ABSTRACT

In the previous chapters, the postcolonial Singaporean nation-state was first analysed as a central material and discursive site through which hegemonic codes of sexuality are produced. Although there are numerous ways to grasp state power over sexuality, I focused on the postcolonial state’s developmental project, its intersecting discourses on nationalism and sexuality, and its repressive practices against homosexuality in the law, in the media and in the public rhetoric of its postcolonial elites. But as repression is enforced and extended, so is resistance unequivocally engendered. The lobby against the male sodomy law in 2007 and the leadership tussle over lesbian issues in 2009 are two compelling events demonstrating evidence of a ‘reverse discourse’ in the very sites where strong social controls over homosexuality have been advanced. In the stateaffiliated media and among individual state actors, homosexuality has been acknowledged, if not legitimised, sometimes in the same language and rhetoric by which it has been disqualified. As the unfolding of these events demonstrated in the previous chapter, the state is characterised by an uneven set of discourses, apparatuses and institutions that serve to regulate and yet reinforce same-sex sexualities in Singapore. Examining the PAP’s legal discourses, its control over the media, and the various positionalities undertaken by its postcolonial elites towards homosexuality helped make apparent their multiple and contradictory scripts of sexuality. In the ensuing analysis, thus, the state was problematised as a unitary, coherent source of social enforcement producing hegemonic codes of sexuality with an immutable force. Unravelling the state enabled an analysis that threads through the gaps and contradictions between its institutions and agents. Indeed, as evident in previous chapters, the postcolonial Singapore state has at significant times tolerated, if not supported, the proliferation of differences from unruly sexual citizens. These re-conceptualisations of the state and state-sexuality relations help set the stage for this chapter, for it is through the fractures and interstices of multiple points of power that queer activism and lesbian activists emerge. Local queer scholarship has captured the growing visibility and contours of lesbian and gay communities in Singapore, as well as pointed to the apparent contradictions in the government’s methods of social control, noting for instance the ‘U-turns – ambivalent, schizophrenic, and unpredictable responses of the

government’ towards homosexuality (Tan and Lee 2007: 182). However, existing analyses have tended to view these contradictions as the result of ‘cautious liberalisation’ on the part of the government (Tan and Lee 2007: 183) or the ‘illiberal pragmatic’ governance of the state (Yue 2007: 105). By describing these state-directed effects in the absence of a re-formulation of state-sexuality relations, these analyses have only painted a picture of state power, lending it further strength. Thus, in Tan and Lee’s (2007: 183) analysis, no ‘real changes’ have been made to challenge the state’s authority over sexuality:

How far the government is willing to go at each juncture is largely a function of strategic calculations to maximise state power and, in materialistic Singapore, the economic gain required to transform this power into authority.