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I. INTRODUCTION
Opposite the United Nations compound in Beijing, graffiti and engravings cover the curbs, benches, and pavements. They were authored by wandering petitioners, usually coming from other provinces in China, who appealed to the United Nations as their last resort against local and national authorities. Ignored by the United Nations, they left their appeals inscribed on the landscape in Beijing's diplomatic district. These appeals, read by United Nations workers during their lunch break or on their way home, are mostly accounts and histories of their personal sufferings and struggles. On the other side of the gate, in the human rights conferences at the United Nations compound, formal representatives from the marginalized communities discuss the issues that are allowed, legitimatized, and sponsored in the United Nations working agenda. Despite the irony and contrasting inequality here, the United Nations-recognized narrators also speak of personal accounts of sufferings with strikingly similar plot lines to those of the petitioners, where everyday lives are disrupted and destroyed by structural injustices and repressions. How do personal stories, despite contrasting and different venues, become the dominant format in human rights advocacy and norm translation?
This article looks into this question through the contested norm of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights.1 Drawing on debates in contemporary political philosophy, I first examine the relationship between human rights and storytelling, and how the latter is used as evidence, tools of mobilization, and means of localizing the global normative packages. Moving on to the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) project Being LGBT in Asia, the first United Nations initiative addressing LGBT rights in the region, the article draws on the original materials collected through semi-structured interviews with United Nations officials and civil society activists and participant observation at the UNDP China office. In doing so, the article traces the ways in which personal stories are chosen and build two major arguments. First, instead of training and empowering the narrators, norm translators focus on the selection and organization of typical stories in order to highlight structural restraints in defined areas and justify normative changes. Second, instead of replacing or reframing the local norm, the selected personal stories maintain the centrality of individuals in human rights advocacy, while redefining and shifting the...