Lynette Chua ’03 receives Honourable Mention for Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award

Associate Professor Lynette Chua ’03 will receive the Honourable Mention for the 2019 Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award by the Human Rights Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for her book, The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford University Press). This honour recognises research that demonstrates thoughtful, competent, and innovative analysis of a theoretical or empirical issue germane to the sociological study of human rights. The award ceremony will be held in August 2019 during the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting.

The Politics of Love in Myanmar is an ethnographic study of how activists practice human rights, particularly how they interact with and produce emotions and interpersonal relationships as they put human rights into action to build a social movement. By offering an intimate account of a group of LGBT activists before, during, and after Myanmar’s post-2011 political transition, Lynette explores how as these activists devoted themselves to, and fell in love with, the practice of human rights, they were able to empower queer Burmese to accept themselves, gain social belonging, and reform discriminatory legislation and law enforcement. Informed by interviews with activists from all walks of life—city dwellers, villagers, political dissidents, children of military families, wage laborers, shopkeepers, beauticians, spirit mediums, lawyers, students—Lynette details the vivid particulars of the LGBT activist experience founding a movement first among exiles and migrants along the border and then into Myanmar’s cities, small towns, and countryside. She finds that a distinct political and emotional culture of activism took shape, fusing shared emotions and cultural bearings with legal and political ideas about human rights. For this network of activists, human rights can move hearts and minds, and sew a transformative web of friendship, fellowship, and affection among queer Burmese across Myanmar. The results are crucial, and actionable, insights into the intersection of emotions and interpersonal relationships with law, rights, and social movements.

Lynette is also the author of Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (Temple University Press, 2014), which was awarded the 2015 Distinguished Book Award by the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA).