Benjamin Talarico
Colors Rainbow / Rainbow TV
Yangon, Myanmar
This isn’t your typical Yangon.
When I’m not at Colors Rainbow, I’m with a bunch of anthropologists and artists. We hang out at the art gallery, exchange ideas, drink tea, etc. Everyone’s insights stem from their particular area of expertise. One of them—a man who has researched Burmese Buddhism since the late ‘70s—explained the sociopolitical reasons for meditation’s popularity in socialist Burma while another—a local artist, the gallery owner—professed the virtues of anarchy and how all Burmese are anarchists at heart.
Another one, a Yale PhD student, whose advisor is the renowned anarchist anthropologist James Scott, discussed Aung San Suu Kyi’s empty “Rule of Law” talk: how it’s politically evasive, how politics happens “before and after the law,” and how we cannot wait for a broken legal system to improve in order for people’s grievances to be met. He advocates a “politics of the daily,” in which political opposition (the NLD, etc.) must “politicize Burmese masses and [civil society] through idioms that interface with CS’s material tasks…encouraging them to make, collectively, a series of non-adversarial demands” (Prasse-Freeman, 371). Rather than simply managing people’s needs—as much civil society tends to do—the opposition should harness latent political energy and channel it into quotidian acts that dramatize the state’s injustices. What’s appealing about this politics is that it moves from mitigating problems to opening up a space to address them directly, by those who are most affected. It removes politics from the elite rhetoric of rights and places it firmly in the hands of the masses.
And so I reflect on Colors Rainbow. Here, the “Rule of Law” is emphasized heavily, and one of the major goals of Colors Rainbow is to amend certain laws that criminalize LGBT people, particularly trans women. By focusing on the “Rule of Law,” we confine politics to the courts, to lawyers who become mediators between people and the state.
Might violence against LGBT people be linked to deeper structural problems that cannot be resolved through advocacy trainings or the amendment of laws? Even if Penal Code 377 is amended and every person dutifully undergoes sensitivity workshops, will that really transform the fact that trans women are vulnerable to sexual violence?
A human rights framework doesn’t help. The Colors Rainbow office is saturated in human rights literature, telling us that, indeed, we have the right not to be abused by the state, that “Love is love!” and that “Homosexuality isn’t a sickness, but homophobia is.”
USAID and other major development organizations encourage this talk—it is nonthreatening and it couches political rhetoric within an elite, centralized power structure, far removed from my friends’ quotidian lives.
More importantly, a human rights framework renders LGBT oppression all about identity, severing it from the context in which this abuse arises, foreclosing possibilities for a truly transformative politics, a politics of the daily.
The problem determines the solution. I’m not sure that we can think about LGBT rights without thinking about land rights abuses in Karen State or about the pipeline that CNPC built from Rakhine State to China. Surely trans women don’t benefit from these gross injustices.
What would LGBT activism look like within a politics of the daily?