“We Aren't Really That Different”

“We aren’t really that diferent” Globe-hopping discourse and queer rights in Singapore Robert Phillips Department of Anthropology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada Singapore is one of a few nations in Asia that has yet to decriminalize homo- sexuality yet has a queer scene that rivals other more liberal cosmopolitan centers. Since the introduction of the Internet into Singapore in 1994, queer Singaporeans have been exposed to a variety of regional and transnational discourses of sexual subjectivity and rights. In this article, I examine the ways that individuals and activists in Singapore reject the “globalization” of sexuality and instead create unique ways of speaking about queer rights. In the process, they are creating a rights movement that is beginning to fnd limited success. Keywords: discourse, queer rights, transnational sexualities, Singapore, coming out, returning home, tongzhi 1. Introduction One rainy evening in July of 2006, I sat at a large wooden table in a recently reno- vated shop house in the Little India section of Singapore. Te table was at the center of a large, almost empty, well-lit set of rooms that served as the writing space for Walter, a prominent queer1 Singaporean blogger, activist, and cultural critic. I had been reading Walter’s blog, which contained his outspoken views on the Singaporean government and its policies for the past few years and was ea- ger to interview him about the complicated relationships between queer activism and the Singaporean nation, relationships that were at the heart of my disserta- tion research. Before I had a chance to turn on my digital recorder, Walter asked me a question that I had heard many times since arriving in the city-state, “Why Singapore?” He was referring, of course, to the fact that I had chosen Singapore as the site of my research but more specifcally to the commonly held misconception Journal of Language and Sexuality 2:1 (2013), 122–144. doi 10.1075/jls.2.1.05phi issn 2211–3770 / e-issn 2211–3789 © John Benjamins Publishing Company “We aren’t really that diferent” 123 within the city-state that it is not a very interesting place. I told him that I was intrigued by the fact that Singapore is one of the few countries in Asia that has yet to decriminalize homosexual behaviour, yet has a queer scene (including bars, dance clubs, saunas, businesses, fashion outlets, and resource centers) that rivals other more liberal cosmopolitan centers both within and beyond Southeast Asia. He then mentioned that just a few years prior, some in the international press were writing of the potential of Singapore to become the new capital of “gay” Asia (Agence France-Press 2003). I replied to Walter, “Isn’t it interesting, though, that there are people out there who think that Singapore could become the new capital of “gay” Asia when Section 377A of the Penal Code still criminalizes private con- sensual sexual intercourse between adult men?”2 As our interview progressed, Walter began relating his own experiences as well as those of Singaporean friends who had visited queer meccas such as Sydney (for Mardi Gras), Taiwan (for Taiwan Pride) or San Francisco (for Gay Pride) and how these travels had afected their perceptions of queer issues at home. We then began feshing out the diferences between the types of queer activism that I, as an American, had been exposed to and those of Walter and his friends, who had been born and raised in Singapore. I had begun my activist career as a teenager protest- ing homophobia, violence against queers, and government inaction to the AIDS pandemic with groups such as Queer Nation and ACT UP. Walter, on the other hand, was raised in a nation in which an assembly of 5 or more people still requires a permit from the police — a move implemented by the government in an efort to maintain social stability in the young city-state. As such, many Singaporean activists, including Walter had never taken part in any type of organized protest, at least not in Singapore. Walter made sure that I understood that the types of civil disobedience employed by Queer Nation and ACT UP would never be tolerated in Singapore because, he said, “the Western model is based on individual autonomy, based on the language of rights which have made them very ill-suited for navigat- ing the political minefelds of Singapore. If you use that type of language, it just doesn’t work…” (emphasis mine). In fact the very notion of “gay rights” was seen by many of the queer Singaporeans with whom I interacted as a Western import,3 incompatible with Singapore’s conservative Confucian-infuenced culture. Walter lamented the fact that even in situations where queer Singaporeans were willing to attempt to organize protests, the legal roadblocks were overwhelming. During my own time in Singapore it was next to impossible to ob- tain a permit for something as relatively simple as screening a flm with queer themes. Walter noted that to further