Speaker: Li-Li Chen (Lecturer, National University of Timor-Leste, Timor-Leste)

Title: Sexual Politics and Situated Agency in Timor-Leste: Rethinking Sexuality as Resistance

Moderator:  Kisho Tsuchiya (CSEAS)

Abstract: I examine how sexuality in Timor-Leste operates not only as an object of governance but also as a situated form of agency and resistance. Focusing on women and LGBT people in a small postcolonial, Catholic-majority society, I trace how colonial rule, church moralities, Indonesian occupation, and post-independence nation-building have sought to regulate bodies, desires, and intimate relations. Rather than treating sexuality simply as identity, sexual expression, or as a linear and progressive rights story, I analyze sexual practices, silences, and everyday negotiations as ways through which people navigate violence, economic precarity, kinship obligations, and state authority. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews, I foreground how micro- and everyday acts, such as choices of partnership, discretion, disclosure, mobility, and care, reconfigure power relations in families, communities, and institutions. In doing so, I argue that sexuality is a resistant form of agency that both emerges from, and subtly transforms, the gendered and colonial orders that shape contemporary Timor-Leste, and suggest how these insights can contribute to broader debates on sexual politics in global South contexts.

About the Speaker: Dr. Li-li Chen, lecturer, National University of Timor-Leste, is a Feminist International Relations scholar focused on Women, Peace, Security (WPS), border politics, and small-state geopolitics in Southeast Asia. Her research critically engages IR theory and policymaking through empirically grounded work in Timor-Leste and Southeast Asia, examining how global norms (e.g., UNSCR 1325, LGBT rights frameworks, geopolitics) are translated, contested, and experienced across different geopolitical contexts. Research interests include: (1) the intimate geopolitics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and U.S. geographic strategies in small postcolonial states; (2) gendered security, migration, and governance in borderlands under China–U.S.–ASEAN pressure; (3) feminist and critical approaches to sexual normativity and governance, with implications for understanding indigenous lifeworlds in postcolonial Asia. Theoretically grounded in critical engagements of IR theory, political geography, and security studies; and methodologically employing qualitative research (life stories, ethnography, interviews) combined with critical discourse and policy analysis. Ph.D. (Political Science), University of Florida, 2018.

Contact: obiya [at] cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp (please replace [at] with @)