Note this essay is part of an amateur contemporary "artistic" installation that involves some paraphernalia (soil, flowers, chili padi) and a video slideshow.
That Singaporeans have been quiescent and indifferent to most things but themselves, is a hackneyed saying. Jean Baudrillard in his 1994 essay The Violence of Indifference writes “There is so much indifference and disaffection that can suddenly crystallize into a more violent form, through a process of instantaneous passage to the extreme. Indifference is not at all a quiescent sea, the flat encephalogram. Indifference is also a passion. Indifference causes real damage.” This idea is not nouveau. Philosopher Baruch Spinoza once said that only stronger ideas and perhaps, passions can negate a presently existing idea in one’s head.
Right now, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, there is nothing but these passions: hate, disgust, allergy, aversion, deception, nausea, repugnance, and repulsion. But, the hate we are talking about now, does not have a subject. It is faceless and perhaps objectless until it finds a victim. People do not know what they want or hate anymore. They say, “I take on” (J’assume) but what? “I hate” but what? Perhaps, we do not hate, but because of our indifference (non-doing; non-acting) to neutralize and liquidate hate, hate persists and we are responsible for it, until we take a stand and make a change, we are all complicit.
Gone are the blatant meta-narratives of black and white and right and wrong. We are now in a sea of invisible and indifferent hate that is far more concealed but hence, far more powerful.
For those familiar with thinker Michel Foucault, he proposes that power is like a web of invisible relations inscribed upon the moving and walking material body. It is like a phantasm, a chimerical ghoul, an insidious shadow that we cannot see, but exists. Foucault taking from the Newtonian maxim “for very action there is an equal and opposite reaction” also proffers along the same line that for all points of power, there are equal points of resistance.
Power is inscribed upon our body, we cannot see it but it exists and we cannot be indifferent to it. We need to understand how power works or how our judgments (or non judgments) and actions (or non actions) work. Since we actually embody all possible and actual power relations and their imperceptible fisticuffs, I have decided make it manifest by the logic of both Newton and Foucault. My way of doing so is to inverse the Newtonian-Foucauldian formula by first asserting a priori, a point of resistance or an opposite reaction. This a priori point of resistance and reaction is my arbitrary and rebellious act of dying my own hair gold (possible only because a “golden head” in Singapore is culturally symbolic of deviancy and notoriety justified by the fact that not many people walk around Singapore with “golden heads”). By the Newtonian-Foucauldian logic, my “golden head” as an arbitrary reactionary reflex resistance inscribed and dyed into my own body will manifest the actually existing power point reacting against my very reactionary move thereby illuminating the invisible power matrix and existing but invisible phantasm of power.
The “interplay” of action and reaction, power and resistance will thereby be shown to our naked eye at the moment of conscious judgment when people judge my “golden head” as some sort of act notoriety and villainous. This, or your very conscious judgment will become the very action that my “golden head” is reflexively reacting against. This artistic display will capture what Charles Baudelaire calls, the pregnated moment of tensions where power is in a dialectical squabble with itself and this moment will shine light upon the danger and violence of indifferent and careless judgment. The moment that people hastily, impetuously and impulsively cast a judgment upon this “golden head” prior to knowing me in person thereby signifies the moment or the very fact that objects of hate and ill-conceived judgment are more often than not innocent victims of your careless projectile impinging upon the highest moral fiber of any human’s soul.
This artistic display hopes to bring light and give life to our deadened and passive indifference thereby transmuting it into a living and animated essence of human kind. This artistic display also aims to unify what Marx calls, the alienated and estranged species-being - the being in us that is supposed to be active, thinking, and productive beings and not what Weber calls, cogs in a ceaselessly moving mechanism.
Where are you going? What are you doing? Who are you judging? What is your judgment or non-judgment doing?
This artistic display also includes a video slide-show. After watching the video, if you are supportive or even agreeable to this artistic display, I hope you will take the stalk of flower on the table and place it into the pot of soil at the front as an act of returning and giving life back to our non-life and indifference in any or all aspects of our own lives and as a recognition of the harm our indifference has caused. In the event you think your indifference has not caused harm, you may refrain from acting until a better reasoning has persuaded you to do so.
The final act is to put together your hands as if you were lifting mellifluously and gently with every grain of your soul the pot of flowers that you have pledged, at least for this moment to re-live and snap a photo of your hands as if it were holding up and giving back life to the earthly Eden that belongs and to who? but us? The completion of this artwork requires the putting together in a photo montage on the last but currently barren page, manifesting our very promise to liquidate indifference and give life to our earthy eden.
The boisterous and flamboyant chilli padi surrounding the and arrowing towards pot is a sign of heat, vigour and fervour that our barren earth with all the hate and harm caused due to the violence of indifference needs. The daisy like chrysanthemum yellow flowers that are hardy and can withstand wind and rain in the capricious calls of nature by virtue their sturdy nature, symbolizes the life we take responsibility to return to our earthly eden, our will to a pro-active stance and the potential for our will to stay strong.
It is not indifference that needs universality, but kindness and grace. If we do not return the spiritual aura to our barren earth, who will?
Embracing the humbling sprit of enlightenment,
Tan, Caryn.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
The need for Great and Beautiful Art
Abstract
The situation of contemporary Art is a difficult one. According to philosopher Arthur Danto, anything can be Art with the interruption of a theory. It also seems that a contemporary artwork does not need to be beautiful or great anymore. This paper rejects Arthur Danto’s post-historical notion of Art and pluralism (or escapism?) and urges the artworld of our era to continue the striving and search for a Great and useful Art of our time.
The irresolvable controversies of contemporary Art
Is this Art? Is everything Art?
The art of our age and its concomitant aesthetic experience however, is dumbfounding. It is sometimes, what I literally call, “empty art” like Alphonse Allais’s exhibition of a blank piece of paper in 1883 (Bell, pp. 199) or Duchamp’s ready-mades – the inversed urinal he called the Fountain and signed with a pseudoname R Mutt. When Duchamp submitted this Fountain urinal sculpture to the New York City art exhibition in 1917, it was rejected on grounds that what we now may even consider Art was simply not Art (Heller, 2002 pp. 102) at all. Or consider Felix Gonzalez Torres, a Cuban/American Artist’s “artwork” which involved replenishing a pile of “multicoloured candies individually wrapped in cellophane” displayed at the corner of New York’s Andrea Rosen Gallery (Heller, 2002 pp. 106). Contemporary art is simply puzzling.
Philosopher Arthur Danto (1992) argues that the key protagonist of such a “pluralistic” anything goes phenomenon in the artworld is of course, Andy Warhol. Warhol made the “sacred” and highly charged political emblems – the communist hammer and the sickle - into objects of daily life by purchasing the hammer and sickle from a local hardware store and photographing them as they were with their inscribed “Champion No. 15” trademarks and “True Temper” manufacturer trade name (1992: pp. 134). In the same fashion, Warhol also made what was aesthetically despised and denunciated as non-Art (anything commercial) into Art – coca-cola bottles, corn flakes, ketchup, Marilyn Monroe and high heels into Artworks. Through Warhol, the “sacred” was made de-sacred and the commonplace commercial mass produced everyday objects was made miraculous (1992: pp. 136-138) creating an egalitarian effect where everything could be Art. It was so controversial that Victor Bokris who wrote a biography of Warhol recounted how de Kooning a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist at a party in East Hampton confronted Warhol and chastised him: “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty and you’re even a killer of laughter. I can’t bear your work (Danto, 1992: pp. 155).”
For Danto, Warhol marked the end of a certain narrative (1992: pp. 10) or progressive historical direction (pp. 222) of Art. To create art, understand art and or to mount a criticism of Art is not anymore to align and situate oneself in a certain temporal-historical position such as “Raphaelites,” “Mondrian,” or “Abstract expressionism” and thereby making a judgment on what is art (or not). In Danto’s 1992 essay on Learning to live with pluralism, pluralism means that there is no grounds for excluding anything as Art and accepting that there is no truth and falsity in Art. It also means that Art does not need any historical vector as its touchstone anymore. Art was pronounced by Danto to have met its end and to be both post-historical and pluralistic. At present, anything can be art and because anything can be art, the only way to discern between what is art and not art or the real Brillo carton from Warhol’s “artistic” stacked Brillo Box is not visually or through any historical point but an interruption of a theory. Danto argues that “to see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge […] of an art world (1992: pp. 38).” In Danto’s The transfiguration of the Common place, he argues that to see something as art is to be ready to interpret it in terms of the art work itself - how and what the artwork itself means and not anymore based on any historical buttress. Since Warhol, the role of art is no longer to depict a true or false representation of reality.
Never mind that the Brillo box may not be good, much less great art. The impressive thing is that it is art at all. But if it is, why are not the indiscernible Brillo boxes that are in the stockroom7 Or has the whole distinction between art and reality broken down?
(Danto, 1964, pp. 581)
We are witnessing the disintegration of the distinctions between art and reality and according to Danto, living in a non-historical (or post-historical) world of art leaving the present-time for art as completely opened and filled with possibilities. For Danto, anything can be art and his pronouncement of “live with pluralism! accept pluralism!” simply makes contemporary art even harder to discern and descry. What is art? What is non-art? Are we really to take the stack of Brillo Boxes as Art? Is a plain wooden chair, Art?
The passé categorical imperative of
(a) Beauty
Contemporary artworks are sometimes also plainly shocking as exemplified by art entrepreneur Damien Hirst’s The physical impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) exhibiting a dead shark displayed in formaldehyde solution. Damien Hirst’s other “artworks” also involve taking photographs ‘with the dead’ – posing next to the decapitated head of a corpse in a morgue. This is contemporary art. Hilariously, there was once Hirst’s “artwork” – a pile of empty beer bottles, dirty ashtrays, coffee cups and candy wrappers at the London’s Eyestorm Gallery was “accidentally” thrown away by the Cleaner Emmanuel Asare who did not seem to think Hirst’s “artwork” was really art (Heller, 2002: pp. 115). Contemporary Art is controversial. It is sometimes just plainly shocking and undeletable. Contemporary art seems to be beyond even the categorical imperative of beautiful. It does not need to be beautiful. It furnishes an idea, intrigue and shock.
(b) Great
The Mona Lisa, one of Leonardo’s four surviving female portraits was the talk of the century attracting all literary and public attention. People wanted to know, who is Mona Lisa? Who is she smiling at? Why does she have such an enchanting smile? The artwork was analyzed to death from her translucent veil which gives depth to the painting, the spiral folds of the mantle across Mona Lisa’s left breast highlighting a close spatial relation between her sited position and the landscape, her face which looks in a different direction or in a contrapposto position, the asymmetrical background on the right vis-à-vis the left which all contributed to an illusion of movement (Sasson, 2002: pp. 35). Leonardo’s use of contrapposto was one of the very initial attempts to represent on a two dimensional flat surface, a three dimensional conception of movement even though the pose maybe static (Sasson, 2001: pp. 35). It was also the instance where Leonardo perfected the usage of the ‘pyramidal’ composition where the sitter’s hands provide the base of a pyramid with her head as the apex (Sasson, 2002: pp. 39) whom others like Raphael drew inspiration from in his paintings such as the Young Woman in a Loggia (1504, Louvre, Department of Graphic Arts) and Lady with a Unicorn (1506, Galleria Borghese, Rome) amongst many others.
