ABSTRACT
In the Singaporean lesbian documentary (WWLW 2006), in popular opinion, in journalistic writing such as in The Economist, and in initial academic analyses, it is remarkably obvious how Western traits have been interpolated into the global space as the reified global queer. What requires attention in the global gay domain, therefore, are the asymmetric relations between the Western and nonWestern queer. Although one-sided Western understandings of global sexual identities have been taken for granted as what being gay means – evident in the construction and commodification of idealised Western queer images circulating in the multiple spheres of the economy, queer politics and popular culture – my intervention is in the intellectual domain. I argue that re-conceptualising the relations of global sexual identities allows us to capture the specificity, authenticity and legitimacy of same-sex identities outside the West, including that of Singapore’s. This is the theoretical task of this chapter. How do we think about global same-sex identities? Particularly, how do we think about the specificity of same-sex identities and practices in Singapore? This chapter is divided into two sections dealing with the conceptualisation of global queering. In the first section, I explore the genealogy and contours of the global gay domain, which I have identified as being over-determinately queered in an Anglo-American way. The global gay domain is dominated by the assumption of a universalising global gay identity, produced most notably in Altman’s (1996a, 1996b, 1997) influential writings. As it was Altman who arguably sparked intellectual interest and debate in the rise of a universal gay identity – embodied in an ‘international gay/lesbian’ (2001: 86) subject whom I refer to as the ‘global gay’ in this book – I trace the genealogy of the global gay in Altman’s account. Then I turn to two pioneering works attempting to articulate the specificity and legitimacy of ‘other’ same-sex identities and communities in the face of this dominating global gay identity. These contestations form the contours of the global gay domain and constitute the first-generation studies of global queer identities. Revisiting these contestations clears conceptual space for a deeper theoretical engagement. Through an analysis of these early scholarships, I propose an elementary framework capturing their teleological and cartographic logics and attendant binaries, which I argue are premised on the idea of sameness and
difference to the West, and do very little to advance our understandings of the specificity of non-Western sexual identities and practices, including Singapore’s. The task in this first section of the chapter is to elaborate on this theoretical problematic. In the second section, I advance postcolonial theory as a means to overcome the entrenched logics and binaries within the global gay domain. I specify how a broad postcolonial approach will be applied in this study. I also argue that the extension of a postcolonial perspective into global sexuality studies re-orients existing analyses of global gay identities in a way that accounts for ‘modern’, non-Western same-sex subjectivities, including those of Singaporean lesbians. This chapter demonstrates that a postcolonial perspective is pivotal in grasping how modern queer subjects, such as lesbians in Singapore, are located and formed. Thus, in positing a postcolonial approach, I seek to turn the problematic of locating lesbian Singaporeans into a demonstration of how this enables us to rethink the asymmetric relationship of the non-Western queer and the Western global gay. As mentioned before, I turn specifically to two related postcolonial conceptual processes, that of ‘hybridisation’, drawn from and already deployed in emergent ‘postcolonial LGQ studies’ (Boellstorff 1999: 478) and ‘transnational’ sexualities, drawn from the ‘transnational turn’ (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999: 439) in feminist queer studies. These constitute a second generation of scholarships more attuned to the inequities of globalising same-sex identities. Although global queer identities have already been theorised as ‘hybrid’ and ‘transnational’, certain misconceptions in the literature suggest that these concepts remain under-theorised and not fully understood. Thus in this chapter, I attend to the postcolonial processes of ‘hybridisation’ and ‘transnationality’, elaborating on, and incorporating in, these concepts a material dimension so that they capture the historical development of same-sex subjectivities in Singapore. I argue that combining these two conceptual processes in a revitalised postcolonial framework directly dismantles the particular temporal and cartographic binaries which have underpinned and hindered understandings of same-sex desires outside the West.
