ABSTRACT
I began this book with the conviction that global hegemonic codes not only shape middle-class Singaporean lesbian’s narratives on sexuality and gender, but also help sustain the seemingly self-evident nature of progressive queer ideologies such as ‘liberation’ and ‘coming out’. I advanced the idea that what forms the contours of lesbian selfhood in the globalised, hyper-capitalist city-state of Singapore, is the women’s embeddedness in, access to, and reception of international queer circuits and discourses. Cosmopolitan, educated and English-speaking middle-class lesbians in Singapore carry with them a certain imagined way of being gay, and the expectation is for them to express a selfconsciousness and sexual identity that do not trouble these taken-for-granted categories. These ideas and the imagination of what it means to be homosexual are embodied by the global gay, a universalising figure delineated in part by Altman (1996a, 1996b, 1997). Being a ‘modern’ global gay or lesbian is to be in a same-sex relationship with another person of the same gender, it is to engage in homoeroticism, it is to place one’s sexuality as an anterior aspect of one’s identity, and for this sexual identity to be recognised in public around which a community can be built and mobilised for a collective good. I have argued that these images of the global gay are essentially based on an Anglo-American model of same-sex sexuality imbued with Western assumptions of identity as singular, stable and unified. As sexual identities globalise and become visible around the world, the Anglo-American model of being gay has risen dominantly on the global gay horizon, naturalised as the climax, or core, of all ‘modern’ homosexualities around which same-sex identities should converge and look ‘just like’. Therefore, as we saw in the discussion and review of the Singaporean documentary, Women Who Love Women, in Chapter 1, it became virtually irresistible to interpret the sexual subjectivities of those contemporary same-sex loving lesbians as yet another instantiation of the ‘modern’, universal global gay. Same-sex subjectivities in Singapore, I contend, have been queer-ed in a dominant Anglo-American way. Seen as another exemplar of the global gay identity, Singaporean same-sex subjects hardly fit into, and are certainly under-featured, in the Asian global queer literature problematising the idea of a homogenising Western queer.
