Negotiating LGBTQ rights in Singapore: The margin as a place of refusal

Introduction

A key aspect of Lefebvre’s theorisation of rights to the city is habitation in the city (Lefebvre, 1996; Purcell, 2002). This is a radical approach because rights are not claimed only through the legal relationship between citizens and the state. One is able to claim rights regardless of citizenship as an inhabitant of the city. However, Lefebvre’s ideal for the city is far from the lived reality of urban life for many. This paper critically engages with the strategies for sexual citizenship deployed by the LGBTQ in Singapore using three examples – Sayoni’s community-based advocacy, Pink Dot and education in a Singapore classroom on gender in the city. It expands the discussion of rights beyond that of the individual to include other scalar analytics such as community and region. Similar to Richardson (2017: 217), the paper asks how might we ‘construe sexual citizenship if we decouple it from individuation and the choosing citizen-subject’. The paper also demonstrates how the margin can function as a critical site of resistance in which the marginalised articulate a different language of rights.

The policies and laws that govern everyday life in Singapore are premised largely on the assumption that the heterosexual family is the basic unit of society and this has been discussed at length elsewhere (Chua, 2014; Oswin, 2010, 2019; Ramdas, 2013, 2015; Tan, 2015a, 2015b; Yue and Zubillaga-Pow, 2012). Another key matter of concern for LGBTQ communities in Singapore is the existence of Section 377A of the penal code, which makes sex between men punishable by law. The Singapore government has argued that Singapore is not ready to repeal this law, citing societal conservatism that is in line with ‘Asian Values’ (Barr, 2000; Hoon, 2004). These are values that promote the heteronormative family as the basic building block of society, and where a Confucian ethic informs societal conduct. These are also values where the rights and needs of the individual are secondary to those of the many (e.g. family, community and the nation).

The sexual in this narrative is framed as cultural, and LGBTQ sexuality as not in line with the cultural sensibilities of Asia or what it means to be Asian. Bell and Binnie (2000: 69) argue that such a separation of subjective meaning of sexuality from any discussions of the social is problematic, for the two are intrinsically linked and cannot be set ‘in opposition to one another’. However, by separating sexuality in this way, the state is able to rationalise not repealing the law for cultural reasons while maintaining that gay Singaporeans face no discrimination in the workplace and that they are able to live their private lives peacefully with no real threat to their safety and security. In his parliamentary speech where the issue of repeal was discussed in 2007, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had this to say:

Singapore is basically a conservative society. The family is the basic building block of this society. It has been so and by policy, we have reinforced this, and we want to keep it so. And by family in Singapore we mean one man, one woman marrying, having children and bringing up children within that framework of a stable family unit … I acknowledge that not everybody fits into this mould. Some are single, some have more colourful lifestyles, some are gay. But a heterosexual, stable family is a social norm. (Lee, 2007)

For LGBTQ Singaporeans, the state’s unwillingness to repeal 377A is discriminatory and it also legitimates homophobia in society. LGBTQ groups and activists have argued that the state’s failure to repeal the legislation functions as a social cue that influences how Singaporeans view homosexuality in Singapore and how they treat homosexual students, employees and family members. Sayoni is a women’s group in Singapore that advocates for lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer (LBTQ) women. It recently submitted a Human Rights Documentation Report at the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (UNCEDAW) in Geneva in 2017 (Sayoni, 2017). Through its advocacy work Sayoni has done two things, first to demonstrate how 377A is more than a ‘gay male problem’ and second to demonstrate the importance of taking the rights debates beyond the single issue of repeal and sexuality alone.

The binary of inclusion and exclusion represented in the centre/margin spatial metaphor is one that feminist geographers, academics in sexuality studies and queer theorists have long questioned and continue to critique (Binnie, 1997; Brown et al., 2010; Manalansan, 2015; Oswin, 2008; Rose, 1993). Rose, for example, argues that a feminist political project is one in which space ‘does not replicate the exclusions of the Same and the Other’. Instead, a feminist spatiality is one that ‘acknowledge(s) the difference of others’ (Rose, 1993: 137) and a sense there is ‘an elsewhere beyond patriarchy’ (Rose, 1993: 138). Similarly, this paper asks what might an elsewhere beyond the single issue of sexuality and an erotic sexual subject look like.

