Västerländska värden i vida världen?

Sammanfattning: The situation for the LGBT community is still problematic in many parts of the world. But maybe change is coming. This paper examines how the state leaders of Malaysia and Singapore speak publicly about gay rights in their own countries. To examine this I used quotes from newspaper articles about the situation in the respective countries. The analysis is made with two ideal types that have been constructed for this thesis. The first one is constructed with ideas from the west including ideas about globalization, individuality and the creative class. The second is based on ideas about Asian Values which includes conservative thoughts about the family and cultural relativism. This study finds that Singapore is largely influenced by ideas that can be traced to both the Asian Values discourse and modern ideas about individuality, especially in areas that concerns economic growth. Malaysia on the other hand strongly argues accordingly to the Asian Values discourse and often refers to the religious aspects of the country.