The politics of evidence: ‘Doing nothing’ about LGBT health inequities by the WHO

How is ‘nothing’ produced and justified, and how is it functioning? Here, I will take a multilateral debate in the World Health Organisation (WHO) over the issues regarding health inequities experienced by sexual and gender minorities as an example. This article asks what national delegates really mean when they blame on the lack of evidence? Observing the debates in the WHO and elsewhere, what certain national governments have been doing is to avoid – by not making anything happen – a potential formulation of future international pressure through global health policymaking and its normative discourse. Through deconstructing the discourse of a ‘lack of evidence’, I identify the socio-political functions of ignorance and ignoring. That is, they did nothing, not because they didn’t understand and care. Quite on the contrary, it was because they cared and knew too well that health is always political, and yet, it is not just the politics concerning knowledge production and media representation; it is also international politics

Decolonising and queering praxis: the unanswerable questions for ‘Queer Asia'

What does it mean by putting ‘Queer’ and ‘Asia’ together? This question –complicated by several concepts – arose many times at occasions of the Queer Asia 2017. Left with series of unanswerable questions, such as the presumption of nation/state, the discontent of sexual/national modernity, and the making of counterpublics, Queer Asia posts challenges for both queer theory and postcolonialism. The Conference participants have reified and (hopefully) resisted the White settler’s dilemma of desiring modernity without the West that has haunted most parts of the world in all aspects, needless to say the production and operationalisation of gender equality, sexual rights and all sorts of queer knowledge. This article, ruminating upon certain observations, reflects the ambivalences and intensions between people of diverse perceptions of modernisation and normalisation for or against queer existence. By elaborating on three main series of debates, I consider the importance of destabilising, by repeatedly questioning, the ‘concepts’ we are familiar with, although the ‘decolonial queer praxis’ is rather traumatising than entertaining

LGBT rights versus Asian values: de/re-constructing the universality of human rights

Law, especially from the international human rights regime, is a direct reference on which minority groups rely when it comes to ‘non-discrimination’. Drawing upon LGBT rights in Taiwan, as well as Hong Kong and Singapore, this article – through an application of K.H. Chen’s (2010) Asia as Method – critically reviews how global LGBT politics interact with local societies influenced by Confucianism. Along a perpetual competition between the universalism and cultural relativism of human rights, this article not only identifies the pitfalls of ‘Asian values’ from a cosmopolitan perspective but also contributes to a queered approach to human rights-holders against homonationalism

Undoing sovereignty/identity, queering the ‘international’: the politics of law

Recently the Yogyakarta Principles have celebrated their tenth anniversary; there has been widening acceptance across international organisations and increasingly corresponding state practices, and still, there is a need for a wider appreciation of such norms. It is argued here, simultaneously, it is necessary for queer methodology and critique to intervene in this developing field in both law and politics in order to relax the policing of identity upon a nationalised as well as gendered and sexualised body. Queer international law – echoing the advocacy of queer International Relations – targets the heteronormative idea of state sovereignty that is in itself patriarchal and paternalistic in normalising, or even discarding, the undesirable citizens. This essay, from the perspective that international law is a historical product reflecting the competition between powers at both domestic and international levels, attempts to draw attention to the importance of raising queer polyvocality in reframing the idea of the law of and between nation/states

The demagogies of ‘Lack’: The WHO’s ambivalence to the right to health of LGBT people

In May 2013, the World Health Organization (WHO) Secretariat produced its first-ever report regarding health issues related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in preparation for an agenda item of the 2013 WHO Executive Board (EB) meeting. The debate resulted in the removal of the item from the adopted agenda. Since then, LBGT health has never been brought up again. Drawing on the debate, there are three ‘lacks’ causing the deadlock in the WHO: (1) the lack of consensus between universalists and cultural relativists on implementing the right to health, (2) the lack of capacity of the WHO in addressing political controversies, and (3) the lack of evidence thwarting the claim for health justice for LGBT people. However, in this paper, I argue that it is the lack of globalism, in contrast to internationalism, that prevents the WHO from achieving the health-for-all goal. While the EB is authorized to determine the global health policy agenda by the WHO Constitution, its prioritization of national interests has made human rights protection rhetorical rather than obligatory. Combating such institutional obstacles to LGBT health, I conclude that it is urgent to promote the people-centered approach to global health governance by accommodating the ‘polyvocality’ of civil societies