The three examples speak to the complex negotiation for rights in the context of Singapore. They demonstrate how the cultural and social aspects of sexuality are intrinsically linked and also how these intricacies are strategically deployed by LGBTQ community members. They demonstrate the complexity of Asian culture as (re)made in and through the social. My analyses of these examples is located at the nexus between the state’s pragmatism and how it provides incremental rights that are in line with the cosmopolitan sensibilities of a global city, or what Yue (2007) has called ‘illiberal pragmatism’, and the strategic and pragmatic ways in which different groups that make up Singapore’s LGBTQ community ask for more while trying to be as ‘normal as possible’ (Yau, 2010). However, rather than seeing these strategies as speaking the ‘coloniser’s tongue’ (hooks, 2015), I argue that these strategies co-opt and destabilise the language of the coloniser.

The margin as a place of refusal and radical openness

bell hooks frames the margin not as periphery looking in on the core but as a place of radical openness that is grounded in the diverse and yet specific histories of the marginalised. She writes that the margin is ‘a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist’; it is a ‘space of refusal, where one can say no to the coloniser’ (hooks, 2015: 150). For hooks the margin is thus a place where power can be creative and life-affirming, where one can ‘reject the powerful’s definition of (our) reality’ (hooks, 2015: 92). hooks’ conceptualisation of the margin is one that is more complex because it makes space for subjects who occupy the margin and speak a different language from that of their colonisers. For LGBTQ Singapore this is a nascent history compared with that of black slavery and the black civil rights movement in the USA that hooks draws upon. The LGBTQ citizen subject in Singapore is not colonised in the same way. However, hooks’ use of the term coloniser extends beyond the context of civil rights. She is also speaking in terms of how the specific histories of the marginalised in a society can often mean that they do not possess a language by which to claim rights. Here the use of the term ‘coloniser’ can also be read as meaning the powerful who are able to dictate terms of language and reproduce hegemony that extends into the everyday lives of the marginalised. LGBTQ Singaporeans experience this in two ways. The first is that LGBTQ identities are seen as incompatible with the majority of Singapore society and the Asian values they ascribe to. Following from this, the second reason is that rights cannot be claimed based on the single issue of sexuality or the ‘gay agenda’. For the most part LGBTQ histories and rights movements in Singapore have stayed hidden online or have taken on greater visibility only more recently with Pink Dot in 2009 and the failed call for the repeal of Section 377A in 2012 (Chua, 2014). LGBTQ Singaporeans are, therefore, citizen subjects who are always and already marginalised because they must speak two languages – one that is produced by the Singapore ‘self-orientalising’ state while the other is the language that responds to the ‘Liberal West’. Under these conditions, the LGBTQ Singaporean is always and already a citizen subject whose language of rights can only ever be framed in terms of pragmatic strategy or seen as inauthentic because it remains in the colonial shadow of 377A. This paper is thus in line with earlier approaches in which queer theorists draw out alternative queer modernities and shy away from the trope of coming out politics. It critiques homonationalism in which queerness is linked to certain mobile sensibilities, a particular directionality of progress that is tied to whiteness and liberalism. Instead the work focuses on the politics of mobility, of how people, culture and ideas move and are represented, ultimately producing who, how or what is queer Asia. These are subjectivities that shift and turn in ways that defy identity categorisations, and question the reproduction of a singular liberal queer subject (Oswin, 2008; Puar, 2007).

hooks’ theorisation of the margin is useful for critical engagement with sexual citizenship where the marginalised are expected to speak the language of those who occupy the centre. hooks argues that it is possible to ‘reject the powerful’s definition of (your) reality’ by drawing upon a strong ‘self-concept’ in which the colonised remember the past, and ‘decolonise (their) minds’ (hooks, 2015: 88). She argues that their speech may ‘resemble the coloniser’s tongue’ but ‘it has undergone a transformation’ (hooks, 2015: 150). Similarly, Foucault (1994) writes about the production of the subject as ‘techniques of the self’. These are procedures that exist in every civilisation and are ‘suggested or prescribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, or transform it in terms of a certain number of ends, through relations of self-mastery or self-knowledge’ (Foucault, 1994: 87). For hooks these are ends that allow people who occupy the margin to gain a sense of who they are and, like Foucault, she argues that this is ‘a formation of the self through techniques of living, and not repression through prohibition and the law’ (Foucault, 1994: 89). While in Foucault’s work these are techniques of governmentalisation, these could also be framed as techniques from below that allow for the affirmation of a subjectivity steeped in resistance, one that, according to hooks, gives us ‘a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world’, a ‘radical creative space’ (hooks, 2015: 153).