compound the difculties, Singapore is “a society where things don’t happen without permission… you have to fnd a way to get permission or approval whereas the Western model is quite the reverse… in spite of disapproval, Westerners say ‘this is my right,’ it’s that kind of rhetoric.” It is © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 124 Robert Phillips this Singaporean mindset — which revolves around pre-approval and permission from authorities that caused Walter so much frustration; on several occasions he likened these experiences to “banging (his) head against the wall.” Like my conversation with Walter, my interviews with other queer Singaporeans in 2006–2007 contained within them many compelling themes that spoke to the complicated relationships that exist between Singaporean queers, activism, and their nation. Te major themes in these conversations centered on the profound infuence of the Internet on queer subjectivity, the diferences between East and West and the corresponding rights discourses associated with these “regions,” and frustrations at gaining governmental permission for the most innocent of gather- ings. When I asked what they thought the most pragmatic and successful approach to gaining queer rights might entail, an overwhelming number of interlocutors gave responses which resonated with Walter who suggested that eforts should be focused on, “convincing our fellow Singaporeans that though we are queer, we aren’t really that diferent.” In this article, I examine these themes and I consider how queer rights activists and everyday queer Singaporeans deploy language in an attempt to convince their fellow citizens and their government that, as Walter suggests, queer Singaporeans “aren’t really that diferent.” I propose that some queer Singaporeans, through their interactions on the Internet, have been exposed to both western (or international) and regional discourses of queer rights and, as a result of local4 appropriation, have created a type of transnational “bricolage” — a product of the collapse of a set of already tenuous binary categories including east/west, in/out of the “closet,” and global/local. Tis new iteration of “rights” discourse has allowed them to fnd a unique way of speaking about queer rights and to subsequently create a queer rights movement that is beginning to fnd a limited success. In considering this success, it becomes important to think about how this language was produced in the frst place. To do so, I return to Walter’s frst question, “Why Singapore?” Besides the illiberal contradictions that shape the lifeworlds of everyday Singaporeans noted in the opening vignette, Singapore is of interest in that it can be imagined in a variety of ways including as “Disneyland5 with the death penalty” because of its perceived authoritarian leadership (Gibson 1993) or due to its lack of physical space and relatively recent history as an independent nation, what Marc Augé (1995) might categorize as a “non-place”. Singapore has also been described as “important node in international circuits of capital” (Chang, Huang & Savage 2004: 413), a description that I fnd particularly apt considering that Singapore has been at the intersection of global fows of people, capital, and information since its founding, through a long British colonial presence, a Japanese occupation, a short merger with neighbouring Malaysia, and fnally in its current position as an independent city-state that began in 1965. © 2013. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved “We aren’t really that diferent” 125 As Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd remind us, “transnational or neo-colonial capitalism, like colonialist capitalism before it, continues to produce sites of contradic- tion that are efects of its always uneven expansion but that cannot be subsumed by the logic of commodifcation itself” (Lowe & Lloyd 1997: 1). As such, in addi- tion to the universal rights discourses produced through transnational capitalism and global capital fows that fnd their way to Singapore, queer Singaporeans also interpret and draw upon a set of potentially conficting local sources of self-under- standing including Chinese diaspora, Singaporean nationalism, and global mo- dernity. Te queer rights discourse that is produced as a result of these interactions demonstrates how these queer subjects are both exposed to and concomitantly act as an integral part of various globalization processes. Recently, cultural theorists have tried to understand local appropriation and incorporation of apparently Western style concepts such as gay rights and various identity ideologies within the larger structures of new media technology, including the Internet, and late-capitalist fows of commodities and people. Much of this work assumed a “globalization of sexuality” (Binnie 2004) or “global queering” (Altman 1997) in which non-Western queer communities more or less “borrow” originally Western style identities and cultures.

Load more