Lynette J Chua
Dr. Lynette J. Chua is a law and society scholar who specializes in legal mobilization, legal consciousness, and rights and resistance. She is Professor of Law and Vice Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. In addition, she is an Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Law & Society, a former President of the Asian Law & Society Association (2022-23), and co-director of the Training Initiative for Asian Law and Society Scholars (supported by a Henry Luce Foundation grant).
Dr. Chua has received multiple awards for her research and writing, including the 2024 International Prize of the Law & Society Association in recognition of her significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the field of law and society. She is the author of The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (2022), The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as A Way of Life (2019) and Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (2014). Additionally, she is the co-editor of The Asian Law & Society Reader (2023, with David Engel and Sida Liu), Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (2024, with Mark F. Massoud) and Contagion, Technology, and Law at the Limits (2024, with Jack Jin Gary Lee). She has also published in a wide range of journals and edited collections spanning law and society, constitutional law, political science, sociology, anthropology, and social policy.
Across her work, Dr. Chua explores questions about legal power, particularly whether and how differently situated social groups engage the law, how they experience legal power, and whether and how identities, social relationships, and legal institutions may or may not alter as a result of those interactions. At present, she is writing a book, Intimate Legalities (under contract with University of California Press), based on her qualitative, comparative study of maintenance of parents laws in Taiwan, China, and Vietnam that require adult children to provide financial support and, in some instances, emotional care, to their elderly parents. She is also conducting a research project called “Governing through Contagion” (with Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee), an ethnography of how colonial and contemporary Singaporean governments combat contagious diseases, how their strategies of control produced and emerged from a web of relationships among humans, creatures, and legal and other technologies, and how the interactions among humans, non-human creatures, and technologies produced disparate effects on differently situated populations.
Find out more about Dr. Chua's publications at: https://nus.academia.edu/LynetteChua
Dr. Chua has received multiple awards for her research and writing, including the 2024 International Prize of the Law & Society Association in recognition of her significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the field of law and society. She is the author of The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (2022), The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as A Way of Life (2019) and Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (2014). Additionally, she is the co-editor of The Asian Law & Society Reader (2023, with David Engel and Sida Liu), Out of Place: Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society (2024, with Mark F. Massoud) and Contagion, Technology, and Law at the Limits (2024, with Jack Jin Gary Lee). She has also published in a wide range of journals and edited collections spanning law and society, constitutional law, political science, sociology, anthropology, and social policy.
Across her work, Dr. Chua explores questions about legal power, particularly whether and how differently situated social groups engage the law, how they experience legal power, and whether and how identities, social relationships, and legal institutions may or may not alter as a result of those interactions. At present, she is writing a book, Intimate Legalities (under contract with University of California Press), based on her qualitative, comparative study of maintenance of parents laws in Taiwan, China, and Vietnam that require adult children to provide financial support and, in some instances, emotional care, to their elderly parents. She is also conducting a research project called “Governing through Contagion” (with Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee), an ethnography of how colonial and contemporary Singaporean governments combat contagious diseases, how their strategies of control produced and emerged from a web of relationships among humans, creatures, and legal and other technologies, and how the interactions among humans, non-human creatures, and technologies produced disparate effects on differently situated populations.
Find out more about Dr. Chua's publications at: https://nus.academia.edu/LynetteChua
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Books by Lynette J Chua
This open access book explores law, politics, and inequality in fights against infectious diseases. Guided by a theoretical framework called “governing through contagion”, the studies in this book analyse how past and present governments have tried to combat contagious diseases, such as the bubonic plague, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19.
They examine how these governments used law and other technologies, including waste management, mask-wearing, quarantine stations, house inspections, and the burning of entire neighbourhoods, to achieve their aims of protecting populations and ensuring productivity.
Although the studies recognise the power of the state, they simultaneously emphasise the active roles of technologies and creatures, drawing attention to the often-taken-for-granted workings of the non-human in public health governance. They also consider the implications of strategies of control on marginalised communities and democratic politics. Collectively, the studies in this book bring attention to the connections between COVID-19 responses by governments and their historical antecedents, shedding light on the role of capitalism, colonialism, and geopolitics in circulating contagions and the strategies used to control them.