People thought Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was a visual Zeitgeist – the spirit of her time and age possessing some sort of feminine intelligence, prophetic wisdom and immortality (Sasson, 2002: pp. 167). Poet Walter Pater thought Mona Lisa was the ideal of man’s fancy. She was described in comparison to the Greek goddesses in an enthralling and hypnotizing fashion.
The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ […] it is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!
(Sasson, 2002: pp. 137)
Mona Lisa is undoubtedly, a great artistic masterpiece. It was not only intellectually groundbreaking during its time. It also created, inspired and enthralled in Dutton’s (2009) terms, everyone’s imaginative experience – from literary poets, to actors and play wrights who made stories out of Mona Lisa, to journalists, historians and art critics who all wanted a say in Mona Lisa - into a great “free-play.”
Yet, contradistinguish this with perhaps, contemporary Art, the art of today.
At the Old Kallang Airport, one of Singapore’s 2011 Biennale sites, Gosia Wlodavczak’s frosted scribbles and drawings on the glass windows had an amusing idiosyncratic scribbling technique somewhat like Pollock’s famous drip paintings which simply defied all previous techniques and rules of painting. Old Kallang Airport also showcased Martin Creed’s use of thirty-nine metronomes and his huge neon luminous “artwork” or signs with wordings “DON’T WORRY,” Leonor Autunes’s hanging ropes of belt, Robert Macpherson’s Relics of boredom, and the now famous German Barn set up by the duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset.
Based on Dutton’s (2009) set of qualifying criterions of what is art, Gosia Wlodavczak’s artwork was by any standards, surely an stylistic, imaginative and tedious scribble, pleasurable to view and had expressive individuality. Along the same lines, Elmgreen and Dragset’s German barn is surely an imaginative and creative creation embodying a “special focus” (2009 pp. 56) as a ‘German object’ dislocated, displaced and bracketed off from ordinary German life and thrown into the kernel of urban Singapore. The displaced German Barn might have unsettled and destabilized Singaporeans’ sense of normality as situated in an urban landscape. But, the question is, are any of these artworks as skillful as groundbreaking or as Great as artworks like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa? Or Renaissance Artist Michelangelo’s the great touch? Or Raphael’s School of Athens? These artworks surely triggered an imaginative and intellectual experience (Dutton, 2009: pp. 58) but are they powerful enough to enthrall, excite and motivate us into a new revolutionary mode of thinking or action?
What then is contemporary Art?
Artworks for Adorno (1997), has a spirit or aura. The spirit is the breath that animates the artwork as a phenomenon (1997: pp. 84). The spirit of the artwork is itself an interior force of the artwork that at once moves and upon contemplation releases a moment of shudder in the age of commercial and objective reification (1997: pp. 79-80). All true artwork unveils, in this shudder, possible constellations that does not exist in society and brings up to our critical self-consciousness something not yet imprisoned by stability and universality (1997: pp. 83). Artworks through its own unique inner spirit unveil the antinomies, reified rigidities and irrationalities in our hyper rationalized and simplified world. Artworks show that the reified unity and seeming unchangeable fate as completely dogmatic (1997: pp. 95). The spirit of artworks has an immanently idealistic element (pp. 91) against reified realism and is as a corollary, a social critique or engagement (1997: pp. 93) with society.
Contemporary artworks according to Danto, now need an exterior theory to even buttress and tell an artistic object apart from its everyday use vis-à-vis Adorno’s notion of art as an interior avant-garde spirit that is its own necessary and sufficient law of form unveiling future possible constellations thereby rejecting fixation and reification in life. Danto’s doctrines of pluralism and his pronouncement of the end of art’s role to unveil a certain truth and falsity for a certain historical progression is a very dangerous idea for it deprives us of an idealism to resist the reifying effects of commodification and crass commercialism. The idea that anything goes as art – even stacked Brillo boxes or multicoloured sweets - and the concomitant collapse of artistic representation and reality into oneness maintained only haphazardly by a theory of art will dispossess us of a critical perspective once before possibly glimpsed through art. As Adorno argues, “artworks […] have a life sui generis. […] Important artworks constantly divulge new layers; they age, grow old and die (Adorno, 1997: pp. 4).” Artworks are supposed to be able to divulge new layers of meaning to human life and unveil new possibilities. Allowing anything to be art and living with pluralism does not do justice to this purposeful notion of Art. For the artworld, it means the end not of art but the end of the responsibility and mission to discover for ourselves what is the sort of Great art and aesthetic beauty of our age that is not merely reactionary or shocking such as Serrano’s Piss Christ or Damien Hirst’s photos with decapitated heads. If this is what marks contemporary art, the Leonardos, Raphaels and Michalangelos of the past who fought so valiantly for Greatness and a definitive moment of Art, would mock us.
As Julian Spalding (2003) urges, and rightly, we need to search (or perhaps, fight) for an aesthetic light out of pluralism and relativism. It is the role of people of the artworld to ensure that the current “dumbfounding” and “shocking” eclipse will pass into a greater light that will once again give us a “shudder,” enthrall us and excite our conscious imaginations again (Spalding, 2003: pp. 97-98).
A case in point: The necessary fight for an artistic experience
According to Marx (1998), “the history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of class struggles.” Time is necessarily cumulative and progressive. Every era, is an era of dialectical struggle(s) and our contemporary era is of no exception. Ideas are built upon ideas. The beauty and achievements of our society are not created ex nihilo. Society evolved through what it inherited from our predecessors of the past and this is how it is even with the current conception of a “pure artistic experience.”
Even our eighteen-century thinkers had a mission. They were fighting passionately for the freedom of man from the vicissitudes of their time where man’s autonomy and substantiality was lost to an over-determining science and mechanical nature. As such, aesthetics not limited to just art and painting but also, poetry and theatrical tragedy which in the eighteen-century took on a distinctive flavour against this very material order of nature.
Some like Fredrich Lessing argued that Poetry which uses “immaterial and arbitrary signs” necessarily free from the referential existential presence of the objects allows the poet to go in its own succession of signs into a realm where even “artistic painting” (which has to refer and be a mimesis of nature) cannot follow (Berstein, 2003: pp. xvi). Fredrich Schlegal in his ‘Athenaeum Fragments’ argues that the will of the poet is above all else when his poem is in an incomplete state of becoming “forever be becoming and never perfected […] (Berstein, 2003: pp. 249; AF 116)” because only then can poetry be infinite and free. Freedom of the poet, painter and of all man’s aesthetic experience of beauty is crucial to these thinkers and must be free because it is the only way we can transcend and triumph against mechanical causality and ends of nature.
This led to Immanuel Kant’s (in)famous saying that beauty has no objective rule of taste. Kant’s second major work, the Critique of the Power of Judgment offered a counter-intuitive argument that all our experiences of beauty must not be subjected to subsumption under any interests, purposes, concepts and uses. When we experience the “manifold of intuitions” as beautiful, our powers of cognition are set into a “free play” where “no determinate concept restricts them to any particular rule of cognition” (Kant, 2002: CPJ §9 5:217). Sometimes, Kant argues that beauty is a state where our imagination is both “free and yet lawful by itself” (Kant, 2002: CPJ §22 5:240-1). Beauty is free without concepts and utility (Guyer, pp. 119). The pure judgment of beauty for Kant is encapsulated in his infamous statement that “purposiveness of an object insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end (Kant, 2002: CPJ §17 5:236).” The view of the eighteen-century was that in the experience of beauty and in artistic representation, our imagination is incited into a moment “full of potentiality, full of the past which produced it and full of the future to come, so the more we see, the more we are able to imagine (Berstein, 2003: pp. xiii).” The highest rule-giver or in Kant’s fanciful terminology, the highest a priori original synthetic unity of Apperception, must be man and our faculty of imagination because only with our imagination, can we go beyond material determining nature.
The eighteen-century concept of purity and purposiveness without purpose emerged out of the context of what is justifiably called the “menacing advance of science” razing everything into a deterministic causal equation. Eighteen-century thinkers were fighting for the usefulness of the concept of the purity of artistic experience that will return man his self-determining autonomy from the clutches of mechanistic nature.
Conclusion
What however, are Artists of our contemporary age fighting for? Are we even actually engaging in a serious fight for any definitive notion of art and beauty? To say that an external discourse of reasons and theoretical inscription is all we need to make art, art, is simply evading the necessary struggle to produce a Great artwork with an interior spirit or aura that is its own law of form unveiling and leading progressive thought. As Kuo Pao Kun (1995) rightly said, “I think you can’t really assert an identity or feeling of yourself unless you go through a process of searching, and I mean, really applying your heart and soul, your body; a process which usually needs to be traumatic, maybe not in the most physical sense of the word, but traumatic nonetheless. Otherwise it doesn’t leave a trace… I think we need to pay that price, you can’t buy it (1995: pp. 27).” In fact, as a reply to Danto, I argue that there are some things theory cannot give and must not create a false illusion that we have possession of. The interior spirit of Great Art is supposed to push the boundaries of the actual so that posterity can inherit a worthy product of our struggles to again share it with their own descendents and so to constantly bring human life towards a beautiful end
References
Adorno, W. Theodore (1997) ‘Art Society and Aesthetics’ in Aesthetic Theory (ed.) & trans. By Robert Hullot Kentor University of Minnesota Press pp. 1-16.
Adorno, W. Theodore (1997) ‘Art Beauty’ in Aesthetic Theory (ed.) & trans. By Robert Hullot Kentor University of Minnesota Press pp. 78-100.
Berstein, J. M (2003) Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics UK: Cambridge University Press pp. vii-297.
Danto, Arthur (1964) The Artworld in The Journal of Philosophy Vol 61. No. 19. Journal of Philosophy: Pp 571-584.
Danto, Arthur (1981) Transfiguration of the Commonplace: a Philosophy of Art Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.
Danto, Arthur (1992) Beyond the Brillo Box Berkeley and Los Angelas, California: University of California Press pp. 3-233.
Dutton, Denis, (2009). Chapter 3: ‘What is Art?’ The Art Instinct: Beauty. Pleasure, and Human evolution. Oxford University Press, pp. 29-47.
Guyer, Paul (2005) Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Heller, G. Nancy, (2002) Why Painting is Like a Pizza: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art Nancy Princeton University Press pp. 6-176.
Kant, Immanuel (2002) Critique of the Power of Judgment (ed.) & trans. Paul Guyer NY: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, Karl (1998) The German ideology: including Theses on Feuerbach and introduction to The critique of political economy USA, NY: Prometheus Books.
Kuo, Pao Kun, (1995) ‘Commentary by Kuo Pao Kun.’ In Lee Weng Choy (ed.) Art vs Art: Conflict & Convergence – The substation Conference 1993, Singapore: The substation, pp. 27.
Sasson, Donald, (2002). Mona Lisa The history of the world’s most famous painting London: Harper Collins Publishers pp. 1-281.
Spalding, Julian, (2003). Chapter 5 ‘The Passing of the Eclipse’, The Eclipse of Art: Tackling Crisis in Art Today. London: Prestel, pp. 97-115.
The situation of contemporary Art is a difficult one. According to philosopher Arthur Danto, anything can be Art with the interruption of a theory. It also seems that a contemporary artwork does not need to be beautiful or great anymore. This paper rejects Arthur Danto’s post-historical notion of Art and pluralism (or escapism?) and urges the artworld of our era to continue the striving and search for a Great and useful Art of our time.
The irresolvable controversies of contemporary Art
Is this Art? Is everything Art?
