Digital Governance, Human Rights Norms, and ASEAN: Sexuality and Gender Rights Meet Surveillance, Networks, and Data

The international human rights regime has in recent years seen remarkable change in relation to matters of sexuality and gender identity. Most recently, the UN has appointed an Independent Expert in this area; many other regional and national human rights regimes have seen similar developments. Scholarly engagement with these and related developments has used sexuality politics as a lens for international analysis, leading to innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical literatures in a critical vein, tracing how sexual norms and logics are imbricated in the exercise of international power. This chapter will apply those literatures to the question of digital governance within human rights regimes. With a regional focus on ASEAN, the paper will trace a research agenda produced by examining the (actual and potential) impact of digital governance techniques and practices on the lives of individuals and groups within sexuality and gender diverse populations. Queer analytics are applied to digital governance in rights research, advocacy, compliance, data management, risk, accountability, and political economy, to tease out practices of political formation and the ways in which digital governance interacts with questions of normality, contingency, and normativity.