It is in this context that the paper asks the following questions: What are Singaporean LGBTQ’s self-concepts? How have and can the LGBTQ in Singapore reject the powerful’s definition of themselves? How have they refused to speak the language of power as domination and control? Singaporean LGBTQ citizens are dependent on the state for access to resources such as housing and healthcare, and for protections from violence and discrimination. As such, the call for rights based on the single identity category of sexuality is important as it acknowledges the state’s lapse in meeting these responsibilities. In asking for these rights, how have LGBTQ Singaporeans developed a self-concept anchored in sexuality but that is also much more than this one identity category?

The three examples the paper addresses exemplify the LGBTQ self-concept in Singapore. They signify queer ‘psychic life’ in all its complexity – intersectional, regional and communal. This psychic life is crucial ‘because the social norms that work on the subject to produce its desires and restrict its operation do not operate unilaterally. Indeed no norm can operate on a subject without the activation of fantasy and, more specifically, the phantasmatic attachment to ideals that are at once social and psychic’ (Butler, 2004: 264). So even as social norms are activated to limit the extent to which LGBTQ Singaporeans are able to make rights claims, so too are LGBTQ self-concepts that challenge and trouble the social norms that define family, community and nation.

Methodology

The three examples in this paper speak to the Singaporean government’s deployment of heteronormative familyhood and Asian family values as key tropes in Singapore’s narrative of nationhood. The first example uses community-based advocacy, which is also a key strategy deployed by the state in Singapore in, for example, public housing and eldercare (Pow, 2013; Rahman, 2013). This conceptualisation of community is similar to what Massey calls Russian doll geographies (Massey, 2004) – strong heteronormative family bonds, which give rise to stable communities and an intact nation in a structure of nested hierarchies. The second draws from the idea of Asia as region, and how it is used to juxtapose Asia against the West. LGBTQ rights are seen as a ‘Western’ issue rather than Asian. Here the concept of Asian is reproduced as traditional and conservative against a ‘Liberal West’. In the sections of the paper that follow, I show how community and region are strategically utilised by LGBTQ communities to shed light on sexuality as an identity category and the complex ways in which sexuality is lived. The margin becomes a more open space from which to make claims that are anchored in the issue of sexual rights but are not entirely defined by sexuality alone. Finally, the third example on education analyses the potential for LGBTQ students to activate and negotiate their psychic lives. What are the challenges they face translating and transforming the coloniser’s tongue? Together the three examples aim to draw attention to the complexities that surround sexual rights debates in Singapore for the LGBTQ. The first example problematises community using the subject category woman to extend LGBTQ politics beyond the single issue of sexuality and the repeal of 377A. The second example problematises ‘Asian culture’ by demonstrating how Pink Dot has evolved to become emblematic of queer Asia. The final example demonstrates what happens when individuals are unable to articulate a language of individual rights. All three examples show how individual, community and region serve to communicate LGBTQ self-concepts.

In writing this paper I draw from my experiences as an activist-academic-educator. I volunteer with groups such as Sayoni and am also an educator at the National University of Singapore (NUS). As such, the first example draws empirically from my involvement with Sayoni’s research and advocacy, while the third example draws from pedagogical research conducted in one of my modules. In each of these instances, I have declared my status as an academic and ensured that there has been full disclosure of this status (see, for example, Ramdas, 2016). The second example, of Pink Dot, draws largely from secondary sources but provides a different reading of these in relation to hooks’‘self-concept’. My analysis of all three examples is further influenced by observations and participation in Singapore’s annual Pink Dot event and as an individual who has been involved with LGBTQ advocacy in Singapore since 1997. My personal involvement in various NGO and volunteer groups is critical to the feminist pedagogy I practise in the classroom and my academic work. When teaching and writing, I draw from these personal examples, taking seriously the personal as political and the classroom as a critical space for feminist intervention (Huang and Ramdas, 2019). My work with the community, my students and in academia is also informed by hooks’ conceptualisation of the margin as a place of struggle, pain and empowerment (hooks, 1994). It is from this positionality that I echo hooks’ call for framing the margin as a site of refusal and a place of radical openness.

