Introduction

I watched the lesbian documentary Women Who Love Women: Conversations in Singapore (2006) for the first time, ironically, when I had just arrived in Sydney from Singapore. By July 2008, the documentary had made its rounds locally through a number of screenings at privately-organised venues: the Singapore International Film Festival, pride events, niche cinemas, lesbian and gay bars, and a local LGBT support group. Played to local sell-out crowds and described as a ‘quiet hit’ (Straits Times 2008a), the documentary also travelled to queer film festivals in Hong Kong, Berlin, Bali and Jogjakarta. Eventually, it was uploaded onto the internet, and made available for open viewing where I tuned in from almost 4,000 miles away. The documentary features three Singaporean women sharing openly about what it means to be lesbian. Directed in an interview format, the documentary captured the women lounging around in a large living room, seated in a designer home, leaning against closet doors, conversing casually about their ‘coming out’, their childhood, their relationships with family, friends and colleagues. In other words, the women do nothing but talk. The simple format was a deliberate strategy to convey ‘the story of their lives as honestly as I could’, explained director, Lim Mayling (quoted in the Straits Times 2008a). As it turns out, the simple approach proved to be the special appeal of the documentary. It received positive reviews for its ‘honest’ portrayal of lesbians in Singapore (see Tan 2008), and for preserving the ‘authenticity’ of the women’s experiences (see Ortmann 2008; Wei 2008). The film opens with each of the three women introducing themselves to the camera. The audience meets Swee Jean, 23 years old and ‘recently graduated’, Sabrina, a 38-year-old ‘lesbian living in Singapore’ and 22-year-old Amanda ‘working in communications’ (Women Who Love Women, henceforth WWLW 2006). All three are Chinese, college-educated and English-speaking, who spoke confidently and articulately. The opening scenes immediately reveal the women to be young, upwardly mobile, modern, cosmopolitan lesbians who are busy professionals, and ‘out and proud’ women who love travelling, photography and their pet cats. Thus, even though the film was meant to be ‘one of the few

documentaries ever made about lesbians in Singapore’ providing ‘a rare glimpse into lesbian lives in Singapore’ (WWLW 2007), the immediate images of these lesbian women are those we already find familiar, if not stereotypical. The women spoke at length about acceptance and self-love, and how they self-consciously worked at presenting positive representations of themselves as lesbian women. This involved maintaining long-term relationships with their partners. It also involved, curiously, an assertion of their womanhood even though two of the three protagonists appear ‘like a man’ or have been called ‘abang’1 as the women themselves disclosed. But ‘no way in hell’, said Swee Jean (WWLW 2006), ‘would I want to give up my femaleness’. Equally familiar with the American ‘lipstick lesbian’ as they are with the Western butch-femme categories, the masculine women seem to eschew gendered roles in favour of more egalitarian same-sex relationships. By denouncing their obvious masculinity, the women consolidate around an idealised ‘originary’ model of Euro-American lesbianism, repeating the position associated with lesbian feminist thinking: that lesbianism means women loving women minus the compromise of heterosexist mimicry, thus perhaps the title of the documentary Women Who Love Women. Despite its claims to novelty, reviewers found the film to be ‘pretty normal after all’ (Ortmann 2008), described the documentary as a ‘nice old blanket – comfortable and familiar’ (Peizhi 2007), wondered if ‘we will remember them?’ (Wei 2008), and wrote that the documentary will ‘not have brought anything new to the table in terms of the issues and struggles that the gay community has dealt with hitherto’ (Hsieh 2007). These responses to the documentary suggest that the women’s narratives and experiences, while honest and compelling on a personal level, were perhaps, in another way, not so novel. The women in fact remind us of our taken-for-granted impressions of homosexuals around the world: educated, well-travelled, seemingly wealthy, socially mobile individuals whose sexual orientation is a visible and antecedent aspect of their identity. Yet, the film is by no means regarded as unimportant. One common response is that the documentary provided not just a voice and a face for lesbian women (Peizhi 2007), but also ‘positive examples for lesbians in Singapore’ (Alicia 2007). This was certainly the intent of the protagonists who wanted to ‘pave the way’ (Amanda, quoted in an interview with Fridae.com 2007a) for other gay people to be ‘assimilated and accepted by society at large’ (Sabrina, quoted in Fridae.com 2007a). Implicit in these responses is the expectation for gay women to be honest and ‘come out’, put a voice and a face to their sexual leanings, overcome their struggles, and eventually triumph to become role models. This certainly seems to be the call of the documentary-makers who are members and supporters of the local gay community. Deploying a particular film technique unflinchingly focused on the women’s coming out stories, inserting inspirational quotes celebrating their decision to ‘live authentically’ (WWLW 2007), and reeling off spiels on the state’s statutory discrimination against sexual minorities, the techniques of the documentary production reinforced the politicised message these lesbians brought to bear on the big screen. The pathway to the development of lesbian consciousness and liberation portrayed

in the documentary is one clearly defined by a specific trajectory: coming to terms with one’s lesbian sexuality, coming out publicly and then confronting entrenched patterns of legal and cultural oppression in an ascending movement. Thus, reviewers concluded that the documentary showcased a ‘human portrayal of three women’s evolutionary process’ (Hsieh 2007, italics mine), and that the ‘real revelation’ of the documentary ‘is in showing once more how the homosexual experience (in coming out especially) is a journey on a path of liberation, self-discovery and universal character building’ (Ortmann 2008, italics mine). Conversely, a concealment of same-sex identity and desire implies self-alienation and inauthenticity (Seidman 2004). Overall, the tone and manner in which the documentary was produced and received was discernibly celebratory and selfcongratulatory on the arrival of ‘modern’ lesbian identities in Singapore. In an interview, the director Lim Mayling offered a vision for her documentary, that is, for it to ‘serve as a platform for others to build upon’ (quoted in an interview in Fridae.com 2007a). My work takes up this invitation in that it also focuses on the same sexual subjects: mainly middle-class lesbians who are in their twenties to forties, who are economically independent and educated, and who make up a visible part of the population of Singaporean women who love women. For this reason, the documentary is a useful prelude to ‘modern’ lesbian lives in Singapore. But this is not the reason I introduce the documentary. The cultural artefact of the documentary is for me both a starting point and also a point of departure for my study of female non-normative sexualities in postcolonial Singapore.