ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Ong reproduces a rhetoric of agony that spurs queer bodies toward a search for salvific, worthwhile vicarious atonement. Shame, the homunculus at play, turns queer bodies, “others” to the transcendental person, inward, purgatorial, biohazardous, autoimmune, fast-living, for self-erasure. The impossibility of transcendence continually gives such oppression life, an obstruction of queer lives to consummate charism. Perhaps a journey on borrowed time is a Dionysian banquet made of messy, scary “impermanences” arcing across life after definitions of sacred/profane, wholeness/sin, rapture/abandonment, hope/loss. This chapter uses Singapore for illustration.
