Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures

14. Doing Cultural Citizenship in the Global Media Hub: Illiberal Pragmatics and Lesbian Consumption Practices in Singapore

250 14 Doing Cultural Citizenship in the Global Media Hub Illiberal Pragmatics and Lesbian Consumption Practices in Singapore Audrey Yue The recent development of a global media hub in Singapore has enabled the emergence of a queer public culture despite the illegality of homosexuality. Statefunded gay films, subsidized theater plays, Internet portals, and nightclubs are part of the new spaces and practices that have been direct beneficiaries of this policy initiative. In a city-state such as Singapore, cultural citizenship is contested through the way sexuality functions as a technology for the creative economy. While the government has mobilized sexuality as a policy tool to promote cultural liberalization, gays and lesbians have also seized on these practices to claim their right to produce and participate in public culture. This chapter examines how lesbians “do” citizenship and carve out modes of expression through their consumption that allow them to fit in, use, and twist the governmental framing of media environments. The critical focus on governance will show how new sexual and gendered formations are produced in and through the developments of cultural and creative industrial policies. Singapore lesbians negotiate a nonnormative sexuality through the resistant and complicit practices of what I call the illiberal pragmatics of cultural and media policies. At the national level, their participation in public life shows the intensity of social networks and indicates strong civic engagement. At the transnational level, social capital is used to bridge global, diasporic, and inter-Asian cultural flows. Across these flows, lesbians’ media consumption practices evince alternative rather than Western homonormative queer tastes, combining queer globalization, diasporic queer cosmopolitanism, and inter-Asian queer proximities. The global media hub produces a queer Singaporean identity without assimilating into the Western liberal discourse of homosexual rights. For lesbians, mediated networks have opened up new ways of making claims to and contesting cultural citizenship, as well as participating in trans/national life. In the Global Media Hub Singapore’s strategic location between Asia and Europe has marked its symbolic and material presence as a hub for capital flows and postmodern consumption. 251 Doing Cultural Citizenship in the Global Media Hub Since its postcolonial independence in 1965, it has transformed from a transit for labor and food produce into a regional base for manufacturing, transportation , and multinational corporations.1 In the 1980s, it began to establish itself as a global media hub, offering a knowledge-based economy and world-class digital infrastructure.2 The arrival of international media production companies and venture capital led to a nationwide media restructuring that worked in conjunction with the service and consumer economy.3 In 2002, the knowledge economy was consolidated into the creative industry, and media developments included the creation of a global media city, export of locally made content, and the growth of the media talent base through education. Critical discussions of Singapore as a global media hub typically focus on the way technology is used for internal social control and external regional branding. While the embrace of digital media has expanded business opportunities, it has also allowed the authoritarian state to increase surveillance and suppress the civil society.4 The cosmopolitan appeals to Eurocentric art and an English-language audience, while anachronistic, still remain hegemonic in the region.5 These tensions problematize the hub’s place-making capacity to“enhance individual potential , link communities locally and globally, and finally, improve the quality of life.”6 Celebrating the livability of the place through postmodern consumption, such strategies do not consider social stratification, inclusion, and cohesion.7 Aihwa Ong describes Singapore’s hub strategy as replicating a“baroque economy ,” with its different clusters and multileveled scales of production.8 As capital Fig. 14.1. Singapore’s Chinatown riverside arts and nightlife hub, with the iconic Merlion and the Esplanade: Theatres on the Bay. (The photograph, entitled “Esplanade,” was taken by Northernstar, from Uniquely Singapore: Singapore in Pixels, http://www.visitsingapore.com/pixels/) 252 Audrey Yue is used to leverage international collaborations to privilege knowledge workers and network participants, neoliberal governance has“reconfigur[ed the] relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality.”9 In this strategy, neoliberalism is mobilized as technologies of governance and self-governance, and it holds the potential to create new forms of inclusion and exclusion. A few characteristics of the media hub emerge: the hub is engineered by neoliberal governance and uses market conditions as technologies of measurement for...