Non-Normative Female Sexualities in Asia, and Singapore?

In the literature concerned with the globalisation of gay identities, same-sex desiring women in Asia have come under increasing attention for two reasons. Firstly, as evidence countering universalising Western assumptions of what it means to be a global gay or lesbian.  Secondly, as a response to the tendency to lump lesbians and gay men together under the generalised rubric ‘queer’, which is dominated by research on gay men both in Western and non-Western contexts. Ethnographic monographs on female non-normative sexualities have therefore appeared in many parts of Asia, including Japan, India, Thailand and Indonesia. But the case of Singapore has been significantly missing in the literature. Why has Singapore been left out of an important queer Asian critique? This paper discusses the missing case of Singaporean women who love women. First, I explore the ways in which a queer Asian scholarship runs the risk of being constructed and produced through an Orientalist area studies approach, which inevitably leads to the omission of ‘modern’ Singapore and Singaporean lesbians. Second, I suggest that taken-for-granted images of local middle-class lesbians can appear, in the eyes of an Orientalist, as ‘just like’ the hegemonic Western queer, a thoroughly globalised version alienated from her indigenous region. Are ‘modern’, middle-class Singaporean lesbians merely another instantiation of the homogenising global gay identity, and hence ineffective as material for an Asian queer critique? Finally, the paper gestures towards a ‘postcolonial LGQ’ approach to comprehend the complex, contradictory and contingent sexual subjectivities of lesbians in Singapore. Using empirical material on lesbians in Singapore, I demonstrate the ways in which Singaporean lesbians re-queer hegemonic concepts of homosexuality and argue that their sexual lives and practices are crucial moments of reconfiguration and transformation, and not mere reception, of what it means to be ‘modern’ global lesbians.