The art of our age and its concomitant aesthetic experience however, is dumbfounding. It is sometimes, what I literally call, “empty art” like Alphonse Allais’s exhibition of a blank piece of paper in 1883 (Bell, pp. 199) or Duchamp’s ready-mades – the inversed urinal he called the Fountain and signed with a pseudoname R Mutt. When Duchamp submitted this Fountain urinal sculpture to the New York City art exhibition in 1917, it was rejected on grounds that what we now may even consider Art was simply not Art (Heller, 2002 pp. 102) at all. Or consider Felix Gonzalez Torres, a Cuban/American Artist’s “artwork” which involved replenishing a pile of “multicoloured candies individually wrapped in cellophane” displayed at the corner of New York’s Andrea Rosen Gallery (Heller, 2002 pp. 106). Contemporary art is simply puzzling.
Philosopher Arthur Danto (1992) argues that the key protagonist of such a “pluralistic” anything goes phenomenon in the artworld is of course, Andy Warhol. Warhol made the “sacred” and highly charged political emblems – the communist hammer and the sickle - into objects of daily life by purchasing the hammer and sickle from a local hardware store and photographing them as they were with their inscribed “Champion No. 15” trademarks and “True Temper” manufacturer trade name (1992: pp. 134). In the same fashion, Warhol also made what was aesthetically despised and denunciated as non-Art (anything commercial) into Art – coca-cola bottles, corn flakes, ketchup, Marilyn Monroe and high heels into Artworks. Through Warhol, the “sacred” was made de-sacred and the commonplace commercial mass produced everyday objects was made miraculous (1992: pp. 136-138) creating an egalitarian effect where everything could be Art. It was so controversial that Victor Bokris who wrote a biography of Warhol recounted how de Kooning a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist at a party in East Hampton confronted Warhol and chastised him: “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty and you’re even a killer of laughter. I can’t bear your work (Danto, 1992: pp. 155).”
For Danto, Warhol marked the end of a certain narrative (1992: pp. 10) or progressive historical direction (pp. 222) of Art. To create art, understand art and or to mount a criticism of Art is not anymore to align and situate oneself in a certain temporal-historical position such as “Raphaelites,” “Mondrian,” or “Abstract expressionism” and thereby making a judgment on what is art (or not). In Danto’s 1992 essay on Learning to live with pluralism, pluralism means that there is no grounds for excluding anything as Art and accepting that there is no truth and falsity in Art. It also means that Art does not need any historical vector as its touchstone anymore. Art was pronounced by Danto to have met its end and to be both post-historical and pluralistic. At present, anything can be art and because anything can be art, the only way to discern between what is art and not art or the real Brillo carton from Warhol’s “artistic” stacked Brillo Box is not visually or through any historical point but an interruption of a theory. Danto argues that “to see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge […] of an art world (1992: pp. 38).” In Danto’s The transfiguration of the Common place, he argues that to see something as art is to be ready to interpret it in terms of the art work itself - how and what the artwork itself means and not anymore based on any historical buttress. Since Warhol, the role of art is no longer to depict a true or false representation of reality.
Never mind that the Brillo box may not be good, much less great art. The impressive thing is that it is art at all. But if it is, why are not the indiscernible Brillo boxes that are in the stockroom7 Or has the whole distinction between art and reality broken down?
(Danto, 1964, pp. 581)
We are witnessing the disintegration of the distinctions between art and reality and according to Danto, living in a non-historical (or post-historical) world of art leaving the present-time for art as completely opened and filled with possibilities. For Danto, anything can be art and his pronouncement of “live with pluralism! accept pluralism!” simply makes contemporary art even harder to discern and descry. What is art? What is non-art? Are we really to take the stack of Brillo Boxes as Art? Is a plain wooden chair, Art?
The passé categorical imperative of
(a) Beauty
Contemporary artworks are sometimes also plainly shocking as exemplified by art entrepreneur Damien Hirst’s The physical impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) exhibiting a dead shark displayed in formaldehyde solution. Damien Hirst’s other “artworks” also involve taking photographs ‘with the dead’ – posing next to the decapitated head of a corpse in a morgue. This is contemporary art. Hilariously, there was once Hirst’s “artwork” – a pile of empty beer bottles, dirty ashtrays, coffee cups and candy wrappers at the London’s Eyestorm Gallery was “accidentally” thrown away by the Cleaner Emmanuel Asare who did not seem to think Hirst’s “artwork” was really art (Heller, 2002: pp. 115). Contemporary Art is controversial. It is sometimes just plainly shocking and undeletable. Contemporary art seems to be beyond even the categorical imperative of beautiful. It does not need to be beautiful. It furnishes an idea, intrigue and shock.
(b) Great
The Mona Lisa, one of Leonardo’s four surviving female portraits was the talk of the century attracting all literary and public attention. People wanted to know, who is Mona Lisa? Who is she smiling at? Why does she have such an enchanting smile? The artwork was analyzed to death from her translucent veil which gives depth to the painting, the spiral folds of the mantle across Mona Lisa’s left breast highlighting a close spatial relation between her sited position and the landscape, her face which looks in a different direction or in a contrapposto position, the asymmetrical background on the right vis-à-vis the left which all contributed to an illusion of movement (Sasson, 2002: pp. 35). Leonardo’s use of contrapposto was one of the very initial attempts to represent on a two dimensional flat surface, a three dimensional conception of movement even though the pose maybe static (Sasson, 2001: pp. 35). It was also the instance where Leonardo perfected the usage of the ‘pyramidal’ composition where the sitter’s hands provide the base of a pyramid with her head as the apex (Sasson, 2002: pp. 39) whom others like Raphael drew inspiration from in his paintings such as the Young Woman in a Loggia (1504, Louvre, Department of Graphic Arts) and Lady with a Unicorn (1506, Galleria Borghese, Rome) amongst many others.
People thought Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was a visual Zeitgeist – the spirit of her time and age possessing some sort of feminine intelligence, prophetic wisdom and immortality (Sasson, 2002: pp. 167). Poet Walter Pater thought Mona Lisa was the ideal of man’s fancy. She was described in comparison to the Greek goddesses in an enthralling and hypnotizing fashion.
The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the world are come,’ […] it is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed!
(Sasson, 2002: pp. 137)
Mona Lisa is undoubtedly, a great artistic masterpiece. It was not only intellectually groundbreaking during its time. It also created, inspired and enthralled in Dutton’s (2009) terms, everyone’s imaginative experience – from literary poets, to actors and play wrights who made stories out of Mona Lisa, to journalists, historians and art critics who all wanted a say in Mona Lisa - into a great “free-play.”
Yet, contradistinguish this with perhaps, contemporary Art, the art of today.
At the Old Kallang Airport, one of Singapore’s 2011 Biennale sites, Gosia Wlodavczak’s frosted scribbles and drawings on the glass windows had an amusing idiosyncratic scribbling technique somewhat like Pollock’s famous drip paintings which simply defied all previous techniques and rules of painting. Old Kallang Airport also showcased Martin Creed’s use of thirty-nine metronomes and his huge neon luminous “artwork” or signs with wordings “DON’T WORRY,” Leonor Autunes’s hanging ropes of belt, Robert Macpherson’s Relics of boredom, and the now famous German Barn set up by the duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset.
Based on Dutton’s (2009) set of qualifying criterions of what is art, Gosia Wlodavczak’s artwork was by any standards, surely an stylistic, imaginative and tedious scribble, pleasurable to view and had expressive individuality. Along the same lines, Elmgreen and Dragset’s German barn is surely an imaginative and creative creation embodying a “special focus” (2009 pp. 56) as a ‘German object’ dislocated, displaced and bracketed off from ordinary German life and thrown into the kernel of urban Singapore. The displaced German Barn might have unsettled and destabilized Singaporeans’ sense of normality as situated in an urban landscape. But, the question is, are any of these artworks as skillful as groundbreaking or as Great as artworks like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa? Or Renaissance Artist Michelangelo’s the great touch? Or Raphael’s School of Athens? These artworks surely triggered an imaginative and intellectual experience (Dutton, 2009: pp. 58) but are they powerful enough to enthrall, excite and motivate us into a new revolutionary mode of thinking or action?
What then is contemporary Art?
Artworks for Adorno (1997), has a spirit or aura. The spirit is the breath that animates the artwork as a phenomenon (1997: pp. 84). The spirit of the artwork is itself an interior force of the artwork that at once moves and upon contemplation releases a moment of shudder in the age of commercial and objective reification (1997: pp. 79-80). All true artwork unveils, in this shudder, possible constellations that does not exist in society and brings up to our critical self-consciousness something not yet imprisoned by stability and universality (1997: pp. 83). Artworks through its own unique inner spirit unveil the antinomies, reified rigidities and irrationalities in our hyper rationalized and simplified world. Artworks show that the reified unity and seeming unchangeable fate as completely dogmatic (1997: pp. 95). The spirit of artworks has an immanently idealistic element (pp. 91) against reified realism and is as a corollary, a social critique or engagement (1997: pp. 93) with society.
Contemporary artworks according to Danto, now need an exterior theory to even buttress and tell an artistic object apart from its everyday use vis-à-vis Adorno’s notion of art as an interior avant-garde spirit that is its own necessary and sufficient law of form unveiling future possible constellations thereby rejecting fixation and reification in life. Danto’s doctrines of pluralism and his pronouncement of the end of art’s role to unveil a certain truth and falsity for a certain historical progression is a very dangerous idea for it deprives us of an idealism to resist the reifying effects of commodification and crass commercialism. The idea that anything goes as art – even stacked Brillo boxes or multicoloured sweets - and the concomitant collapse of artistic representation and reality into oneness maintained only haphazardly by a theory of art will dispossess us of a critical perspective once before possibly glimpsed through art. As Adorno argues, “artworks […] have a life sui generis. […] Important artworks constantly divulge new layers; they age, grow old and die (Adorno, 1997: pp. 4).” Artworks are supposed to be able to divulge new layers of meaning to human life and unveil new possibilities. Allowing anything to be art and living with pluralism does not do justice to this purposeful notion of Art. For the artworld, it means the end not of art but the end of the responsibility and mission to discover for ourselves what is the sort of Great art and aesthetic beauty of our age that is not merely reactionary or shocking such as Serrano’s Piss Christ or Damien Hirst’s photos with decapitated heads. If this is what marks contemporary art, the Leonardos, Raphaels and Michalangelos of the past who fought so valiantly for Greatness and a definitive moment of Art, would mock us.
As Julian Spalding (2003) urges, and rightly, we need to search (or perhaps, fight) for an aesthetic light out of pluralism and relativism. It is the role of people of the artworld to ensure that the current “dumbfounding” and “shocking” eclipse will pass into a greater light that will once again give us a “shudder,” enthrall us and excite our conscious imaginations again (Spalding, 2003: pp. 97-98).
A case in point: The necessary fight for an artistic experience
According to Marx (1998), “the history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of class struggles.” Time is necessarily cumulative and progressive. Every era, is an era of dialectical struggle(s) and our contemporary era is of no exception. Ideas are built upon ideas. The beauty and achievements of our society are not created ex nihilo. Society evolved through what it inherited from our predecessors of the past and this is how it is even with the current conception of a “pure artistic experience.”
Even our eighteen-century thinkers had a mission. They were fighting passionately for the freedom of man from the vicissitudes of their time where man’s autonomy and substantiality was lost to an over-determining science and mechanical nature. As such, aesthetics not limited to just art and painting but also, poetry and theatrical tragedy which in the eighteen-century took on a distinctive flavour against this very material order of nature.