Out of Place tells a new history of the field of law and society through the experiences and fieldwork of successful writers from populations that academia has historically marginalized. Encouraging collective and transparent self-reflection on positionality, the volume features scholars from around the world who share how their out-of-place positionalities influenced their research questions, data collection, analysis, and writing in law and society. From China to Colombia, India to Indonesia, Singapore to South Africa, and the United Kingdom to the United States, these experts record how they conducted their fieldwork, how their privileges and disadvantages impacted their training and research, and what they learned about the law in the process. As the global field of law and society becomes more diverse and an interest in identity grows, Out of Place is a call to embrace the power of positionality.
Publisher's site: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/asian-law-and-society-reader/5602784D3296142D39B10A76A051ED7A#fndtn-information
The first reader on Asian law and society scholarship, this book features reading selections from a wide range of Asian countries – East, South, Southeast and Central Asia – along with original commentaries by the three editors on the theoretical debates and research methods pertinent to the discipline. Organized by themes and topical areas, the reader enables scholars and students to break out of country-specific silos to make theoretical connections across national borders. It meets a growing demand for law and society materials in institutions and universities in Asia and around the world. It is written at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students as well as experienced researchers, and serves as a valuable teaching tool for courses focused on Asian law and society in law schools, area studies, history, religion, and social science fields such as sociology, anthropology, politics, government, and criminal justice.
In this monograph, I introduce the socio-legal study of politics of rights as the theoretical framework to understand rights in the culturally and politically diverse region of Southeast Asia. The politics of rights framework is empirically grounded and treats rights as social practices whereby rights’ meanings and implications emerge from being put into action or mobilised. I elaborate on the concepts underlying politics of rights and develop an analysis of rights in Southeast Asia using this framework. The analysis focusses on: what are the structural conditions that influence the emergence of rights mobilisation? How do people mobilise rights and what forms does rights mobilisation take? What are the consequences of rights mobilisation and how do we assess them? I hope that this view of politics of rights - from a Global South region and from the ground - can encourage more astute evaluations of the power of rights.
Check out the Table of Contents and Chapter Abstracts here: https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=28672&i=Contents.htm
On how to obtain an e-copy, contact the author directly.
[Book Description]
The Politics of Love in Myanmar offers an intimate ethnographic account of a group of LGBT activists before, during, and after Myanmar's post-2011 political transition. Lynette J. Chua explores how these activists devoted themselves to, and fell in love with, the practice of human rights and how 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—Chua details the vivid particulars of the LGBT activist experience founding a movement first among exiles and migrants and then in Myanmar's cities, towns, and countryside. 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 moved hearts and minds and crafted a transformative web of friendship, fellowship, and affection among queer Burmese. Chua's investigation provides crucial insights into the intersection of emotions and interpersonal relationships with law, rights, and social movements.
Chua tells this important story using in-depth interviews with gay activists, observations of the movement's activities-including "Pink Dot" events, where thousands of Singaporeans gather in annual celebrations of gay pride-movement documents, government statements, and media reports. She shows how activists deploy "pragmatic resistance" to gain visibility and support, tackle political norms that suppress dissent, and deal with police harassment, while avoiding direct confrontations with the law.
Mobilizing Gay Singapore also addresses how these brave, locally engaged citizens come out into the open as gay activists and expand and diversify their efforts in the global queer political movement.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Mobilizing Gay Rights under Authoritarianism
2. Legal Restrictions, Political Norms, and Being Gay in Singapore
3. Timorous Beginnings
4. Cyber Organizing
5. Transition
6. Coming Out
7. Mobilizing in the Open
8. Pragmatic Resistance, Law, and Social Movements
Appendix A: Research Design and Methods
Appendix B: Study Respondents: Singapore’s Gay Activists
Appendix C: Singapore’s Gay Movement Organizations and Major Events
Notes
References
Index
Journal Articles by Lynette J Chua
vaccination reveals: (i) GTC relies on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors in protecting populations against viral threats; law is essential but does not necessarily drive vaccination or other strategies of control and (ii) resistance to GTC, in which law plays an integral role, reinforces inequalities and
differentiated treatment, what we term endemic inter/dysconnectedness.