Flow-based Intrinsic Curiosity Module

In this paper, we focus on a prediction-based novelty estimation strategy upon the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, and present a flow-based intrinsic curiosity module (FICM) to exploit the prediction errors from optical flow estimation as exploration bonuses. We propose the concept of leveraging motion features captured between consecutive observations to evaluate the novelty of observations in an environment. FICM encourages a DRL agent to explore observations with unfamiliar motion features, and requires only two consecutive frames to obtain sufficient information when estimating the novelty. We evaluate our method and compare it with a number of existing methods on multiple benchmark environments, including Atari games, Super Mario Bros., and ViZDoom. We demonstrate that FICM is favorable to tasks or environments featuring moving objects, which allow FICM to utilize the motion features between consecutive observations. We further ablatively analyze the encoding efficiency of FICM, and discuss its applicable domains comprehensively.Comment: The SOLE copyright holder is IJCAI (International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence), all rights reserved. The link is provided as follows: https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2020/28

How is ‘nothing’ produced and justified? International inaction in the face of the health disparities of sexual and gender minorities

This work considers ‘nothing’ and its effect upon the reproduction of ignorance and epistemic exclusion, by interrogating a decision to ‘do nothing’ made by the World Health Organisation (WHO). As a functional international organisation, its policymaking is enacted through the interplay and negotiation of scientific knowledge, international legality, and state will. In this context, the thesis contains two parts. In Part I, I look at the discussions between states over health inequities experienced by sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) from 2013 to 2016, which resulted in permanently deleting the agenda proposal in question. In Part II, drawing on and looking beyond the sociology of nothing and the sociology of ignorance, I propose normative and critical policy interventions into the discursive practices that have allowed such indecision and inaction to be justified. Therefore, this study demonstrates that nothing is productive, lending itself to a rhetorical use of sovereignty in order to circumvent a global response to SGM health injustices. This study identifies the complex power-knowledge nexus, particularly in a field in which legal, political and health discourses are competing for authority over policy legitimacy. In this respect, I employ ‘lack/lacking’ as an analytical concept in capturing the variable relationships between nothing (negative social phenomena) and ignorance (the limits of knowledge). In the current case, states have asserted something that is required/desired (e.g. interstate consensus, global definition, scientific evidence) is lacking, using this to justify the WHO’s inertia, which, however, has reinforced SGMs’ vulnerability across societies. Along with presenting the disappearance of that agenda proposal, I also presentify, based on the decolonial-queer praxis, a critical reimagining of what if another knowledge were/is possible. Taking ‘nothing happened’ as a point of departure for analysis, this study contributes to a better understanding of the production and functioning of ignorance, especially for the studies concerning multilateral policymaking such as international law and political sociology

The paradox of international law as the law of nations: the (re)production of refugee and statelessness

Considering the refugee crisis and statelessness around the world particularly in the Asian context, this article argues that, by interrogating the fundamental premise of international law as ‘the law of nations’, the repeated affirmation and representation of the relationship between a nation/state and its ‘people’ creates and self-justifies a series of relevant problematics. Drawing on a genealogy of the modern discourses with regard to ‘statehood’, on which one’s nationality and citizenship is established, the failure of contemporary international human rights and humanitarian legal regimes in addressing the rightless situations of refugees and stateless persons is, nonetheless, an intended product of the maintenance of the Westphalian style of sovereign equality. Beyond such a dystopian reading of the present, I consider – turning to Deleuzian nomadological ontology of ‘existence’ of sporadicalness, radicalness and contingency – the beings or becomings as refugees or stateless persons as resistance to the status quo of law, by transgressing the territorialisation of states and exposing the irresolution of post-Cold War liberal internationalism

The struggle for marriage equality and intimate citizenship: a field occupied by multiple hegemonic discourses

On 24 May 2017, the ROC Constitutional Court issued the J.Y. Interpretation No. 748, declaring part of Taiwan’s Civil Code, which prohibits same-sex marriage, unconstitutional. Suddenly, it seems that the marriage equality campaign has won and the decades-long tongzhi social movement is close to a conclusion: from demedicalisation, normalisation, anti-discrimination, to constitutional recognition of homosexual intimate citizenship. Starting with the Same-Sex Marriage case in question, this article considers what have made the equalisation of same-sex partnership possible and/or impossible in Taiwan, by critically analysing the contexts and contents of the Court’s decision, which potentially reinforced heterosexism. Thus, I propose to understand the process and outcome of Pro-Family Referendums from an agonistic perspective, arguing that, in this light, any attempt to ‘essentialise’ marriage/family and Taiwaneseness would harm Taiwan’s democracy. Through representing a pluralistic picture of ‘marriage equality’, this article also demonstrates that the struggle for intimate citizenship is located in a field in which multiple hegemonic discourses (e.g. legal, medical, political, cultural) coexist and compete with each other for authority. In this respect, our agency and reflexivity, as right advocates as well as tongzhi members, is an ethical question in that struggle