Some like Fredrich Lessing argued that Poetry which uses “immaterial and arbitrary signs” necessarily free from the referential existential presence of the objects allows the poet to go in its own succession of signs into a realm where even “artistic painting” (which has to refer and be a mimesis of nature) cannot follow (Berstein, 2003: pp. xvi). Fredrich Schlegal in his ‘Athenaeum Fragments’ argues that the will of the poet is above all else when his poem is in an incomplete state of becoming “forever be becoming and never perfected […] (Berstein, 2003: pp. 249; AF 116)” because only then can poetry be infinite and free. Freedom of the poet, painter and of all man’s aesthetic experience of beauty is crucial to these thinkers and must be free because it is the only way we can transcend and triumph against mechanical causality and ends of nature.
This led to Immanuel Kant’s (in)famous saying that beauty has no objective rule of taste. Kant’s second major work, the Critique of the Power of Judgment offered a counter-intuitive argument that all our experiences of beauty must not be subjected to subsumption under any interests, purposes, concepts and uses. When we experience the “manifold of intuitions” as beautiful, our powers of cognition are set into a “free play” where “no determinate concept restricts them to any particular rule of cognition” (Kant, 2002: CPJ §9 5:217). Sometimes, Kant argues that beauty is a state where our imagination is both “free and yet lawful by itself” (Kant, 2002: CPJ §22 5:240-1). Beauty is free without concepts and utility (Guyer, pp. 119). The pure judgment of beauty for Kant is encapsulated in his infamous statement that “purposiveness of an object insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end (Kant, 2002: CPJ §17 5:236).” The view of the eighteen-century was that in the experience of beauty and in artistic representation, our imagination is incited into a moment “full of potentiality, full of the past which produced it and full of the future to come, so the more we see, the more we are able to imagine (Berstein, 2003: pp. xiii).” The highest rule-giver or in Kant’s fanciful terminology, the highest a priori original synthetic unity of Apperception, must be man and our faculty of imagination because only with our imagination, can we go beyond material determining nature.
The eighteen-century concept of purity and purposiveness without purpose emerged out of the context of what is justifiably called the “menacing advance of science” razing everything into a deterministic causal equation. Eighteen-century thinkers were fighting for the usefulness of the concept of the purity of artistic experience that will return man his self-determining autonomy from the clutches of mechanistic nature.
Conclusion
What however, are Artists of our contemporary age fighting for? Are we even actually engaging in a serious fight for any definitive notion of art and beauty? To say that an external discourse of reasons and theoretical inscription is all we need to make art, art, is simply evading the necessary struggle to produce a Great artwork with an interior spirit or aura that is its own law of form unveiling and leading progressive thought. As Kuo Pao Kun (1995) rightly said, “I think you can’t really assert an identity or feeling of yourself unless you go through a process of searching, and I mean, really applying your heart and soul, your body; a process which usually needs to be traumatic, maybe not in the most physical sense of the word, but traumatic nonetheless. Otherwise it doesn’t leave a trace… I think we need to pay that price, you can’t buy it (1995: pp. 27).” In fact, as a reply to Danto, I argue that there are some things theory cannot give and must not create a false illusion that we have possession of. The interior spirit of Great Art is supposed to push the boundaries of the actual so that posterity can inherit a worthy product of our struggles to again share it with their own descendents and so to constantly bring human life towards a beautiful end
References
Adorno, W. Theodore (1997) ‘Art Society and Aesthetics’ in Aesthetic Theory (ed.) & trans. By Robert Hullot Kentor University of Minnesota Press pp. 1-16.
Adorno, W. Theodore (1997) ‘Art Beauty’ in Aesthetic Theory (ed.) & trans. By Robert Hullot Kentor University of Minnesota Press pp. 78-100.
Berstein, J. M (2003) Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics UK: Cambridge University Press pp. vii-297.
Danto, Arthur (1964) The Artworld in The Journal of Philosophy Vol 61. No. 19. Journal of Philosophy: Pp 571-584.
Danto, Arthur (1981) Transfiguration of the Commonplace: a Philosophy of Art Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.
Danto, Arthur (1992) Beyond the Brillo Box Berkeley and Los Angelas, California: University of California Press pp. 3-233.
Dutton, Denis, (2009). Chapter 3: ‘What is Art?’ The Art Instinct: Beauty. Pleasure, and Human evolution. Oxford University Press, pp. 29-47.
Guyer, Paul (2005) Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Heller, G. Nancy, (2002) Why Painting is Like a Pizza: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art Nancy Princeton University Press pp. 6-176.
Kant, Immanuel (2002) Critique of the Power of Judgment (ed.) & trans. Paul Guyer NY: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, Karl (1998) The German ideology: including Theses on Feuerbach and introduction to The critique of political economy USA, NY: Prometheus Books.
Kuo, Pao Kun, (1995) ‘Commentary by Kuo Pao Kun.’ In Lee Weng Choy (ed.) Art vs Art: Conflict & Convergence – The substation Conference 1993, Singapore: The substation, pp. 27.
Sasson, Donald, (2002). Mona Lisa The history of the world’s most famous painting London: Harper Collins Publishers pp. 1-281.
Spalding, Julian, (2003). Chapter 5 ‘The Passing of the Eclipse’, The Eclipse of Art: Tackling Crisis in Art Today. London: Prestel, pp. 97-115.
Art according to Dewey, is the core of human experience. Art for Dewey is like Kant’s imaginative apperception and categorical imperatives, the highest synthesis. It is universal and plunges directly into the attitudes. Art transcends the particulars. It is more effective than Reason or speech. It strives into the deepest elements of all civilizations, directly. Hence, the penetration of Art into our human psyches necessarily expands our humanly experiences and melts away distinctions and thereby making communication possible. “Civilization is uncivilized because human beings are divided into non-communicating sects, races, nations, classes and cliques (AE, pp. 350).”
Forces of our civilization have for a long time isolated Art and render the latter a duly isolated phenomenon. When nature is to science wholly physical and encased with domineering a scientific outlook Art becomes alienated from man. When the capitalistic economic structure turns all man into means for a profitable end, art is further alienated from man for the ends of art are divergent from profitable ends.
The imaginative element of art makes the actual buoyant again. It lifts the possibilities woven in the indurated actual and transcends ossified rules into once again, liberal thoughts for everyone.
Forces of our civilization have for a long time isolated Art and render the latter a duly isolated phenomenon. When nature is to science wholly physical and encased with domineering a scientific outlook Art becomes alienated from man. When the capitalistic economic structure turns all man into means for a profitable end, art is further alienated from man for the ends of art are divergent from profitable ends.
The imaginative element of art makes the actual buoyant again. It lifts the possibilities woven in the indurated actual and transcends ossified rules into once again, liberal thoughts for everyone.
The more I am disallowed, the more I want to be. The more the world is framed in its pragmatic outlook alienated from the beauty of experience and the pulse of life, the more I will rage with a maniac fanaticism to embody the vivacity of life and thereby, to change the world. The more people degenerate into believing in cultural relativism and virtual reality, the more I think there is a need to structure a framework with logic and reason to infuse the platonic distinctions between Forms and particulars again.
The only virtual reality is not in some machine capsule but in the human mind. Here, all that is solid melts into air. Here, fine lines are razed and distinctions transmute and transcend each other. Here, all pre-conceived notions of perfection becomes outmoded and what is revealed is an Aristotlian type of human being (Ousia or Ousiology) never in perfect teleion but imperfect a-teles - always working continuously towards his goal or his ideal form, always in in kinesis or continual movement towards perfection. Life, is an eternal state of disorder and untidiness where humans are obliged to erect an organized beauty from. Death only returns this organized beauty to its natural eternal state of disorder. Yet, whatever we have fondled and tempered with will forever bear our humanly imprints. The only way to leave our mark is to sear them into our material chaotic beauty of nature for then and only then can another creator in posterity transmute them into a living and breathing creature.
The only virtual reality is not in some machine capsule but in the human mind. Here, all that is solid melts into air. Here, fine lines are razed and distinctions transmute and transcend each other. Here, all pre-conceived notions of perfection becomes outmoded and what is revealed is an Aristotlian type of human being (Ousia or Ousiology) never in perfect teleion but imperfect a-teles - always working continuously towards his goal or his ideal form, always in in kinesis or continual movement towards perfection. Life, is an eternal state of disorder and untidiness where humans are obliged to erect an organized beauty from. Death only returns this organized beauty to its natural eternal state of disorder. Yet, whatever we have fondled and tempered with will forever bear our humanly imprints. The only way to leave our mark is to sear them into our material chaotic beauty of nature for then and only then can another creator in posterity transmute them into a living and breathing creature.
On Kant’s aesthetics – the harmony of faculties revisited in Paul Guyer’s (2005) ‘Values of Beauty Historical Essays in Aesthetics.’
There are stronger views which seems to be the more notoriously popular school of thought that Kant thinks that the mind ranges indeterminately amongst a multitude of concepts (Guyer pp. 91). The contention for this group that the judgment of beauty is “indeterminate” for Kant wrote that “In our power of judgment we perceive purposiveness insofar as it merely reflect upon a given object… in order to bring the empirical intuition of that concept under some concept (it is indeterminate which) (pp. 91).” But Guyer contents that this argument that aesthetic experience involves an indeterminate concept or indeterminate multitude of concepts is weak because it is more likely that Kant is saying that experience of beauty somehow involves our faculty of concepts without any particular or specific concepts (pp. 92). He argues that Kant thinks that the judgment of beauty the faculty of concepts without any specific concept (pp. 92). Guyer also does not agree that the experience of beauty is a “play” of concepts or conceptual possibilities upon viewing an object either. For these “plays” back and forth amongst an indeterminate multitude of concepts, he questions, why should this play be pleasing? (pp. 93). In fact he says that not being able to find a stable ground can be a frustrating experience.
The experience of beauty is not a instantaneous but a protracted experience (pp. 93). When we experience a beauty of something, it remains in our minds and captivates us for sometime because beauty has a causality in itself where it can maintain the state of the representation of the mind and the occupation of cognitive powers. The contemplation of beauty itself strengthens and reproduces itself (CPJ S12 5:222). Pleasure like Spinoza’s argument on the inherent nature of positive affects is something that wants to stay and prolong itself. Like Spinoza, For Kant, this state of pleasure is in itself a positive one on the outside (Guyer pp. 94). Thus, pleasure we derive from experiencing beauty is not derived from “conceptual possibilities” but in fact from the very state of pleasure as its starting point, itself (Guyer, pp. 94).
The quandary Guyer points out is that based on Kant’s first critique in the sections on Transcendental Analytic, Kant argues that pure concepts of the understanding are forms of determinate empirical concepts. Determinate empirical concepts are needed for us to be conscious of any representations (pp. 96). Also, in the first critique there seems to be the need for a transcendental unity of apperception to bring together the faculty of understanding and manifold representations (pp. 96). Based on the first critique then, it is impossible for us to be conscious of anything without applying a determinate concept and without some form of correspondence between the understanding and imagination (pp. 96). Hence, it cannot be that Kant is saying that in the experiencing of beauty, there is no determinate concepts applicable to the empirical representation.