This article examines the relevance of the study of legal consciousness, particularly that of ordinary people, to constitutional interpretation. It draws on sociolegal scholarship to explain how empirically informed, ground-up research on legal consciousness can make important contributions to the study of constitutional law away from elite actors and formal political institutions. Statutes, regulations, and court opinions that restrict the exercise of constitutional rights, and political discourse that is averse or friendly to activism and rights claims are conditions that shape the legal consciousness of ordinary people—their willingness and ability to make constitutional claims of their own in the courts, as well as their self-perceptions, social interactions, and relationships. Constitutional interpretation by ordinary people—their legal consciousness—in turn influences the development of constitutional law as it is interpreted by courts and other branches of government. By studying the words, thoughts, feelings, and (non)actions of citizens as a means of revealing how they perceive, think, and behave toward the constitution, scholars can produce a different type of study about constitutional interpretation—one that emerges from the ground up. Adopting the approach of legal consciousness research can contribute much-needed empirical insights into typically normative debates in legal scholarship about constitutional legitimacy and developments.
collective litigation, in a non-liberal regime. It analyses the emergence
and development of collective litigation to challenge the constitutionality
of section 377A of the Penal Code, the law that criminalizes same-sex
sexual conduct in Singapore. The analysis focuses on the relational
dynamics of collective litigation and legal subjectivities of the social
actors involved, highlighting how social positions and strategic interests
shaped their interactions and decisions on litigation. While gay rights
activists emphasized their movement's collective interests when choosing
the appropriate case and lawyers, a movement outsider pursued
individual interests on behalf of a client. Due to their divergent social
positions and strategic interests, the two teams competed with each other
as they initiated two separate constitutional challenges. Tension between
the teams led to conflict with constituents of the gay rights movement and
influenced their relational dynamics with other parties.
of dissent and civil-political liberties, thus reinforcing the political status quo. We also find judicial review to be a scarcely utilized recourse. The article contributes to the study of law and courts, particularly administrative law in nonliberal regimes.
questions about citizenship and ethnic identity. How does one think about
citizenship and people’s negotiations with law in political-legal regimes that
do not subscribe to liberal democratic norms? This paper investigates how
law marginalizes the Burmese Chinese minority in Myanmar and the nature of
their legal participation. Since law asserts cultural power impacting the way
people think and behave, we engage with the concept of legal consciousness
to understand how perceptions of legal vulnerability shape political
subjectivity ambivalently. The paper highlights the spatial strategies and
everyday practices that the Burmese Chinese deploy to navigate oppressive
laws, but signals that internal social divisions and geopolitical considerations
deter collective action towards rights assertion. It argues that studying the
multiple sites and scales through which law is engaged contributes towards
recovering citizenship aspirations where engagement with power and
authority are articulated differently from Western norms.
research is rich with implications for the field. We welcome in particular the ways in which they have portrayed personhood as an ongoing construction and have highlighted its contingent relationship with the state. Building on these themes, we conclude the article with a plea for a more far-reaching engagement between Southeast Asian studies and law and society research.
Publication Date: Oct 2015
Publication Name: Asian Journal of Law & Society, Vol 2, No. 2
This open access book explores law, politics, and inequality in fights against infectious diseases. Guided by a theoretical framework called “governing through contagion”, the studies in this book analyse how past and present governments have tried to combat contagious diseases, such as the bubonic plague, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19.
They examine how these governments used law and other technologies, including waste management, mask-wearing, quarantine stations, house inspections, and the burning of entire neighbourhoods, to achieve their aims of protecting populations and ensuring productivity.
Although the studies recognise the power of the state, they simultaneously emphasise the active roles of technologies and creatures, drawing attention to the often-taken-for-granted workings of the non-human in public health governance. They also consider the implications of strategies of control on marginalised communities and democratic politics. Collectively, the studies in this book bring attention to the connections between COVID-19 responses by governments and their historical antecedents, shedding light on the role of capitalism, colonialism, and geopolitics in circulating contagions and the strategies used to control them.
Out of Place tells a new history of the field of law and society through the experiences and fieldwork of successful writers from populations that academia has historically marginalized. Encouraging collective and transparent self-reflection on positionality, the volume features scholars from around the world who share how their out-of-place positionalities influenced their research questions, data collection, analysis, and writing in law and society. From China to Colombia, India to Indonesia, Singapore to South Africa, and the United Kingdom to the United States, these experts record how they conducted their fieldwork, how their privileges and disadvantages impacted their training and research, and what they learned about the law in the process. As the global field of law and society becomes more diverse and an interest in identity grows, Out of Place is a call to embrace the power of positionality.
