This article examines the interplay between homophobia and nationalism by analyzing online comments on the ruling of legalizing same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Drawing on methods from critical discourse analysis, I focus on the framing of this ruling by members from a Chinese antigay community online. I show that they frame this ruling as (1) in opposition to public opinion, (2) promoting ‘Westernization’ and ‘Independence’, (3) seeking immorality and self-destruction. I find that within these frames, they evoke nationalist discourses that represent (...) supporters of this ruling as the ‘Other’ who attempt to split with China, thereby associating LGBT equality movements in China with this political threat. I argue that these nationalist discourses are used in a way that reinforces and legitimizes discourses of homophobia. (shrink)

In this paper I refute the chief arguments for cultural relativism, meaning the moral (not the descriptive) theory that goes by that name. In doing this I walk some oft-trodden paths, but I also break new ones. For instance, I take unusual pains to produce an adequate formulation of cultural relativism, and I distinguish that thesis from the relativism of present-day anthropologists, with which it is often conflated. In addition, I address not one or two, but eleven arguments for cultural (...) relativism, many of which contribute to its popularity but receive scant attention from its critics. To elicit the failings of these arguments I deploy a host of pertinent but often neglected distinctions. (shrink)

Recent critical approaches on human rights have exalted the potentiality of this category for seeking progressive agendas insofar as they are enacted within counter-hegemonic cognitive frames towards the construction of “subaltern human rights”. Others, however, have pointed out that the human rights institutional and political hegemony makes other valuable emancipatory strategies less available, and that this foregrounds problems of participation and procedure at the expense of distribution. Finally, others have explained how the abstractedness of the category entails a de-politicization or (...) an emptiness that, of course, can be filled by progressive activism, but whose substance is easily reappropriated by those in power. By engaging with the above-mentioned perspectives, and following the decolonial approach, I suggest that the category human rights can be decolonized and being used for progressive agendas only after a comprehensive critique of liberal legality has been performed. (shrink)