Guyer also does not think that the experience of beauty without an intended end or use of the object in experience (pp. 97). He argues that Kant suggests that in the third Critique, Kant argues that pleasure is typically connected with the attainment of an aim of some sort (pp. 97) and that in the discussing of practical reason, Kant suggests that the very power of the mind has a characteristic aim and characteristic interest (pp. 97).
The free play of the imagination and understanding is to be understood in Guyer’s very own “metacognitive approach.” He argues that the free play relation between the understanding and the imagination is something additional (my emphasis) to the ordinary cognition (pp. 101) of an object. Quoting Guyer, “… there are concepts available for the object and that the experience of beauty must be compatible with the availability of those concepts (pp. 101.)” The supporting contextual text for Guyer is to be located in Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful where Kant writes:
“But if in the judgment of taste the imagination must be considered in its freedom, then it is in the first instance taken not as reproductive, as subjected to the laws of association but as productive and self-active (as theauthoress of voluntary forms of possible intuitions): an although in the apprenehsion of a given object of the senses it is of course bound to a determinate form
of this object and to this extent has no free play (as in invention), nevertheless it is still quite conceivable that the object can provide it with a form that contains precisely such a composition of the manifold as the imagination would design in harmony with the lawfulness of the understanding in general if it were left free by itself.”
(CPJ. General Remark following S22 5:241)
Forms of the object still in some way fufill the requirements of lawfulness demanded by the understanding (pp. 102). Guyer in addition argues that the only coherent way to understand the experience of beauty is by this approach that is in tandem with Kant’s theory of apperception and really, how else is it possible for the judgment of taste to be universally valid then to be in some ways connected with the lawfulness of understanding that produces validity of our experiences (of beauty)? Thus, Guyer concludes to point 7 in his Harmony of Faculties Revisisted that experience of beauty fulfills basic requirements of understanding’s lawfulness and simultaneously goes beyond it.
The work of Art is hence, produced according to some ends or rules in the mind of the Artist but rules are never sufficient to determine the work because its success depends on our experience prompted by the genius of the artist, of a free play of our cognitive cognitive powers which satisfies rules but goes beyond the satisfaction of rules (pp. 107). It is futile to say that in the creation of art, art does not presuppose an end. There in fact needs to be a first ground concept of what the art is to be. Yet, the experience (proportion and disposition) of the beauty of art is not constrained by the lawfulness of the understanding. Art fulfills this lawfulness and (my emphasis) produces a free play of the imagination and understanding beyond the mere satisfaction of these constraints.
There are stronger views which seems to be the more notoriously popular school of thought that Kant thinks that the mind ranges indeterminately amongst a multitude of concepts (Guyer pp. 91). The contention for this group that the judgment of beauty is “indeterminate” for Kant wrote that “In our power of judgment we perceive purposiveness insofar as it merely reflect upon a given object… in order to bring the empirical intuition of that concept under some concept (it is indeterminate which) (pp. 91).” But Guyer contents that this argument that aesthetic experience involves an indeterminate concept or indeterminate multitude of concepts is weak because it is more likely that Kant is saying that experience of beauty somehow involves our faculty of concepts without any particular or specific concepts (pp. 92). He argues that Kant thinks that the judgment of beauty the faculty of concepts without any specific concept (pp. 92). Guyer also does not agree that the experience of beauty is a “play” of concepts or conceptual possibilities upon viewing an object either. For these “plays” back and forth amongst an indeterminate multitude of concepts, he questions, why should this play be pleasing? (pp. 93). In fact he says that not being able to find a stable ground can be a frustrating experience.
The experience of beauty is not a instantaneous but a protracted experience (pp. 93). When we experience a beauty of something, it remains in our minds and captivates us for sometime because beauty has a causality in itself where it can maintain the state of the representation of the mind and the occupation of cognitive powers. The contemplation of beauty itself strengthens and reproduces itself (CPJ S12 5:222). Pleasure like Spinoza’s argument on the inherent nature of positive affects is something that wants to stay and prolong itself. Like Spinoza, For Kant, this state of pleasure is in itself a positive one on the outside (Guyer pp. 94). Thus, pleasure we derive from experiencing beauty is not derived from “conceptual possibilities” but in fact from the very state of pleasure as its starting point, itself (Guyer, pp. 94).
The quandary Guyer points out is that based on Kant’s first critique in the sections on Transcendental Analytic, Kant argues that pure concepts of the understanding are forms of determinate empirical concepts. Determinate empirical concepts are needed for us to be conscious of any representations (pp. 96). Also, in the first critique there seems to be the need for a transcendental unity of apperception to bring together the faculty of understanding and manifold representations (pp. 96). Based on the first critique then, it is impossible for us to be conscious of anything without applying a determinate concept and without some form of correspondence between the understanding and imagination (pp. 96). Hence, it cannot be that Kant is saying that in the experiencing of beauty, there is no determinate concepts applicable to the empirical representation.
Guyer also does not think that the experience of beauty without an intended end or use of the object in experience (pp. 97). He argues that Kant suggests that in the third Critique, Kant argues that pleasure is typically connected with the attainment of an aim of some sort (pp. 97) and that in the discussing of practical reason, Kant suggests that the very power of the mind has a characteristic aim and characteristic interest (pp. 97).
The free play of the imagination and understanding is to be understood in Guyer’s very own “metacognitive approach.” He argues that the free play relation between the understanding and the imagination is something additional (my emphasis) to the ordinary cognition (pp. 101) of an object. Quoting Guyer, “… there are concepts available for the object and that the experience of beauty must be compatible with the availability of those concepts (pp. 101.)” The supporting contextual text for Guyer is to be located in Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful where Kant writes:
“But if in the judgment of taste the imagination must be considered in its freedom, then it is in the first instance taken not as reproductive, as subjected to the laws of association but as productive and self-active (as theauthoress of voluntary forms of possible intuitions): an although in the apprenehsion of a given object of the senses it is of course bound to a determinate form
of this object and to this extent has no free play (as in invention), nevertheless it is still quite conceivable that the object can provide it with a form that contains precisely such a composition of the manifold as the imagination would design in harmony with the lawfulness of the understanding in general if it were left free by itself.”
(CPJ. General Remark following S22 5:241)
Forms of the object still in some way fufill the requirements of lawfulness demanded by the understanding (pp. 102). Guyer in addition argues that the only coherent way to understand the experience of beauty is by this approach that is in tandem with Kant’s theory of apperception and really, how else is it possible for the judgment of taste to be universally valid then to be in some ways connected with the lawfulness of understanding that produces validity of our experiences (of beauty)? Thus, Guyer concludes to point 7 in his Harmony of Faculties Revisisted that experience of beauty fulfills basic requirements of understanding’s lawfulness and simultaneously goes beyond it.
The work of Art is hence, produced according to some ends or rules in the mind of the Artist but rules are never sufficient to determine the work because its success depends on our experience prompted by the genius of the artist, of a free play of our cognitive cognitive powers which satisfies rules but goes beyond the satisfaction of rules (pp. 107). It is futile to say that in the creation of art, art does not presuppose an end. There in fact needs to be a first ground concept of what the art is to be. Yet, the experience (proportion and disposition) of the beauty of art is not constrained by the lawfulness of the understanding. Art fulfills this lawfulness and (my emphasis) produces a free play of the imagination and understanding beyond the mere satisfaction of these constraints.
An understanding of some thinkers before Kant from Paul Guyer’s (2005) ‘Values of Beauty Historical Essays in Aesthetics.’
For how long can you travel the same gravel roads and go through the same prosaic conversations? We need not Addison of great antiquity to tell us our minds loathe boredom and constraint. In our Imaginations, we transmute reality, suffocate in the beauty of seized intuitions, journey across time and douse ourselves in the cultures of the past and the possible future. Where understanding and reason lose sight of ends, Imagination shows us the way. The power of imagination completes the human capacity and ultimately unites our faculties. Regulatory Imagination incises distinctions in nature and orders them. Productive Imagination creates beauty and gives us pleasure. Through imagination, as Du Bos (1670-1742) argues, we engage our passions and escape ennui and the tedium of everyday life. In Spectator, Addison (1712) argues, the man who can use his imagination, can “converse with a picture, and find an agreeable companion on statue. He meets with a secret refreshment in a description and often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows, then does another in the possession.” How true indeed! We do not need to possess it physically but own and befriend with it in us. We not only intuit and cognize sensations and represent them as Bishop Berkeley thinks as copy ideas. Humans imagine. Through imagination, our mind dominates the mechanical determinations of nature and commands it. Through imagination, humans experience Freedom. Art, poetry and prose are hence mediums we show our ability to go beyond.
For how else do we represent richly our ideas of reason other than capturing it with our imaginations in an image? Surely our sensibility cannot represent it fully nor the concepts of our understanding quite limited to itself and the representations given to it.
Baumgarten argues like Do Bos that our emotions and affects are stirred not by something prosaic and repetitive but by the richer and denser representations of our imagination. Try in fact to be heatedly excited about taking the trains you take everyday then from a rocket-speed like train. The latter’s richness in the sematic sense excites us. Our Imaginations then give life, vividity and life.
For how else do we represent richly our ideas of reason other than capturing it with our imaginations in an image? Surely our sensibility cannot represent it fully nor the concepts of our understanding quite limited to itself and the representations given to it.
Baumgarten argues like Do Bos that our emotions and affects are stirred not by something prosaic and repetitive but by the richer and denser representations of our imagination. Try in fact to be heatedly excited about taking the trains you take everyday then from a rocket-speed like train. The latter’s richness in the sematic sense excites us. Our Imaginations then give life, vividity and life.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
"Coming out" as a Lesbian-woman in Singapore
Abstract
This study aims to explore the manifold problems of “coming out” as a lesbian woman in Singapore - a dominantly hetero-normative social order. The phenomena of “coming out” is intense, traumatic and confusing. It entails life and death social stakes when one is deciding between “coming out” (or not). The implications of (not) “coming out” includes living a “performative hypperreality” and the duplex epiphenomenon of an invisible and split life. This accentuates the importance of the role of the visible Singapore Lesbian Community in lesbian-women’s personal and social lives. Lesbian-women’s sui generis dilemma of “coming out” (or not) and at times, the very decision to (never) “come out” implies the existence of certain powerful social norms and forces at work. Going against these forces, is a revolutionary act of bravery symbolic of the enlightened spirit and ethos of modernity albeit with real sacrifices to be made.
(10, 497 words)
Acknowledgements
This six months undertaking would not been possible if not for many gracious and wonderful souls who have devoted their time to helping me understand many pertinent and heart wrenching issues of their lives. To these all people who have made my writings possible and taught me the real vicissitudes of life, I owe you everything. To my soul mate who has given me faith in times of incertitude and taught me once again how to live life, you have my most heartfelt gratitude. To the many others who have spent time scrupulously scrutinizing and listening to my analyses and thoughts over many drafts, you have my most heartfelt gratitude. This radical project and thought would not have been possible at all without the faith that none other than Professor Kwok Kian Woon could have given me to explore boundlessly the intellectual works of many great thinkers. His judicious opinions that I painfully devoured over many discussion sessions have contributed to the newfound sensibility and clarity of my writings. Without his heartening inspiration, this dauntless venture could not have been completed. To him and especially to the many wonderful ladies, I hope the product of my intellectual exercise may be a first step to helping everyone soar in their rights and inspirations to live freely and happily.