Sayoni’s community advocacy: Self-concept as intersectional and more than 377A

Sayoni defines itself as a ‘community of queer women, including lesbian, bisexual and transgender women’ who ‘organise and advocate for equality in well-being and dignity regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity’. ¹ In 2013 Sayoni began its journey to document gender- and sexuality-based violence and discrimination through its human rights documentation (HRD) project. The documentation for the HRD project was used by Sayoni to advocate for LBTQ rights under UNCEDAW, to which Singapore is a signatory. Through this process Sayoni is able to advocate for LBTQ women while also providing feedback to the international community on the ways the Singaporean government has or has not complied with the terms of the convention with regards to LBTQ women (Ramdas, 2016). The work on HRD has been critical for Sayoni; it marked the start of Sayoni’s journey into research-based advocacy (Sayoni, 2017). Prior to this, when members of Sayoni had argued at the UNCEDAW convention that LBTQ women faced discrimination because of their sexuality, they did not have evidence to support these claims, merely anecdotal evidence from their own experiences.

The documentation project was an important strategy for Sayoni sharing evidence about the lives of LBTQ women in Singapore, thus bringing the discussion about violence and discrimination from the private sphere, where many of the incidents occurred, into the public sphere. The report documented how LBTQ women experience gender- and sexuality-based violence and discrimination in Singapore. Subsequently, the state, through representatives such as the Minister for Law Shanmugam, has emphasised that it will not tolerate violence against any citizen regardless of gender or sexuality. The modus operandi in this instance is one of neutrality towards gender and sexuality. Calls for rights and recognition by the different groups that make up Singapore’s LGBTQ community are often seen as problematic by the state. While the latter may extend an olive branch in terms of continued dialogues with representatives from the community, and also by allowing a certain amount of visibility through the annual Pink Dot pride celebration, advocacy based on the single issue of sexual rights continues to be the limit. This is, for example, represented by the state’s constant refusal to repeal 377A. Sayoni’s report and advocacy have provided a way forward beyond the rights-based narratives that centre on the repeal of 377A (Sayoni, 2018).

Sayoni’s HRD project also set in motion the Brave Spaces project, which was officially launched in March 2018. According to the Brave Spaces website, ² ‘Brave Spaces is a Singapore-based non-profit organisation that develops programmes, provides social services, organises events, and conducts research and advocacy to empower women in Singapore.’ It is a ‘values-driven inclusive organisation’ and works ‘closely with professionals, state bodies and independent organisations to develop flexible and sustainable programmes adapted to the needs of our primary stakeholders – women of intersectional identities who are multiply marginalized’. Brave Spaces states that it adopts ‘a collaborative approach in building capacities and growing our shared networks of care, resources and support for women’. This approach is critical to building feminist solidarities for the urban enshrined in what Peake and Rieker (2013) call ‘gendered geographies of justice’. While Brave Spaces and Sayoni are separate entities, the former is a project that also involves individuals and volunteers who are part of Sayoni. The concept of intersectionality is critical for how Brave Spaces works, allowing for a more complex interpretation of the category woman that moves beyond the Singaporean State’s heteronormative definition. Sayoni’s HRD project provided the momentum needed to start the Brave Spaces project through its successful collecting and documenting of LBTQ women’s experiences of discrimination and violence in Singapore across gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class divides. While the starting point had been a rights-based approach for Sayoni’s HRD project, Brave Spaces adopts a sophisticated and complex approach that extends the discussion beyond one of rights. A key tenet of Brave Spaces includes the provision of advocacy-based social services. It is guided by principles of social justice and the desire to enact an inclusive feminism that is ‘compassionate and supportive of the multiply marginalised’ (https://bravespace.org/about/).

