ABSTRACT
In an article in Singapore’s Today newspaper that profiled Lim Hwee Hua, the then junior minister, former managing director of Temasek Holdings, and mother-of-three was described as a ‘tough no-nonsense figure [who also] projects warmth and understanding, although in a cool-headed style . . . often seen in black pantsuits, [but nevertheless] a woman’s woman’. Lim was one of 17 women voted into a parliament of 84 members in GE2006. She was also among a very select few in the inner sanctum of the PAP. The newspaper quoted her as saying the ‘women of Singapore today have it so good – with access to education and employment opportunities – compared to their counterparts in the region’. In the article, Lim was positioned as a model of and spokesperson for the ideal Singapore woman: urging other women to follow her example of balancing the demands of family, career, and even public service. When she became leader of the PAP’s women’s wing, she chose the title of ‘chairman’ over ‘chairperson’ or ‘chairwoman’, but agreed after much deliberation to ‘madam deputy speaker’ when she was appointed the parliamentary post (‘Where are the women’, 18 December 2006). Even though Singapore’s constitution does not protect against gender discrimination, which can be observed in job advertising practices and immigration policies (Lyons, 2004: 27), the mainstream of Singapore women has not been overtly oppressed by a culture of physical violence or a system that denies them national resources for self-development and personal advancement. High-profile women like Lim are held up as evidence of Singapore’s gender-neutral meritocracy: if Lim and other ‘barrier-breaking’ women (Siu, 2000) can do it, then there is no reason why other Singapore women cannot; and Lim is even described in the article as being unsympathetic to women who complain about the problems of balancing family and career. And yet, it is precisely this method of showcasing success that conceals the gravely different experiences and life chances of women of other classes, ethnicities, sexual identities, and age groups, putting the blame for their ‘under-achievement’ squarely on their own shoulders. This showcasing of successful women also conceals how these women, in order to be taken seriously, may have had outwardly to disavow their ‘femininity’ and to demonstrate ‘manly’ attributes in order to succeed in fields traditionally
dominated and designed by men. Women entering the public sphere have to ‘exchange their role as not-men for that of like-men’ (Deutscher, 2002: 11). And yet, women – even in their advanced status – have had to provide an unthreatening reassurance of their femininity as defined by patriarchy. Today assured its readers that although the idealized Lim could be serious, rational, and resilient like men (and therefore should be admired and imitated by other women), readers should not have to worry because she was also warm, understanding, and a ‘woman’s woman’. In politics and the workplace, women like Lim Hwee Hua must negotiate an ambivalent space between behaving like a man in order to be taken seriously, and masquerading as feminine so as not to provoke the castration anxieties of their male peers. However, this ambivalence is unsatisfactory as it forces women to enter a man’s world with slightly bowed heads, speaking enough of a male voice to be admitted but not so deeply as to be regarded as a threat to male egos. Institutionally, differences in salary, benefits and entitlements, and promotion prospects – though apparently marginal in Singapore – do serve at least symbolically to put women in their place, attenuating any masculine anxieties. However, the media often manufactures news by capitalizing on these anxieties: erecting a resurgent male chauvinism as a response to the changing socio-economic circumstances that have enabled some women to ‘outperform’ their male counterparts, making them ‘lose face’ as it were. The media sometimes features stereotypes of selfish, materialistic, frivolous, demanding, and overlyWesternized Singapore women, and of Singapore men who respond by looking for brides from China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, where the women are thought to be more subservient and domesticated according to the Asian stereotype (Yap, 2005). In the early 1980s, then-PM LKY (1983) publicly wondered about the wisdom of giving women opportunities in the workplace, noting how the more educated women were not getting married and having children, and how Singapore men were only willing to marry women of lower status. Influenced by vulgarized and pseudo-scientific ideas about eugenics, Lee’s government attempted to address the problem of optimizing the gene pool through ‘antenatal streaming’ policies that materially rewarded