“Coming out” as a Lesbian-woman in Singapore
Contents
I The problem and study of “coming out” as a lesbian-woman
1.1 Defining the normality of the hetero-sexual spatial order and the concomitant abnormality of coming out
1.2 The problem “coming out” of hetero-normativity
1.3 Methodological Considerations & Strategies
II The Social Phenomenology of “coming out”
2.1 The intensity, trauma and confusion of “coming out”
2.2 The life and death social stakes of “coming out”
2.3 Considering “coming out” (not) in the hetero-normative spatiality
2.4 The duplex epiphenomenon of the invisible life and the split world
2.5 The visible lesbian community in Singapore and the role and importance of a ‘genuine’ culture
III To act or not to act; to be true or not true?
3.1 (Not) “coming out” as a performative hypperreality
3.2 “Coming out” of and into a “true,” lesbian being as a pure idealization
IV The powerful grip that is everywhere inhibiting “coming out”
4.1 The homo-sexual ‘negative’ institutional facts, ‘status functions’ and its independent deontic powers
4.2 The act of non-conformity as automatically being subjected to discrimination
4.3 Demise of the state (?) and the nature of hetero-normative power as everywhere suppressing “coming out”
4.4 The power hypothesis
V Lesbianism as a modern self
5.1 What is modernity and the modern self?
5.2 The modern lesbian self and the consequence of modernity
5.3 The modern or not so modern reception of homo-sexuality
VI Conclusion: The heroines of modernity
Appendix A
Notes
References
I The problem and study of “coming out” as lesbian-woman
A persistent and nearly universal quandary that surfaces in the lives of lesbian-women is this: “Coming out.”
What is “coming out?” What is the lesbian-woman “Coming out” of? Or “coming out” into? Why is there even a hullabaloo regarding “coming out:” When to “come out?” “How to “come out?” and what conditions must be present for a safe and successful “coming out” endeavour? Perhaps, the questions to ask are why does being a lesbian almost necessarily involve dealing with the issue of “coming out?” Why do some lesbian-women fail to “come out?” all their lives? Why is “coming out” even an issue to be reckoned with for Sociology?
“Coming out” is an act that questions the very “natural” and veracious nature of hetero-normativity. “Coming out” is often the sort of cogitation that involves a dialectical oscillation between the choice of whether the lesbian-woman should be true to her lesbian self or to continue to exact tremendous amounts of energy in maintaining a chimerical facade of a hetero-normative life. The choice may involve very real social sacrifices and the experience is an intense and stressful affair. Those who cannot cope may collapse under the powerful all-pervading grip of hetero-normativity and hence, contrary to the romantic notion of the modern questioning ethos as the most ideal mode of orientation, my account of the “coming out” of lesbians in Singapore will show that questioning the hetero-normative may not be all that pleasant and romantic an affair.
1.1 Defining the normality of the hetero-sexual spatial order and the concomitant abnormality of coming out
Habermas (Habermas, 1984) argues that our lifeworld (lebenswelt) is the totality of taken-for-granted interpretive works, cultural stock of knowledge and background convictions presupposed by social agents as unproblematic (1984: pp. 50-51). A discourse of “coming out” as a lesbian-woman in Singapore must be situated in the taken-for-granted facticity of substance of “sex” and the entire hetero-sexual order because fundamentally, the lesbian-woman is “coming out” of this hetero-sexual and normative order. Hence, the etymology of “coming out” (of) has its direct genesis in the whole a priori order of hetero-sexuality.
The order of hetero-sexuality is primarily characterized by an unequivocal sexual binary of woman and men and hence, an unequivocal hetero-polarity. Hetero-polarity has a power-ful biological mandate (Weeks, 1985) grounded so rigorously in the “natural” categories of human beings (Somerville, 2000) such that once sexuality is conflated under the category of ‘natural biological order,’ ‘sexuality’ becomes an unchallenged verity in-itself. Sexuality as a noumena substance of sex in-itself becomes taken for granted as unproblematic. Anything that falls out of this natural categorization is seen as deviant of the automatically presupposed normal natural sexual form.
This stemmed most fundamentally from ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle who proposed concepts of “natural” laws of being and the state (Plato, 2004). It was further inspired by 1) Darwin’s (2003) monistic or one-way evolutionary model in the Origin of the Species insinuating the idea of how the human subject naturally inherited a set of distinctive reproductive organs upon ‘compulsory’ adaptive use for the perpetuation of the human species. The naturalness of hetero-polarity reaches its acme in the psychoanalytic literature where Freud (1963) argues that a child’s bi-sexual (and pre-sexual) polymorphous sexual libido develops in two hetero-polar trajectories into a “mature” state of hetero-sexuality. Boys’ ‘Oedipus complex’ or sexual love for his mother and desire to kill his father - is repressed through a ‘castration anxiety’ – fear of castration by his stronger father whereas girls’ ‘Electra complex’ or sexual love for her mother is resolved by ‘penis envy’ where Freud suggests that because the girl realizes that she lacks the anatomical penis, she cannot love her mother and has to re-direct her sexual desire for her mother to her father (Freud, 1963). Hetero-sexuality is presupposed in a child’s natural sexual development. Anything that deviates from this mature hetero-sexual stage is a form of psychoneurosis. What is inherited by this whole naturalistic tradition of thought is hence a sort of “natural” and unquestionable sexual dimorphism of “natural” sexual proclivities of man and woman and the whole edifice of this ‘natural sexual division’ forms the basis of defining socially what is “normal” (Weeks, 1985) or “normative.” What is normal for,
“a normal man is to be hetero-sexual (attracted to the opposite sex); to be a normal woman is to be a welcoming recipient of male wooing.”
(Weeks, 1985: pp. 86)
“with respect to sexuality, there is a female human nature and a male human nature, and these natures are extraordinarily different… because throughout the immensely long hunting and gathering phase of human evolutionary history, the evolutionary history of the sexual desires and dispositions that were adaptive for either sex were for other tickets to reproductive oblivion.”
(Symons, 1979: pp. 358)
Once conceived as natural, the qualitative distinction between sexuality and gender becomes infinitesimal and glossed over. Female or “feminine” modes of being, thinking and acting become uncritically affixed to the sexual nature of women.
“…sex is taken as an “immediate given,” a “sensible given,” “physical features,” belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an “imaginary formation.”
(Wittig, 2003: pp. 159)
As such, postulation of a normative sexuality that is “before,” “outside,” or “beyond” the hetero-sexual order or matrix becomes a cultural impossibility (Butler, 1990) because the hetero-polar binary of men (acting masculine) and woman (acting feminine) is the fixated totality of what can be culturally normal. Such a discursive formation or plenitude of discourses of ‘hetero-normativity’ is further enforced in Singapore by a whole matrix of religious and cultural believes against homo¬-sexuality. Because everything that is natural and normal is confined within the institution of hetero-sexuality enforced by a multiplicity of cultural discourses, “coming out” as a homo-sexual lesbian-woman is then, unnatural and culturally and socially inconceivable. Such a cultural inconceivability is manifests itself as an act of deviancy if not, abnormality.
1.2 The problem “coming out” of hetero-normativity
‘Hetero-normativity’ has two distinctive dimensions. In Adrienne Rich’s (Rich, 1994) definition of ‘compulsory hetero-sexuality,’ she delineates the power of compulsory hetero-sexuality as 1) keeping women within its confines and also 2) as keeping women down and subordinated (Jackson, 2003). “Coming out,” to be a lesbian-woman or as lesbian is then coming out of this entire normative order of hetero-sexuality and into an entirely different mode of being, way of life and sexual orientation. But because the institution of hetero-sexuality is the entire edifice of what is natural and normal, “coming out” of hetero-sexuality is often “coming out” into a spatiality that the hetero-sexual matrix has pre-defined as neurotic, abnormal and unnatural.
A preliminary definition of “coming out” can hence be conceived as “coming out” of a hetero-sexual social spatiality into a homo-sexual social spatiality which is socially problematic because it is deemed as unnatural and abnormal. Because “coming out” is going up against the whole ontological substrate and power of the entire order of hetero-sexuality, this makes most “coming out” inextricable with the act of resisting the power of hetero-normativity and this has its very real consequences.
I.3 Methodological considerations & strategies
This research and study has been conducted based on an investigation in four prime sites which for heuristic purposes, I shall define as the visible segment of the Singapore Lesbian Community (SLC) comprising of events, support groups, camps, ad hoc dinners and lunches organized by Usha Queer Woman Organization (UQWO) , Woman Out Reach , God’s Sanctuary Church , Woman’s Dinner Night and Reach Out Now (RON).
In order to even grasp an understanding of what the life of a homo-sexual is like and what problems they face, I partook in the Woman’s Out Reach lesbian-women support group and seminars of which gracious lesbian-women introduced me to the UQWO’s queer woman community. I also attended UQWO’s newbie dinner and anniversary party, two Woman’s Out Reach lesbian-women discussion sessions and the God’s Sanctuary Church’s Sunday Services, cell group meetings, Christmas celebration dinner and Halloween party. Through my “field-immersion,” I began to the immense and sui generis problems that homo-sexuals face. Lesbian-women and gay-men alike have to deal with their own internalized homo-phobia, the homo-phobic treatment of others’, potential social ostracism and many issues related to “coming out” as a homo-sexually oriented person to their family, friends and co-workers just because they love someone of a same-sex. Because homo-sexuality is so stigmatized, my biggest difficulty was not only to maintain trust and friendship connections with these lesbian-women but also to overcome my own preconceived sense of homophobia.
For a period of six months, I took ethnographic notes, did participant observations and interviewed a total of 30 lesbian-women. With specific reference to Appendix A table 2 (and table 1 for detailed profiling), 90% of my interviewees are between the age-range of 20 < x < 40, 90% are Chinese, 76.67% have higher university education qualifications (Degrees; M. Sc; Ph.D ) and everyone of these lesbian-women have in one way or another participated in events organized by SLC. 46.67% of my sample population is active in one organization in the community, 33.33% in two organizations and 20% in three. With regards to being a lesbian (or homo-sexual for that matter), I found that age group, ethnicity or whether one had higher education (or not) does not matter. Although “coming out” stories were highly different and unique, they had equally distressing and poignant moments.
2.1 The intensity, trauma and confusion of “coming out”
To use the expression of Walter Benjamin (1968: pp. 263), the phenomenon of “coming out” is an arrest of the flow of thoughts in time where the act of cogitating “coming out” suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions and gives the configuration an unpleasant shock, crystallizing into a monad . The very act of “coming out” is a phenomenon of immense mental and emotional intensity characterized by the colossal amount of deliberation and cogitation occurring a priori, at the level of intentionality . Because the act of “coming out” as lesbian to herself and her greater sociality is an act against the moral order and veracity of hetero-normativity, “coming out” against such a ‘truth’ is often to the lesbian-woman is very traumatic, confusing and painful.
“You go through the period of confusion you don’t know you are normal, dirty, freak of nature, you don’t know whether you wanna commit suicide. These kind of feelings you will feel. A lot of confusion a lot of panic. Because you suddenly discover something about yourself and you have to hide it.”
(Interviewee Siew Keng, late-20s, Chinese, self-employed)
“The bible says out very clearly, you should not be homo-sexual because all these people will be condemned to hell. So what am I suppose to do? I love god but I love girls too. So that’s when I started to self doubt I even cried. I asked myself, I tried to commit suicide and for three or four years, I ran away from church…”
(Interviewee Kaitlyn, late-30s, Chinese, provides pastoral services)
In “coming out,” lesbian-women are thrusted into a very tempestuous process of self-conflict. They begin to feel as though they are ‘freaks of nature,’ ‘dirty,’ ‘shameful,’ and ‘guilty.’ Many overwhelmed by such feelings feel so immoral and unworthy of their ‘selves’ that they cogitate suicide and suffer from depression.
