Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures
Author(s): Audrey Zubillaga–pow (Author), Audrey Yue (Author), Jun Zubillaga–pow (Author)
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Publication Date: 20 Nov. 2012
Language: English
Print length: 268 pages
ISBN-10: 9888139339
ISBN-13: 9789888139330
Book Description
Singapore remains one of the few countries in Asia that has yet to decriminalise homosexuality. Yet it has also been hailed by many as one of the emerging gay capitals of Asia. This book accounts for the rise of mediated queer cultures in Singapore’s current milieu of illiberal citizenship. This collection analyses how contemporary queer Singapore has emerged against a contradictory backdrop of sexual repression and cultural liberalisation. Using the innovative framework of illiberal pragmatism, established and emergent local scholars and activists provide expansive coverage of the impact of homosexuality on Singapore’s media cultures and political economy, including law, religion, the military, literature, theatre, photography, cinema, social media and queer commerce. It shows how new LGBT subjectivities have been fashioned through the governance of illiberal pragmatism, how pragmatism is appropriated as a form of social and critical democratic action, and how cultural citizenship is forged through a logic of queer complicity that complicates the flows of oppositional resistance and grassroots appropriation.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Unique to the Singaporean LGBT scene is the ambivalence of the creative yet entrepreneurial, the culturally liberalized yet sexually repressive, and the post-colonial yet illiberal, all lucidly discussed in this volume that tackles the ironic complexities of queer ingenuity/queer complicity. — Josephine Ho, National Central University, Taiwan An exciting and noteworthy contribution to the burgeoning field of queer Asia studies, the volume highlights the importance of theorizing sexuality from the specificity of local sites while being carefully attuned to how such sites are produced through global processes. The editors grapple with the central contradiction that characterizes the Singapore nation-state today: its ongoing criminalization of homosexuality on the one hand, and its embrace of cultural liberalization on the other, which has helped to make Singapore one of the epicenters of gay life in Asia. The collection allows us to understand queer culture in Singapore as not merely resistant nor assimilationist, but rather as emerging from an imaginative negotiation of these paradoxes of neoliberal postcoloniality. — Gayatri Gopinath, New York University
From the Back Cover
Gay and Lesbian Studies / Cultural Studies
About the Author
Audrey Yue is senior lecturer in cinema and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne; she is the author of Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile. Jun Zubillaga-Pow is a Ph.D candidate in music research at King’s College London.
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