graduate mothers who bore more children and less educated mothers who opted to be sterilized (Tremewan, 1994: 114-17). These policies have evolved over the decades into more politically correct pro-family incentives, the idea of the family officially enshrined as one of Singapore’s five ‘shared values’. But the Today article also revealed how Singapore women were still being viewed as primarily responsible for reproducing the nation, their bodies as machines for producing the future workforce that was so vital for an island-state with a small and ageing population, a seriously declining birth rate, and no natural resources. And yet, women’s concerns do not seem to merit serious national attention: when PAP MP Lily Neo asked if Singaporeans could be allowed to use their own compulsory savings fund to pay for breast cancer screening, the health minister refused, trivializing the proposal with a suggestion to women to ‘save on one hairdo and use the money for breast
screening’. This remark, some women’s groups felt, suggested ‘that women were frivolous with money and did not make rational choices’ (Wong, 2001). Compulsory military service, on the other hand, is restricted to male Singaporeans who are then honoured and compensated for their sacrifice to the nation. To raise the quality of family life, efforts have been made in the civil service – Singapore’s largest employer – to strike a healthier work-life balance for its employees; and yet the provision of a 16-week maternity leave period is hardly matched by one week (in some cases up to two weeks) of paternity leave. After all, even Singapore women like Lim seem to have such low expectations of husbands and fathers. By commending Singapore men for being increasingly willing to ‘help out with the chores at home . . . push strollers and . . . feed babies as a matter of course’, Lim unfortunately reinforces the patriarchal view of fathering as simply a ‘helping-out-with-the-family’ role. Modern patriarchal societies like Singapore are the main objects of critique for radical feminist theorists who often identify, in order to discredit, a phallogocentric culture or ideology that sustains and at the same time obscures and embeds institutions and practices of domination. One such feminist theorist is Luce Irigaray, whose earlier works (especially 1985a, 1985b, and 1993) attempt to theorize phallogocentrism as a ‘monosexual imaginary’ (Whitford, 1991: 72) centred on masculinity as the singular model that defines and constructs all other subjectivities, the feminine in particular. Immanent to phallogocentrism, woman is reduced to being the ‘negative elaboration of the masculine subject’ (Butler, 1990: 140), serving as ‘negative mirrors sustaining masculine identity’ (Deutscher, 2002: 11) and the ‘material support of male narcissism’ (Whitford, 1991: 72). In this binary operation in which woman’s otherness is a product of man’s ‘self-amplifying desire’ (Butler, 1990: 16), ‘man is the Universal, while woman is contingent, particular, and deficient’ (Hansen, 2000: 202). Man is rational and disciplined; woman, viewed as ‘an atrophy or lack of masculine qualities’, is therefore none of these (Deutscher, 2002: 11). Singapore’s patriarchal society has, through its phallogocentric ideology, constructed a basic image of its women as selfish, materialistic, frivolous, demanding, and excessive, an image that is simply the negative elaboration of the masculine subject, constructed in support of male narcissism. Counterpoised against this would seem to be the mass-mediated ‘manly’ image of Lim Hwee Hua; but this is also constructed by and within this same phallogocentric ideology that, in this case, uses her to reaffirm the desirability of manly attributes without allowing her to be a female threat to male dominance, by presenting her as only a partial embodiment of these attributes. In similar ways, the basic image of society – or civil society, its organized form – has been constructed as selfish, materialistic, frivolous, demanding, and excessive, an image that is simply the negative elaboration of the masculine (in fact, machomeritocratic) state, constructed in support of the state’s narcissism. This phallogocentric ideology ‘legitimizes’ civil society by constructing its image – like the image of Lim Hwee Hua in Today – to reaffirm the manly attributes of the state (disciplined, serious, meritocratic, rational, pragmatic, technical, universalistic,
and so on) without being a threat to its dominance, since it is only a partial embodiment of the state’s attributes. Once again, this ambivalence is unsatisfactory as it forces civil society to speak enough of the state’s voice to be admitted legitimately into the public sphere, but not so deeply as to be regarded as a threat to the state’s ego.