Publisher's site: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/asian-law-and-society-reader/5602784D3296142D39B10A76A051ED7A#fndtn-information
The first reader on Asian law and society scholarship, this book features reading selections from a wide range of Asian countries – East, South, Southeast and Central Asia – along with original commentaries by the three editors on the theoretical debates and research methods pertinent to the discipline. Organized by themes and topical areas, the reader enables scholars and students to break out of country-specific silos to make theoretical connections across national borders. It meets a growing demand for law and society materials in institutions and universities in Asia and around the world. It is written at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students as well as experienced researchers, and serves as a valuable teaching tool for courses focused on Asian law and society in law schools, area studies, history, religion, and social science fields such as sociology, anthropology, politics, government, and criminal justice.
In this monograph, I introduce the socio-legal study of politics of rights as the theoretical framework to understand rights in the culturally and politically diverse region of Southeast Asia. The politics of rights framework is empirically grounded and treats rights as social practices whereby rights’ meanings and implications emerge from being put into action or mobilised. I elaborate on the concepts underlying politics of rights and develop an analysis of rights in Southeast Asia using this framework. The analysis focusses on: what are the structural conditions that influence the emergence of rights mobilisation? How do people mobilise rights and what forms does rights mobilisation take? What are the consequences of rights mobilisation and how do we assess them? I hope that this view of politics of rights - from a Global South region and from the ground - can encourage more astute evaluations of the power of rights.
Check out the Table of Contents and Chapter Abstracts here: https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=28672&i=Contents.htm
On how to obtain an e-copy, contact the author directly.
[Book Description]
The Politics of Love in Myanmar offers an intimate ethnographic account of a group of LGBT activists before, during, and after Myanmar's post-2011 political transition. Lynette J. Chua explores how these activists devoted themselves to, and fell in love with, the practice of human rights and how 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—Chua details the vivid particulars of the LGBT activist experience founding a movement first among exiles and migrants and then in Myanmar's cities, towns, and countryside. 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 moved hearts and minds and crafted a transformative web of friendship, fellowship, and affection among queer Burmese. Chua's investigation provides crucial insights into the intersection of emotions and interpersonal relationships with law, rights, and social movements.
Chua tells this important story using in-depth interviews with gay activists, observations of the movement's activities-including "Pink Dot" events, where thousands of Singaporeans gather in annual celebrations of gay pride-movement documents, government statements, and media reports. She shows how activists deploy "pragmatic resistance" to gain visibility and support, tackle political norms that suppress dissent, and deal with police harassment, while avoiding direct confrontations with the law.
Mobilizing Gay Singapore also addresses how these brave, locally engaged citizens come out into the open as gay activists and expand and diversify their efforts in the global queer political movement.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Mobilizing Gay Rights under Authoritarianism
2. Legal Restrictions, Political Norms, and Being Gay in Singapore
3. Timorous Beginnings
4. Cyber Organizing
5. Transition
6. Coming Out
7. Mobilizing in the Open
8. Pragmatic Resistance, Law, and Social Movements
Appendix A: Research Design and Methods
Appendix B: Study Respondents: Singapore’s Gay Activists
Appendix C: Singapore’s Gay Movement Organizations and Major Events
Notes
References
Index
vaccination reveals: (i) GTC relies on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors in protecting populations against viral threats; law is essential but does not necessarily drive vaccination or other strategies of control and (ii) resistance to GTC, in which law plays an integral role, reinforces inequalities and
differentiated treatment, what we term endemic inter/dysconnectedness.
This article examines the relevance of the study of legal consciousness, particularly that of ordinary people, to constitutional interpretation. It draws on sociolegal scholarship to explain how empirically informed, ground-up research on legal consciousness can make important contributions to the study of constitutional law away from elite actors and formal political institutions. Statutes, regulations, and court opinions that restrict the exercise of constitutional rights, and political discourse that is averse or friendly to activism and rights claims are conditions that shape the legal consciousness of ordinary people—their willingness and ability to make constitutional claims of their own in the courts, as well as their self-perceptions, social interactions, and relationships. Constitutional interpretation by ordinary people—their legal consciousness—in turn influences the development of constitutional law as it is interpreted by courts and other branches of government. By studying the words, thoughts, feelings, and (non)actions of citizens as a means of revealing how they perceive, think, and behave toward the constitution, scholars can produce a different type of study about constitutional interpretation—one that emerges from the ground up. Adopting the approach of legal consciousness research can contribute much-needed empirical insights into typically normative debates in legal scholarship about constitutional legitimacy and developments.