Brave Spaces implements two strategies. First, it recognises the complexity of the category ‘woman’ as more than heteronormative and one where women experience marginalisation at the intersection of a number of identity categories, namely, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class (see also Johnston, 2016). Second, Brave Spaces co-opts the state’s reliance on community-based care. In Singapore, the state relies on non-governmental groups such as religious organisations, community welfare groups and even members of the neighbourhood to pitch in and help with the provision of care. For example, in caring for the elderly, the state calls this the ‘Many Hands Approach’ (Rahman, 2013) where care work is outsourced to non-governmental groups. While this may be interpreted as Sayoni speaking a language the state can understand, it is also one that emanates from a place of pain and suffering. This is an angry place, one that has galvanised LBTQ women and their allies to take action and make space for important work. Brave Spaces’ events on self-care, mental health and wellbeing are not limited to LBTQ women alone but bring together a diverse group of women, many of whom are LBTQ but some who may be straight or questioning. It is an example of queer psychic life that draws on the complex self-concept of ‘woman’ as intersectional, complex and open. This strategy draws attention to the ways the lives of heterosexual and LBTQ women are similar and yet also different when they do not conform to hetero-patriarchal expectations of women (see also Ramdas, 2015, for discussion on the alliance between straight and gay women in the context of the AWARE Saga in Singapore). Sayoni’s HRD project and Brave Spaces are thus examples of how community-based advocacy draws on a self-concept that is intersectional and whose subjectivation is not linked to the single issue of 377A. While speaking the state’s language of community-based care, it is also an avenue for community-building in which sexuality enters the conversation between women.

Pink Dot: Love fantasy and pink region as self-concept

Pink Dot is an annual LGBTQ pride event which takes place every year in June. The use of the colour ‘pink’ aligns the organisers to the LGBTQ community worldwide. Singapore is known colloquially as the ‘little Red Dot’ in reference to how tiny it appears on maps. Together the terms Pink and Dot represent LGBTQ communities in Singapore. The Pink Dot celebrations culminate with the taking of an aerial photo of a ‘Pink Dot’ formation comprising the coming together of all the participants dressed in pink (see Figure 1). Pink Dot celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2018. Over the years the number of people gathering at the event has increased from several hundred in the inaugural year to close to 20,000 in more recent years. Pink Dot has been successful in part because it does not present an outright proclamation of homosexual interests in Singapore. However, Pink Dot may also be criticised for taking a ‘soft approach’, focusing on love, family and kinship – the ‘kosher’ version of sexual citizenship that suits societal norms in the city-state (see, for example, Tan, 2015a, 2015b). It reproduces the hearts and flowers mode of familyhood that silences more insidious forms of violence and discrimination experienced by LGBTQ (and even straight) Singaporeans in the domestic sphere (Sayoni, 2018).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Pink Dot celebrations.

However, the concept of love represented in the landscape of Pink Dot is one that focuses on love as a universal right and represents a refusal in two ways. First it is a refusal of legitimate love located only in heteronormative familyhood. Pink Dot symbolises a resistance to the state’s constructions of family and what constitutes legitimate love, by introducing the possibility for love and family to take alternative forms, and the right for anyone to experience love regardless of their sexuality. Second, by focusing on love, Pink Dot reproduces a less erotic discourse of sexual citizenship, thus as Chris Tan (2015b: 989) writes, Pink Dot and its promotional videos ‘emphasised the familiarity of gay men and lesbians as kin – as somebody’s sons and daughters’. Sexual citizenship in Singapore is ‘de-eroticised’ and is a refusal of the call ‘to bring in the erotic and embodied dimensions excluded in many discussions of citizenship’ (Bell and Binnie, 2000: 20). One might argue again that the power of Pink Dot lies in its ability to speak the language of the state and that Pink Dot has become knowable and legible to many Singaporeans precisely because it represents core values of family and multiculturalism that both the state and many Singaporeans believe are key tenets of the Singaporean national identity. I argue that Pink Dot makes space for other formations of love that represent the LGBTQ self-concept and also its ‘fantasy’ or desire for a more expansive understanding of love. As Butler argues (2004: 267), ‘it would not be possible to postulate the social norm on one side of the analysis, and the fantasy on the other … the very syntax of the fantasy could not be read without an understanding of the lexicon of the social norm’. By bringing together gay and straight Singaporeans, the performativity of sexuality is communicated through the material and symbolic performance of the Pink Dot formation.

The Pink Dot love fantasy has also taken root elsewhere via the many satellite Pink Dots in London, New York, Hong Kong and Taiwan to name a few. Singapore’s influence as an Asian city-state is represented by how Pink Dot has ‘travelled’, thus making less stable the binary between Asia and West. The global reach of Pink Dot both functions as a sign of non-Western Singapore’s influence in LGBTQ rights and, at the same time, has attracted the attention of global MNCs such as Google and Barclays Bank who were until recently corporate sponsors for the event. In 2017 the government implemented new laws that prevented foreign companies from funding and supporting events that relate to domestic issues (Channel News Asia, 2017a). The government also stated that only Singaporeans and Singapore Permanent Residents (PRs) would be permitted to assemble at Hong Lim Park for the Pink Dot event. Prior to that, foreigners could participate in Pink Dot as observers providing they did not take part in it. But with the change in legislation, the police would no longer distinguish between participants and observers. According to then Minister for Home Affairs and Law, K Shanmugam, ‘as a government, we don’t take a position for or against Pink Dot, but we do take a position against foreign involvement … the point is this is a matter for Singaporeans, Singapore companies, Singapore entities to discuss’ (Channel News Asia, 2017b).

In response to these actions by the government, the Pink Dot organisers focused more of their fundraising efforts on Singaporean companies. The Pink Dot website now provides information about Singaporean companies and local champions and supporters of the Pink Dot event. ‘Red Dot for Pink Dot’ is a campaign led by Darius Cheng, CEO of 99.co, a local real estate company. He brought together 50 more Singaporean-owned companies to sponsor Pink Dot 2017. ‘The campaign’s goal is to sign up 100 local companies to show their support for Pink Dot and be part of a movement to promote greater understanding, inclusion and acceptance of LGBT individuals in Singapore’ (Pink Dot, 2017). Furthermore, Pink Dot’s foreign and regional supporters came together to send messages of support for Pink Dot even though they were unable to attend the event. One example of this support is in the form of a video message titled ‘Support for Pink Dot 2017 from around the World’ uploaded to YouTube (APCOM, 2017). In this video, there are messages from individuals mostly from ASEAN countries (e.g. Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia) reminding Singaporeans that Pink Dot symbolises more than can be contained by its territorial borders. The financial support of local companies and the virtual messages of solidarity from Asian supporters demonstrates how Singapore and Asia are queer places also.

These acts of support emplace Pink Dot within Singapore and Asia and they destabilise the narrative that non-normative sexualities are a ‘Western’ influence. These acts of support from within Singapore and Asia are representations of hooks’‘self-concept’ chosen by LGBTQ communities and their allies and these are acts that locate and claim queer identities from the margin and that refuse to be determined only by Singaporean state legislation and narratives. Here the binary between Asia/Singapore and the West is destabilised. Singapore and Asia are queer with the support of local companies, and regional queer networks. Love extends beyond family and kin to include region and more (see also Ramdas, 2016). Yet within Singapore the push for change remains challenging. There is now an anti-Pink Dot movement in the forms of a ‘Wear White Campaign’ and the ‘We are Against Pink Dot’, which bring together conservative members of Christian and Muslim communities in Singapore. These individuals protest against Pink Dot on the grounds that family and love within families must be grounded in a heteronormative idea of family. They do this by wearing white on the day of Pink Dot. The government has, therefore, had to manage some of the social pressure emerging out of the tensions between the different groups. Hegemonic values and narratives about family, community and nation persist in Singapore. However, even as Singaporeans and the Singapore government argue against the ‘gay agenda’ as Western and incompatible with ‘Asian values’, Singapore and Asia have reclaimed the region as queer through Pink Dot and its discourse of love that has travelled from Singapore to Asia and beyond. The refusal to speak of sexuality only in terms of the erotic has provided alternative narratives of sexuality that work better for Asian queer. In the next section, on education, I discuss the impact and challenge for students who do not possess the capacity to speak using a language of rights. While the earlier two examples have proved significant for community- and regional-scale advocacy, I argue that on a day-to-day level young people in Singapore struggle to negotiate and resist when they do not possess a more overt language of rights.

Educating self-concept: Learning and speaking the language of rights

Gender and the City (GE4228) is a fourth year, honours-level module offered at the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Students who take the module are senior undergraduate students whose grade point average scores qualify them to graduate with honours. GE4228 aims to develop students’ understanding of feminist political economy and it engages particularly with how geographers have drawn from feminist political theory and Marxist feminist critique to analyse social inequalities that have emerged in neoliberal urban contexts. Specifically, students draw from literature in feminist political economy and urban studies to ‘just diversity’ in urban planning (Fincher and Iveson, 2008; see also Peake and Rieker, 2013). Students are required to keep a fieldwork journal and later produce a poster that represents a feminist reimagining of the urban in Singapore. Students work in pairs to make observations and collect material for pre-assigned polemical themes. Each member of the pair is asked to take one side of the ‘argument’ for their theme and work on ‘their side’ in their journal. After four weeks they come together to work on a joint statement that addresses the similarities and differences they observed as part of their fieldwork. The joint statement serves as the starting point for a final poster assignment that they work on together. Students are interviewed by research assistants once they have completed the journal exercise to find out how each of them reached a compromise with reference to the polemic.

The syllabus and framework for the module are informed by bell hooks’ feminist pedagogy, specifically her 1994 book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. In this book hooks argues that ‘the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy’ (hooks, 1994: 12); and it is this idea that I was interested to explore. How possible is it for educators in a socio-cultural context such as Singapore to use the classroom as a radical space of possibility? How could students be challenged to think more critically about the hegemonic values underpinning some of the planning decisions in the city-state? For example, the Confucian ethos that informs the core values that are integral to Singapore’s national identity is something that many of the students in the class would be familiar with. These are values that students learn about in social studies in high school as well as in tertiary institutions such as NUS under the Singapore Studies curriculum as part of National Education (NE) Programme (see Ramdas et al., 2018). According to Koh (2005: 80–82), NE is primarily designed for nation-building purposes and its overarching objective is to develop ‘national cohesion’ and ‘a shared sense of nationhood’, thus ‘cultivating a sense of identity, pride and self-respect in Singaporeans as well as enable an in-depth understanding of the challenges, constraints and vulnerabilities confronting Singapore’ (Ramdas et al., 2018: 51). Elsewhere I have argued that the government’s ‘strategic use of Asian Family Values as the panacea for the threat of Westernization [has] resulted in a more divided movement that distances sexuality from gender’ (Ramdas, 2015: 109). This has resulted, I argue, in a feminist movement in Singapore that is, until recently with the setting-up of Brave Spaces, decoupled from queer politics. Given this context, I was interested to find out what it might mean for students to use their place in the classroom as a site of refusal? Young (1997: 399) argues that ‘a common consequence of social privilege is the ability of a group to convert its perspective on some issue into authoritative knowledge without being challenged by those who have reason to see things differently’. How would students negotiate the Confucian ethos that places the interest of the many (i.e. family, community and society) over that of the individual? What would this mean for more marginalised groups represented in the classroom (e.g. LGBTQ students)?

I focus on one key theme that emerged out of this classroom exercise, namely that of silence as compromise and compromise as silencing. For example, during an interview conducted with a student about the journaling process, she said:

My partner is quite objective in the sense that even though she is not a LGBT, she recognises that the gay nightclub holds meaning for certain people. She was not condemning that, so she remained very objective … (Although) there was a bit of conflict, because I know about her positionality (straight) and where she is coming from, so I resolved that. We did not talk about it, but I understood that she did not have any malicious intent. (LGBTQ student, interviewed February 2016)

While the exercise of journaling was empowering for the student, who could share her point of view about being LGBTQ, there was also a strong need to be objective and to understand where her non-LGBTQ partner was coming from. The LGBTQ student understood her partner’s positionality and she rationalised that it was not a personal attack when her buddy had particular religious views which intersected with heteronormative values pertaining to family and men and women’s roles in the family. The non-LGBTQ student, on the other hand, felt the need to frame the discussion in a neutral way. The idea of objectivism and neutrality is fundamental to how each of them dealt with compromise. Most of the other students also shared similar experiences in their interviews with the research assistants. They said that it was good to know where others were coming from, and that the exercise was an ‘exchange of ideas’ rather than ‘pushing down one idea and elevating another idea’.

