), The Market Theatre (Johannesburg, South Africa), the Hip Hop Theatre Festival (New York and Washington, D.C.), the Oval House (London), choreographer/movement director for productions at New York Shakespeare Festival/Shakespeare in the Park, Singapore Repertory Theatre, La Monnaie/De Munt (Brussels), Landestheater (Saltzburg), Aaron Davis Hall (Harlem), for Maurice Sendak/The Night Kitchen. Faculty member of the Department of Undergraduate Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and the MFA in Contemporary Performance at Naropa University, founder and director of the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative, advisor in the Gallatin School for Individualized Studies, on the Founding Board of the Hip Hop Education Center in the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education in the Steinhardt School, aculty of the M.A. in Applied Theatre at City University of NY, 2011 Ariane de Rothschild Fellow, recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Career Development Program for Directors, Co-Director of Theatre Without Borders, founding member of the Acting Together project in the Program for Peacebuilding and the Arts at Brandeis University, on the Editorial Board of No Passport Press, the Advisory Board of the Downtown Urban Arts Festival. Guest Lecturer at SUNY Stony Brook, University of California-Riverside, Stanford University, Brandeis University, University of Western Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Central Florida, and University of Florida-Gainesville, University of New Mexico, Rhodes College; ,Guest Artist at Williams College, City College of New York, Marymount Manhattan College, and National Theatre Conservatory, Denver., Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU. Author of "Unperforming 'Race': Strategies for Re-imagining Identity" in A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (edited by Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz, Routledge, 2006); "Youth Leading Youth: Hip Hop and Hiplife Theatre in Ghana and South Africa" in Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict, Vol 2, a project of the Coexistence Project, Brandeis University, and Theatre Without Borders (New Village Press); “The Question of Cultural Diplomacy: Acting Ethically,” Theatre Topics; “From Homer to Hip Hop: Orature and Griots, Ancient and Present,” Classical World; and “Re-Thinking Non-Traditional Casting,” Black Masks, Editor of Hip Hop Theatre plays Say Word!: Voices from Hip Hop Theater for the University of Michigan Press, “The Question of Cultural Diplomacy” http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/449851 - KSA)

The United States' history of intervention can complicate international work (see Adalet Garmiany ⁷ [Fig. 4]). Sometimes this presence is appreciated locally; other times it is unwelcome. As US-based "emissaries" of cultural diplomacy, we carry this history with us, whether we realize it or not. Therefore we need to plan responsibly, with an awareness of the multiple levels of meaning of our presence. Local participants are often not as helpless or disempowered as organizers and facilitators might think, or be led to think. There can be great cachet in a local participant aligning with a Western embassy or nongovernmental organization; while, in other circumstances, there are great risks. When working in Palestine with Jewish Israeli and Palestinian women, the women in Palestine asked that we never use their names or images or reveal the specific location in which we met, due to a fear of reprisals for attempting to bridge that particular cultural and economic divide. But until the playing field is leveled, as Roberto Varea ⁸ describes (Fig. 5), or at least more level, facilitators in situations of cultural diplomacy need to continue to practice the "critical consciousness" that Freire advocates. The dynamics of "the web" are complex and often misleading. As Levitow explains: "The cultural diplomats think they are using culture intentionally to influence others; and seldom consider that they are being used by those others in the context of local politics" (personal communication, 29 April 2011). Cultural diplomacy is often set up in ways that look like an organization or agency thinks it is in control of who is influencing whom; but inherent in this structure is a "level of presumption" (ibid.). Artists and organizations in these projects cannot afford to presume that there is no evolution involved in these relationships and power dynamics. It has long been the practice of disempowered groups to negotiate ways of manipulating entities with more political/ economic power and resources. I have met local artists and workers who have either participated or chosen not to participate in moments of cultural diplomacy and their webs of influence, especially if they are repeatedly selected as the "local informant" or safe participant. An artist-diplomat needs to consider and interrogate all these dynamics from moment to moment—making no assumptions about local contacts, participants, and colleagues—for circumstances can change very quickly.