2.2 The life and death social stakes of “coming out”
To come out to herself, means to recognize her lesbian self. To come out to others, means to expose herself as lesbian to others. The stakes of “coming out” are high. In “coming out,” lesbian-women have to risk being seen as immoral and aberrant beings.
“I had this guy who called me an animal he says that it is unnatural and everything. I mean what is natural?”
(Interviewee Lisa, early-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
“Coming out” to one’s family also means risking pre-existing familial relations. Because hetero-normativity such a simultaneously central and taken-for-granted mode of orientation and acting, it does not matter if one’s parents is ‘liberal’ or ‘traditional.’ The ‘hurt and disappointment’ that parents experience when their children “come out” as lesbian to them is universally felt as in ‘liberal’ parents of Lynn and the ‘traditional’ Chinese parents of Cyndi.
“People get disowned, some people, in the family will get very angry because a lot of people don’t have the notion of homo-sexuality as also normal. So in coming out, there is really no good time. It will hurt. It will always hurt in the beginning. Even my parents who are so liberal are very hurt and disappointed.”
(Interviewee Lynn, early-30s, Chinese, civil servant)
“My mum suspected very long ago already. So I told her the thing that you suspect… what if it is real. She told me “I rather not know until I die” and she took it very, very badly when I eventually told her, her face was all black and not only she was crying all that but I was just crying and crying too.”
(Interviewee Cyndi, mid-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
“Coming out” (or not) is thus, often a matter of having to deal with very real impending threat(s) of social rejection and hence, estrangement and anomie (Durkheim, 1933) – a sense of ‘normless-ness’ resulting from being forcibly dislodged from one’s sociality.
“You worry you lose friends, you worry you lose financial support as somebody who is not working yet, you worry... that you might enter a world of isolation and maybe eventually kill yourself.”
(Interviewee Siew Keng, late-20s, Chinese, self-employed)
Women whom I have spoken to and who are in one way or another bonded to the government by scholarships, working as civil servants and teachers face an even greater deal of risk and stress. These women who have to uphold the ‘moral sanctity’ of ‘a civil servant, ‘a teacher’ or ‘a scholar’ find it hard to “come out” as lesbian at work and to their colleagues. For them, “coming out” is a risk that may possibly destroy their entire career and job.
“I was a civil service scholar. I felt I and I was scared that I would get my career shut off or just basically… well, they’ll never find any evidence to support this but some people can find other reasons if they are uncomfortable with you. So when I came back I tried to act really straight and really discretely like really and I was going crazy. I showed up at work on the first day and wore like one of those smart pleaded skirts... sling bags you know, put on make up…”
(Interviewee Lynn, early-30s, Chinese, civil servant)
It does not matter where, when, how and to whom the lesbian-woman is coming out to because when she is coming out within the framework of hetero-normativity as lesbian, the stakes are high in all aspects of her life. Some women risk losing their jobs, others risk losing their family and friends and a very small minority may lose their lives.
2.3 Considering “coming out” (not) in the hetero-normative spatiality
“Coming out” is hence, like ‘the great leap forward’ that many lesbian-women may for a certain period of time in their lives, try to avoid because “coming out” is risky and it entails having to deal with a lot of melodrama that many lesbian-women feel, will yield no favourable outcomes nor benefits.
“…a lot of explanation, emotional outburst, blaming, a lot of questioning, just don’t want to deal with all these things. How will it help my relationship, my family, my relationship with myself? I only see the negative although I know there is the positive.”
(Interviewee Danielle, early-30s, Chinese, works in a production firm)
There is simply ‘no point in coming out’ if it will severely create ruptures in pre-existing social ties. If the lesbian-woman can live their personal love-life fairly comfortably, some feel that they do not need to risk going through the melodrama of “coming out” to their families.
“I am already bringing my girlfriend around … so there is no need to further traumatise my parents to force them to accept.”
(Interviewee Indira, mid-20s, Indian, Bachelors undergraduate)
Women like Indira adopt a “don’t ask don’t tell policy” whereby so long as her parents do not question her and her girlfriend’s presence at home, she does not disclose her true lesbian self. Whether a lesbian-woman ever gets to “come out” as lesbian is very subjective and highly contingent on a multiplicity of circumstances. It is a question of whether her family, social circle and workplace is “open-minded” enough. Acting within a hetero-normative order with cultural and religious discourses disapproving of homo-sexuality means that lesbian-women have to resort to “testing waters.” This a term used to indicate an inspection of their social environment to judge if conditions are ripe and appropriate enough to “come out” (or not). “Testing waters” means deducing from attitudes and passing remarks, the receptivity of the lesbian-woman’s hetero-sexual sociality on homo-sexuality. In the event their sociality has negative opinions about homo-sexuality, lesbian-women often avoid “coming out.” For the case of Alia below, results of her waters” is unfavourable and she still has not “come out” to her father.
“I will never forget that my dad actually said a statement and said that you should change your sex to ever like a person of the same sex. Because to him he is a very fundamentalist kind of Christian so he literally takes the bible as he is. So really you must be a man and a woman so you must change your sex in order to like another sex.”
(Interviewee Alia, late-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
Just as Marx (1985) thought material conditions had to be ripe for a socialist revolution to take place, lesbian-women are like revolutionary proletariats who have to prepare and shore up for their eventual “coming out” revolutionary moment. One of the nearly indispensable conditions for lesbian-women to “come out” especially to her family is being financially independent.
“I had to be and I was ready. I made sure I was financially independent, so that if they kick me out of the house or disown me... my ex-wife actually got disowned and I had to take care of her.”
(Interviewee Ace, early-30s, Chinese, civil servant and sports coach)
Financial independence will prevent the lesbian-woman from becoming a loitering vagabond if she is disowned and will prevent her family from using the withdrawal of her allowance as “a weapon” to force her to be hetero-sexual. Having a priori a group of friends who have accepted the lesbian-woman as lesbian will also facilitate “coming out” to others. This a priori group often acts as “ancillary units” giving the lesbian-woman a source of psychological ease and strength to “come out” later on, to others.
2.4 The duplex epiphenomenon of the invisible life and the split world
Yet, because the statement “I am lesbian” is often poorly received, the epiphenomenon of leading “the invisible life” for many lesbian-women becomes a natural corollary. Such an invisible life is euphemized with the metaphor of “being in the closet” and it immediately entails another epiphenomena called “living in split worlds,” hidden and invisible from the hetero-sexual world. The upshot of these epiphenomenon(s) is often, a strictly partitioned, invisible and closeted life which often in one way or other, isolates the lesbian-woman’s personal life from her other life-spheres.
“Nobody knew… I broke up with my girlfriend, I was broken for two years, but I couldn’t and didn’t tell anyone.”
(Interviewee Yifen, mid-30s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
Living ‘invisibly’ and split from the hetero-sexual world entails facing a sui generis manifold of problems such as dealing with homo-phobia, stresses from needing to ‘hide’ her lesbian love life, fears of being seen as ‘aberrant and abnormal,’ managing asphyxiating stress from cogitation about “coming out” (or not) that hetero-sexuals would never have to think and bother about. This makes many lesbian-women feel strongly about a cognitive-experiential gulf between themselves and their hetero-sexual majority. Many lesbian-women feel that hetero-sexuals cannot even imagine what it is like to be a lesbian-woman and much less, understand the predicaments they are sometimes faced with. This raises a parallel problem Thomas Nagal (1974) once raised in his philosophical enquiry.
“What is it like for a bat to be like a bat?”
(Nagal: 1974: pp. 435-436)
Nagal (1974) argues that in wanting to understand what is it like to be a bat, one can only (italics emphasized) turn to one’s own background of experience as basic material for imagining what it is like to be a bat. One can never (italics emphasized), Nagal (1974) argues, transcend one’s own imaginative boundaries into the bat’s consciousness and truly understand what being a bat feels like. Lesbian-woman feel exactly like this. They feel that it is impossible for hetero-sexuals to what it is like to be a Lesbian. In Searlean (2010) terms, this first-person phenomena and ontology (2004: pp. 98) experienced as being a lesbian is something that no third person i.e. hetero-sexuals can possibly understand.
“It is not possible for other people to understand us. You need to go through it put yourself in their shoes in order to understand. It’s like lets say you have never gone through depression before and you are talking to someone who has depression you can never fully understand what depression must be like because you can never gone through it yourself. So no matter how hard you try, no matter how good a friend you want to be, you will never reach 100% empathy it is just how it is.
I got this one of this good straight guy friend. He’s the Casanova ladies man, really good with girls Very good looking, charming, sociable… glib tongue, and he’s like my relationship guru. I got love problems I talk to him but he will never understand the homophobia I go through you know.”
(Interviewee Lisa, early-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
Continued invisibility I argue, perpetuates the myth that homo-sexuality is “non-existent” and “not of grave majority-concern” in Singapore. It accentuates the feeling of isolation and the experiential-cognitive gulf between ‘the homo-sexual’ and ‘hetero-sexual’ simply because there is no (italics emphasized) communication of true feelings, problems and thoughts between two sexual worlds. It also compounds the “shock” factor if and when lesbian-women eventually “come out” to their family and friends exacerbating the stresses (from “relationship damage control”) that lesbian-women have to deal with after they “come out.”
2.5 The visible lesbian community in Singapore and the role and importance of a ‘genuine’ culture
In a hetero-normative world where lesbian-women face a high risk of social rejection and alienation, the visible lesbian community in Singapore (comprising of, Usha Queer Woman Organization (UQWO), Woman Out Reach, God’s Sanctuary Church, Woman’s Dinner Night and Reach Out Now (RON) is an important as a safe haven where lesbian-women can find acceptance with their own homo-sexuality, build a strong and stable ancillary network of friends and safely be lesbian with other lesbians.
“The community is like your second parachute in case the first one fails. The first parachute is like the people you come out to and fail to come out properly and things turn nasty. And then they don’t become your friends anymore so it is this community you can fall back on to give you the friendship and support.”
(Interviewee Lisa, early-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
“Joining FCC was important for me to find acceptance. You find acceptance in friends. If you are a friend and if you find friends who go through the same things as you, you not only learn to accept your self, your other friend who is learning to accept you, it will also indirectly teach them to accept themselves you get what I mean? You not only get to view another person who is gay you know but you also get to feel that acceptance of being gay. You find peace and peace is an important marker in my life that things are ok.”
(Interviewee Alia, late-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
The community helps lesbian-women fan off the stresses and pressures of “coming out” (or not). Being with other lesbian-women like themselves and seeing that these other lesbian-women are leading healthy and successful lives starts a positive psychological feedback loop that normalizes their otherwise stigmatized lesbian identity in the hetero-sexual world.
“You start out very unsure very low self esteem, not sure if you are right in this matter and then as you go along, knowing more people they reinforce your values about yourself that you being gay and then you get to know more people you talk to them about what it is to be gay and then life still goes on even after they know even after they know you are gay, so all these experiences from both the straight world and the gay world, helps you become more sure about yourself.”
