Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Chua Beng Huat, Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. 

ABSTRACT

In the literature concerned with the globalization of gay identities, non-normative sexualities in Asia have come under increasing attention as evidence countering universalizing Western assumptions of what it means to be a global gay or lesbian. As part of this surge in regional sexuality scholarship, ethnographic monographs on female non-normative sexualities have appeared in Japan, India, Indonesia and Thailand for instance. But the case of Singapore has been significantly missing. By examining the cultural artefact of a Singaporean lesbian documentary, I suggest how taken-for-granted images of local middle-class lesbians can appear to be ‘just like’ the hegemonic Western queer, a thoroughly globalized version alienated from her indigenous region. Are ‘modern’, middle-class Singaporean lesbians merely another instantiation of the homogenizing global gay identity, and hence ineffective as material for an Asian queer critique? How might we understand the sexual specificity of women who love women in Singapore? I turn to postcolonial theory and feminist sexuality studies for conceptual tools to move beyond the edifice of problematic binaries such as global/local and modern/traditional underpinning persistent postulations of same-sex subjectivities as originating from, and oriented to, the imperial West. My aim is to resist the theoretical impulse to refer to antecedents in North America or Western Europe when thinking about same-sex sexualities in Singapore as this holds real-life implications for non-Western sexual subjects trying to live up to idealized images of what being gay means.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Shawna Tang is a postdoctoral fellow with the Cultural Studies cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She completed her PhD at the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney in May 2013 and is currently publishing from her dissertation titled ‘Re-queering lesbian women in Singapore: Towards a Postcolonial Study of Global Sexual Identities’. Her interest is in the convergence of postcolonial theory, critical feminist studies and queer theory in engaging questions of sexuality, gender, modernity, globalisation, state, citizenship and nationalism.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg