Performing Singapore’s Queer Quandary: Walking the Tightrope Between Sexual Illegality and Neoliberal-Enabled Subjectivity at Pink Dot and in Loo Zihan’s Cane

Abstract

In 2012, Singaporean multidisciplinary artist Loo Zihan re-enacted a 1994 piece by performance artist Joseph Ng that had sparked controversy both in the artistic circles and mainstream media in Singapore. Titled Cane, Loo’s piece revisits Ng’s original impetus of protesting against the imprisonment, corporal punishment and public shaming of 12 gay men who were caught up in a sexual entrapment sting devised by the police, as well as the legal and censorship mechanisms taken up against Ng and the arts community by the state. At that time, Ng was charged with ‘committing an obscene act in public’, and performance art was indirectly censored by being denied public funding for the next ten years (Lee 1994: n.p.).¹ In this chapter, I analyse the performance of Loo’s Cane in 2012 alongside the civil-society-led, pro-LGBTQ campaign, Pink Dot, which gathers LGBTQ citizens and their supporters together to celebrate and promote the voices and lives of queer Singaporeans. I demonstrate how Cane and Pink Dot reveal how queer resistances are enacted and perceived in reaction to the Singapore state’s shifting positions in regards to the presence of queer subjectivities and LGBTQrights. I argue that these case studies are examples of hybrid performances that merge global LGBTQ rights discourses with Asian-based rhetoric. They manifest the evolving political subjectivities of selected Asian queer subjects who are at once enabled yet co-opted by the Singapore state’s neoliberal objectives.