The Glocal Right Circuits: Mapping the Transnational Flows of Anti-LGBTQ Conservatism between Taiwan and the United States

This research tracks the development of the anti-LGBTQ (pro-family) movement in Taiwan and analyzes how American and Taiwanese conservative groups have built transnational connections through pan-religious networks to launch the “culture wars” locally and globally to maintain their dominance in moral regimes of family/marriage, gender, and sexualities. The study is based on my accumulative 23-month ethnography during Taiwan’s peaks of anti-LGBTQ campaigns in 2015–2020 and 104 in-depth interviews with leaders representing moral conservatism, moderate liberalism, and queer radicalism, as well as the content analyses of more than 200 relevant Christian books collected during the fieldwork. Research findings show that the global anti-LGBTQ conservatism has operated in five hermeneutic types of transnational processes: (1) Western Importing: It directly imports Euro-American sexual panic, “televangelical” materials, and global Pentecostal spirituality to shape Taiwan’s counterparts. (2) Asia-Manufacturing and Export-Processing: Euro-American-originated conservative elements are shipped to and processed in Asian neighbors before being exported to Taiwan as Asianized morality. (3) Anti-Queer Regionalism: Anti-LGBTQ ideology is essentialized as part of the imagined “Asian values” and circulated among four “Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore). (4) South-South conservatization: Anti-LGBTQ conservatisms from South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Russia are introduced to legitimize moral campaigns in East Asia. (5) Reverse Remittance: Taiwanese-Asian conservatives are not (only) passive recipients but also agentive in-between processors who proactively translate, assemble, invent, and (re)produce the glocalized anti-LGBTQ discourses and transport them back to influence the moral politics in Euro-American homelands. Based on the empirical findings, I coined the concept “glocal right circuits” to push forward the literature of global gender/sexualities studies and transnational religion-based movements by visualizing the typology of transnational conservative flows and bringing the “culture war” debates into the studies of cultural globalization and transnationalism and Queer Asias studies.