Benjamin Talarico
Colors Rainbow / Rainbow TV
Yangon, Myanmar
Hello. I am a third-year undergraduate at Gallatin concentrating in the Culture of Neoliberalism. This summer, I will intern at Colors Rainbow, an organization that has been working on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights in Yangon, Myanmar, since 2008. Colors Rainbow focuses mainly on repealing Penal Code 377, an anti-sodomy law instituted by the British. I will work primarily on their publication, Rainbow Magazine, and I will draft and edit reports concerning LGBT rights throughout the country as well.
My desire to understand LGBT rights in Myanmar stems from the extensive time I spent in Southeast Asia during my gap year between high school and college. While there, I became increasingly interested in global economic inequality. While working for an international development NGO in Cambodia, I read a book entitled Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins—a damning account of the World Bank and USAID and their policies towards developing nations. While reading Perkins’s book, I realized that I was embedded in these very systems of inequality at the NGO.
I promptly left.
As I moved about the region, I grew troubled by the tourist gaze—a search for the “authentic” and “traditional”—because I felt that these ways of seeing reproduced colonial tropes of the Other. In response, I became interested in narratives of globalization. What does “globalization” mean to people in the Global South? How do globalizing processes change the way they see themselves? How do workers in the tourist industry perceive themselves in relation to tourists, and how do they perceive the “culture” they are supposedly arbitrating? Because globalization is either demonized (a la Naomi Klein or Vandana Shiva) or valorized (a la Thomas Friedman), I wanted to develop a more nuanced perspective.
After taking Professor Ritty Lukose’s “Globalization: Promises and Discontents,” I refocused my questions. I became interested in global identity-based movements. One question I had was, what political opportunities do globalizing processes present to people involved in these movements? How do global mechanisms change the way they perceive themselves? Who gets included? Who gets excluded?
These questions led me to Colors Rainbow. I first interned there in the summer of 2013. Myanmar had long interested me; it was a country undergoing a so-called “transition,” and at the time, there was still much optimism about its political trajectory. During the three months I spent in Yangon, I made close friendships with my colleagues and had the privilege of participating in the exciting, dynamic world of LGBT activism.
This summer, I hope to use my strengths as a writer and researcher to contribute to Colors Rainbow and to learn from them what it is to be an activist in today’s Myanmar.