The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life, Lynette J. Chua

We begin with rights adaptation, a common tactic whereby the chosen discourse of rights is unfamiliar to the people whom mobilizers hope to convince or otherwise engage. In her book, Human Rights and Gender Violence (2006), Sally Engle Merry describes such adaptation processes as translation and vernacularization.

Before LGBT activists can galvanize queer Burmese to fight for human rights together, they have to first empower them. And to do that, they have to change the way queer Burmese feel about themselves, so that they abandon feeling rules built on inferiority, stigmatization, and resignation.

Changing self-understanding entails, first and foremost, making human rights resonate with queer Burmese. Although Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's most famous pro-democracy activist and leader, advocated for human rights in her speeches and writings, ordinary Burmese in Myanmar had little access to human rights discourse during military rule. The move­ment's founding and recruitment stories in the previous chapter show how human rights activism was suppressed. Before joining the LGBT movement, Pyae Soe had not heard of Aung San Suu Kyi. Nor did he realize what was wrong with the forced portering and labor that he and his family experienced in their village. Those incidents were simply part of their lives, the way things had always been. Tin Hla did not understand the r988 protests or its after­math. Most Burmese like him were unfamiliar with, even fearful of, human rights.

But LGBT activists have a rich cultural schema: the suffering of queers and other ordinary Burmese: “Our people know human rights from their suffering....

To make human rights relevant, LGBT activists evoke the emotional power of suffering. Emotions such as pain, fear, and despair are the antithesis of having human dignity, lu gone theit khar, a central tenet of human rights to LGBT activists. Hence, in Tun Tun's words above, Burmese people under­stand human rights by feeling what it is like to live in their absence. When queer Burmese experience the pangs of suffering, they lose human dignity, robbed by the violations of human rights. Although LGBT activists are informed by the UDHR, such as Article ι's reference to the equal entitlement of human beings to dignity, by “human rights violations,” they do not mean claims according to the formal standards of international law. Rather, they mean human rights offer queers and other Burmese what they are deprived of, which has caused them to feel the emotions of suffering. [...]

Although he was shouting for “human rights” during the 1988 protests, Tun Tun admitted he did not really understand what that meant at the time. After joining the rebel army, in “jungle university” along the Myanmar-Thailand border, he came across a UDHR booklet donated by an international organ­ization to their camp library. “I started reading [the booklet] and compared it with the life in Burma. We don't have human rights, but we have violations of human rights [laughs]!”

While LGBT activists do not delve into major events of political oppression at every workshop, they usually encourage participants to share their encoun­ters with oppression to summon the emotional power of suffering.

Having evoked the emotional power of suffering, associating queer suffering with the absence of dignity, and construing it as the result of human rights violations, LGBT activists ask these fellow Burmese to imagine the opposite: what enjoying dignity and thus human rights would feel like when they are free from the pain of abuse, feel safe, and experience joy and happiness. Pyae Soe and other activists link the stories that workshop participants share to the UDHR (and sometimes the Yogyakarta Principles) to explain what it entails to have human rights. They take participants through the clauses in these international documents, which provide for rights to equality, life, personal security, fair trial, and education and illustrate them with relevant grievances mentioned in participants' stories.

From Shame to Blame: Shedding Negative Feeling Rules

By characterizing their suffering as human rights violations, LGBT activists try to help queer Burmese shed negative feeling rules, another necessary step to transform self-understanding. Steeped in stigmatization, feelings of inferiority, and resignation, negative feeling rules breed self-hatred, shame, and fear of being queer. Therefore, LGBT activists urge queer Burmese to jettison the internalized beliefs about karma to which Yamin referred earlier - that is, people are reborn queer due to bad karma from past lives and are expected to endure ill treatment and low social status. They remind them that prejudicial norms, state laws, authorities who abuse power, and other social actors are to blame for the pain, fear, and despair they feel. Their suffering should not be accepted or explained away on the basis of bad karma, for they are the fault of these other people and conditions, which violate their rights and human dignity.

LGBT activists explain that queers deserve human rights, just like everyone else. They again call upon human rights' promise of dignity. They point to human rights documents, such as the UDHR and Yogyakarta Principles, to persuade queer Burmese they are not inferior but are worthy of human dignity, regardless of their sexuality or gender and regardless of their past. In workshops and interviews, activists ranging from long-time VIVID leaders to new grassroots organizers consistently stress that LGBT rights are the same as human rights and that they are asking for the same treatment.

The appreciation of human dignity - and thus human rights - by LGBT activists contains the meaning of a transformed sense of self as someone as deserving as other human beings. Chan Thar, like many others who recounted their experiences to me, described his amazement and wonder: “I felt like I was in a foreign country, seeing all the new things....

It would be easy to read LGBT activists' interpretation as a demand for the rights of LGBT persons to be recognized as human rights, akin to the efforts of international activists in the early 1990s. However, I find that it carries the much more significant meaning that queer people are equally deserving of rights. This meaning cannot be taken for granted in the Burmese context, for LGBT activists have to counter entrenched beliefs about karma and the related views on social hierarchy. I was particularly struck by the observations and interviews that contain statements along the following lines. At the movement meeting before IDAHO 2013, Tun Tun asked grassroots organ­izers how they would explain to local media the slogan for the event, “LGBT Rights Are Human Rights.” Gyo Kyar, one of the earliest grassroots organizers, stood up and said, “We are all human beings, so there should not be discrim­ination of LGBT people.” When asked what he had learned about human rights, Min Min, a grassroots organizer who joined in 2013-2014, answered, “We are equal like other human beings. And we being like this doesn't mean that we are lower than other people.”

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