While this is only one example, it does speak to the wider challenge of transforming the Singaporean classroom into a radical space for LGBTQ students. The social context that students are located in is one that values pragmatism, ‘keeping the peace’ and being sensitive to the needs of the societal majority (i.e. their classmates, society) rather than pushing for their own views to be heard. Discussions about social injustice and feminist politics become muted when sensitivity toward the other results in silence, particularly when it is the LGBTQ student who is holding back. The LGBTQ student’s self-location in the margins, in this instance, promotes a different kind of refusal. A refusal to resist, a refusal to speak out assuming that silence is necessary. Theirs is a self-concept muted by concerns about keeping the peace in the classroom. The student has thus chosen to understand their ‘coloniser’, who in this instance is a specific other (a friend, a classmate), and it is this proximity that is what perhaps results in a muted conversation instead of refusal. These are students who will become workers employed by the city-state. Many of them will work for the government in tourism, education, transport, urban planning, trade and foreign policy. Should their silence persist, they will become complicit in reproducing the state’s narrative of ‘majority conservative Singapore’.

To encourage students to speak out across these differences there is a second part to the assignment for the module which they work on together after the individual journaling exercise. Each pair of students must now work together on a poster that addresses some of the inequalities they observed and journaled about during their fieldwork in Singapore. As part of this discussion the students must address issues of social justice that promote justice and make space for the multiple and heterogeneous publics that are part of urban life (Fincher and Iveson, 2008). During the exchange with their partners students learn to listen and speak across their differences. The posters are then displayed as part of an open exhibition in which the pair must advocate greater equality in Singapore to the exhibition’s visitors (comprising other students and faculty from the Department of Geography). It is during this exhibition that students who occupy marginalised spaces (e.g. LGBTQ, ethnic, gender- or class-based minority) learn to advocate for the more marginalised in Singaporean society. Even students who occupy a more privileged position learn what it means to advocate for those less privileged than they are.

Conclusion

hooks asks that the marginalised turn their backs on the centre and claim the margin as a place of refusal, a space of radical openness. Through refusal one’s identity becomes less about being understood by the centre and more in terms of how we see or want to see ourselves. Our fantasy, desires and psychic realities become part of the conversation with the centre, but not in marginal and disempowering ways. The concept of refusal allows the strategies adopted by LGBTQ communities to be framed as ‘more than pragmatic’. The narrative of pragmatism assumes there is a more authentic and ‘better’ version of rights-based politics that is the standard we ought to aspire towards. Focusing on three self-concepts the paper has made space for a more complex sexual citizenship, one that is less associated with a singular and legible citizen subject defined only in terms of their sexuality. In Singapore, where the articulation of rights from the margins can be very challenging, this paper has analysed how sexual citizenship can benefit from alternative scalar analytics.

First, via an intersectional approach to gender and sexuality as put into practice by Sayoni’s community advocacy. This is a more complex articulation or framing of community that is not anchored in the identity category of sexuality alone. Sayoni’s HRD project and Brave Spaces have resulted in greater engagement with national conversations about care, and protection from violence and discrimination. For example, through Sayoni’s advocacy in parliament, national conversations on domestic violence and bullying now include the topic of sexuality (Kurohi, 2020). The violence and discrimination experienced by LBTQ women cannot be ignored by the state because these are inequalities that arise out of patriarchal injustices located at the intersections of gender and sexuality. Second, Pink Dot and its influence in Asia and beyond is an example of how Singapore as Asian city-state is at the forefront of a social movement that has expanded the politics of sexuality by queering and co-opting the narrative of love, family and kinship. By destabilising the narrative that non-normative sexualities are not Singaporean or Asian, the paper demonstrates how Pink Dot is a refusal to locate Singapore’s LGBTQ movement in Western liberal politics. The third example, of education and the classroom, demonstrates how challenging it can be to refuse from the margin when one is face-to-face with a particular other (friend, family, classmate) and one lacks the language or self-concept from which to make these claims. The third example demonstrates how self-concept can be silenced at the scale of the individual in the name of peace-keeping. In a Confucian city-state such as Singapore where neutrality, meritocracy and individual needs come after those of family, community and nation, education must provide more opportunities for students to learn how to speak a language of rights based on principles of justice. It is only then that they will be better able to advocate for themselves or on behalf of those who are less privileged than they are.