collective litigation, in a non-liberal regime. It analyses the emergence
and development of collective litigation to challenge the constitutionality
of section 377A of the Penal Code, the law that criminalizes same-sex
sexual conduct in Singapore. The analysis focuses on the relational
dynamics of collective litigation and legal subjectivities of the social
actors involved, highlighting how social positions and strategic interests
shaped their interactions and decisions on litigation. While gay rights
activists emphasized their movement's collective interests when choosing
the appropriate case and lawyers, a movement outsider pursued
individual interests on behalf of a client. Due to their divergent social
positions and strategic interests, the two teams competed with each other
as they initiated two separate constitutional challenges. Tension between
the teams led to conflict with constituents of the gay rights movement and
influenced their relational dynamics with other parties.
of dissent and civil-political liberties, thus reinforcing the political status quo. We also find judicial review to be a scarcely utilized recourse. The article contributes to the study of law and courts, particularly administrative law in nonliberal regimes.
questions about citizenship and ethnic identity. How does one think about
citizenship and people’s negotiations with law in political-legal regimes that
do not subscribe to liberal democratic norms? This paper investigates how
law marginalizes the Burmese Chinese minority in Myanmar and the nature of
their legal participation. Since law asserts cultural power impacting the way
people think and behave, we engage with the concept of legal consciousness
to understand how perceptions of legal vulnerability shape political
subjectivity ambivalently. The paper highlights the spatial strategies and
everyday practices that the Burmese Chinese deploy to navigate oppressive
laws, but signals that internal social divisions and geopolitical considerations
deter collective action towards rights assertion. It argues that studying the
multiple sites and scales through which law is engaged contributes towards
recovering citizenship aspirations where engagement with power and
authority are articulated differently from Western norms.
research is rich with implications for the field. We welcome in particular the ways in which they have portrayed personhood as an ongoing construction and have highlighted its contingent relationship with the state. Building on these themes, we conclude the article with a plea for a more far-reaching engagement between Southeast Asian studies and law and society research.
Publication Date: Oct 2015
Publication Name: Asian Journal of Law & Society, Vol 2, No. 2
where rights mobilization has political legitimacy, exercising and claiming rights in the de facto one-party state are non-conformist behaviours and face greater limitations. Gay rights
activists in Singapore not only struggle with the state and their opponents over the right to equality; compared to their counterparts in liberal democracies, they also have to overcome
stronger restrictions on political access and civil-political liberties that enable or protect rights mobilization. This paper therefore describes and analyzes a politics of rights under authoritar-
ian conditions and the complicated consequences of legal resistance and rights mobilization. Although the petition campaign transformed collective grievances, expanded activists’ support base, and opened up new tactical possibilities, it also provoked intense, third-party opposition and foreclosed other avenues of mobilization.
(* Please note that Section 377 was subsequently repealed in 2007 but Section 377A remains.)
Conducting the research, finishing the final draft, and then reflecting on the research and writing processes, whether on a conference panel or in print, often feel like disjunctive exercises. By the time this series of commentaries is published, at least eight years would have passed since my first visit with LGBT rights activists of Myanmar. I have moved on to new projects and walked with other people in the field in other lands. Despite the seemingly disjointed phases of research, publication, and reflection, the key word in the title of this book, "love," threads all three together-my appreciation for everyone who gave me the privilege to know them a little in the course of fieldwork, and my love for what I do as a law-and-society scholar. Being fortunate enough to receive professional recognition for The Politics of Love, and having read the commentaries by David Engel, Amy Barrow, Hsiao-Tan Wang, and Nick Cheesman, I am moved by another kind of love: the warmth and endearment that fellow law-and-society scholars have expressed toward my labour for a good part of the past decade. In response, I want to highlight two themes that either surface from or lie beneath their generous commentaries. The first theme is what I call ongoing-ness-the feeling of instability and ever-change in law-and-society questions of power, justice, and subjectivity. The second is authenticity-of the researcher, her work, the people in her work, and how they approach discourses such as human rights.
(* This court decision concerns the procedural matter of standing. Subsequently, the Singapore High Court and Court of Appeal heard the substantive cases challenging Section 377A's constitutionality and upheld the law.)