ABSTRACT
Same-sex sexual acts became headline news in Malaysia in 1998 when the then deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, was deposed and charged with sodomy. The contestation over the potential for sexual citizenship in the public is therefore crucial for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgenders (LGBT) in Malaysia in the way they imagine their place within the nation. Sexual citizenship is not a single theory, but a lens through which to collate various conflicting frameworks through which marginalised sexual subjects demand the rights of full citizenship. As the Malaysian government deployed anti-colonial discourse to demonise LGBTs as traitors to the nation, sexual rights activists responded by bolstering our citizenship claims with a range of norms from international frameworks, local human rights bodies and the federal constitution. Incited by the discourse of the same sexual epistemologies, some Malaysian gays found themselves part of a political debate which they felt compelled to resist.