(Interviewee Lisa, early-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
The importance of the visible lesbian community to lesbian-women must be seen in light of how human beings are social-cultural beings. As Gellner (1955) writes, one may be born free but is everywhere in cultural chains. Both the necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of a sense self is as Mead (2003: pp. 35-37) argues, to 1), internalize the attitudes of other human individuals toward herself entailing the embodiment or bringing of the entire social process as a whole into her individual experience and adopting these attitudes of other individuals toward herself and towards others. 2), To take the entire sociality’s attitudes euphemized as the “generalized other” towards other social activities that she is engage in. “Culture” then, at variance with Kant’s (1929) a priori primacy of the transcendental subject , functions like our primary internal cognitive model of reality orienting our sense of time, space, causality and how we perceive our everyday reality (Keesing & Strathern, 1998). We have, as Lakoff (1997) argues, built-in, unconscious, automatic ways of conceptualizing ourselves.
The hetero-normative order is built into our taken-for-granted lifeworld - lebenswelt (Habermas, 1984: pp. 50-51) and internalized. For the homo-sexual lesbian self however, this is hetero-normative order often acts in a detrimental fashion to one’s construction of a coherent homo-sexual lesbian self-hood resulting in some of the lesbian-women feeling “guilty,” “dirty” and “abhorred” with themselves. What is ‘genuine’ of culture (Sapir, 1949) to the hetero-sexual becomes (or is) antithetical to the homo-sexual lesbian self. A ‘genuine’ culture Sapir (1949) argues, “must be looked upon as a steady plant growth [with] each remotest twig of [being] organically fed by the sap at the core (1949: pp. 316).” Core norms and values must serve the central interest of its members (1949: pp. 316). Hence, when the hetero-normative culture does not commensurate with the actual daily-lived experiences and problems of lesbian-women, such a culture becomes a chronic farce to them. If uncritically accepted, it is ‘bad faith ’ in Sartre’s etymology or ‘fallenness’ and inauthenticity’ of one’s being (dasein) (Heidegger). What the visible lesbian community does is then to create another imagined community to use the term by Benedict Anderson (), outside of the hetero-normative matrix to furnish lesbian-women with social-cultural norms affirmative of their lesbian being. By connecting with the lesbian community, lesbian-women have a lower chance of facing social dislocation or in Durkheim’s terms, anomie and a greater possibility of exposure to fellow women who face the same problems as them.
“I think it is important recently I join YOH. I think it is really very helpful especially for young questioning youths because they really discuss every single almost every all aspects of being a gay teen. It really helps. We talk about coming out to family members, gay relationships, breakups, safe sex, schools, work-place… You get close to many young people and that is really important so you won’t feel so alone.”
(Interviewee Kaia, late-teens, Chinese, Diploma undergraduate)
III To act or not to act; to be true or not true?
3.1 (Not) “coming out” as a performative hypperreality
For lesbian-women living in an invisible and split world life is a contrivance, a continual flagrant misrepresentation of one’s self as a ‘straight-acting ’ hetero-sexual. Social life consists of tremendous acts of dramaturgy or impression management properly conceived as acts of concealing, mystification, ascetic control and scrupulous calibration of distance-maintenance between one’s lesbian self and the hetero-sexual others. Her closeted life is subjected to scrupulous performances, highly contrived and painstakingly put together (Goffman, 1959a: pp. 77). All aspects of her lesbian desires, affections, decorum and behaviour must be hidden and modulated using a repertoire of punctiliously created titles, lies and idealized images. Everyday is like a ceremony of play-acting and make-believe bedeviled with intense self-policing and incertitude of whether the manifold performance is formidable and elaborate enough a simulacrum. There is incessant fear of committing a faux pas – an unintentional and unthinking omission or contribution of gesture or speech act that will result in the destruction of a the lesbian-woman’s mandatory simulacrum (Goffman, 1959b: pp. 204). For the lesbian-women, life has no backstage where as a performer, she gets a momentary break. Once she takes up her subverted lesbian identity, she has to up-play this simulacrum or false representation all the time and everywhere, at home, at work, in school, with friends and relatives. Her real lesbian identity has to be hidden and hence invisible to the presumed social reality ‘out there.’ Her lesbian existence or the substance of her self hence ironically transmutes into a phantasmagoric illusion. Her identity is simultaneously a productive fabrication of a nonexistent representation of ‘straightness’ expressed by Butler (1990) as “an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive hetero-sexuality (1990: pp. 136).”
“It is extremely repressive if you don’t come out… you are not being authentic you are repressing yourself and just lying your way through life.”
(Interviewee Alia, late-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
The lesbian-woman’s very straightness has no ontological substrate except for her very performativity of acting straight. It is sustained by a repertoire of lies and make-believe mystification of her non-lesbianness. My interviewee Alia, who is not “out” to her parents, avoids hugging her girlfriend or holding her girlfriend’s hands at crowded places. To live up to the ideal of a filial daughter, Alia also avoids bringing her girlfriend home and constantly speaks of her fantasies of guys to her parents. If she receives repeated phone calls from a girl, she tells her parents it is just her best friend. When she moves in with her girlfriend, she introduces her girlfriend to her parents as ‘the landlord.’ Consciousness of another of my interviewee Cyndi heightens with greater proximity to her home or workplace and social distance. Cyndi for instance, avoids wrapping her hands over her girlfriend and walks with a certain distance apart. There exist a tactic of ‘friends-cycling’ that she also uses to create a mystification or an illusion that she is going out with many friends instead of just her one girlfriend.
This whole edifice of “straightness” is a performative negation of lesbianness that demands tremendous amounts of dramaturgical prudency to efface the essence of lesbianness from every aspect of her lesbian self in to forge a chimera of the straight acting self. The closeted lesbian self thus conceived, is the straight-acting self. To herself, she thinks she is straight; at home, she acts as a good straight-daughter, in public, she acts as the good straight-citizen; at work, she acts as the good straight-worker, to her relatives; she acts as the good straight-niece; in school, she acts as the good straight-student.
If we understand social life as a performative with no ontological status apart from the very acts that constitute its reality, then the lesbian-woman’s social life is one with no real ontological reality because her very reality is an everyday performative act to a negate herself from its very reality by acting straight. Her life is marked with deviousness, treacherous, scrupulous and ceaseless inauguration of representations that at once performatively create and embody the ideal paradigm of ‘straightness.’ In other words, her life is nothing but self-negation, duplicity and deceit to herself, family, friends, friends, co-workers and relatives. It is thus, not a coincidence why this metaphor of ‘being in a closet’ or ‘closeted’ is constantly evoked to describe this dark and stealthily hidden continual reproduction of the performative negation of self in every aspect of her everyday life. This performativity is stressful to keep up with.
“I have always been close with my parents at that point it was like do I hide a part of myself from them, or do I just come out and then we see what happens?”
(Interviewee Stesha, early-30s, Chinese, educator in a private university)
The immutable and indubitable certainty of the sanctity of the ideal hetero-normative straightness is thus constituted and upheld only by performative acting and mystification tactics. This very performativity of straight-acting creates an epiphenomenon of the invisibility of the lesbian world which serves only to sustain the chimerical appearance and ideality of its hetero-normative counterpart. Reality so conceived is then hyperreal (Baudrillard, 1998). A “real” reality that is not signified by any “real” values or referentials (1998) but simply, by performative acts whose very acts constitute reality (Butler, 1990).
Thus, the lesbian-women wants to come out, and out of draconian and exacting continual reproduction and performativity of a false representation of one self; tearing asunder the pretense and simulation of a straight reality or the simulacrum of falsehood. She wants come out into her true species-being or one’s true consciousness. As Marx (1998) writes:
‘As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are therefore coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.’
(Marx, 1998: pp. 37)
Through the very performativity of one’s acts, one objectifies oneself in reality. But the lesbian-woman’s performativity is a pretentious acting of straight which does not coincide with her true species-being (Marx, 1998) or true nature. Thus conceived, ‘coming out’ is a revolt against one’s bitter alienation from her very lesbian species-being. It is a revolt against the subservience of her lesbian individuality to a collective straight purpose that has only remote relevancy to her true lesbian relationship, identity and strivings. Again, borrowing Edward Sapir’s (1949) coining, it is to create a genuine (1949: pp. 314) lesbian self and in all hope, a lesbian life and culture which he defines as a synthesis of all spheres consisting of a unified attitude towards life (1949: pp. 316). This is so that her whole reality and being is not just a front stage or an entire artifice of contrivance that requires perpetual policing of a straight appearance where the lesbian-woman has to ensure that her performances are coherent, her behaviour is sufficiently straight-looking and well embellished and lies have continuity in their fictional stories. There is no backstage where the closeted lesbian-woman can momentary relax. Even her home is turned into a dramatized front. So, the lesbian in her wants to come out, as lesbian.
3.2 “Coming out” of and into a “true,” lesbian being as a pure idealization
But “coming out” as lesbian I argue is a pure idealization because “coming out” is often in actuality, never even “coming out.” It is a socio-personal struggle to “come out.” Most often, “coming out” to one’s parents takes many years, some never even get to “come out” to their parents while others delude themselves into waiting for a “right timing .” The ideal of coming out as lesbian faces repeated failure and this failure is not yet externalized as action. In Nietzsche’s (1954: pp. 332-333) words it is an eternal recurrence of failure. The lesbian-woman wants to declare: “I am… lesbian” to her mother, her father, her co-workers or friends for that matter but these three words are incredibly hard to be uttered. The very effort takes years of serious cogitation and musing. The manifestation of the pure idealization of “coming out” as lesbian, is objectified in the various fissures or non-space where what is intended or thought is never articulated and acted out in social reality. This is what Searle (2001) legitimately calls, volitional gaps.
“Gaps occur when the beliefs, desires, and other reasons are not experienced as causally sufficient conditions for a decision (the formation of a prior intention); and the gap also occurs when the prior intention does not set a causally sufficient condition for an intentional action; and it also occurs when the initiation of an intentional project does not yet set sufficient conditions for its continuation or completion (2001: pp. 62-63)”
There are in Searle’s (2001) system of argumentation, three gaps. The intricacies of volitional gaps are unimportant for our purposes. Yet, I wish to highlight how, there exists many volitional gaps or “lapses” in thought and action. Firstly, the lesbian-woman may not even dare to “come out” to herself as lesbian. She does not dare to have such an “intention” – desire or belief that she is lesbian. Even if she “comes out” to herself, she has trouble materializing her already-intended lesbian self into action (Searle, 2001) i.e. “coming out to others” much less continuing to be lesbian throughout her life. There are lesbian-women who take decades to “come out” to themselves and to people in her social milieus and other lesbians who have “turned straight” after being lesbian for decades. To me, these volitional lapses signify powerful forces acting to keep the intention-of-being lesbian and actually-being lesbian apart.
IV The powerful grip that is everywhere inhibiting “coming out”
In section 5.1, I will proffer using Searle’s (1995, 2010) argument that “coming out” is difficult because institutional facts created and maintained by attributing and collectively recognizing a manifold of negative and dismissive status-functions to homo-sexuality makes “coming out” to accepting such a lesbian-self as a very tough affair. In section 5.2, I will argue again using Searle’s (1995, 2010) argument that because the act of non-conformity automatically subjects one to the possibility of being censured, lesbian-women have the tendency to defer from “coming out.” In section 5.3 I will reject the notion of power as subsisting in any “essence” of the state or subject and propose to understand “coming out” as problematic because power is everywhere and everywhere reinforcing the order of hetero-normativity.
4.1 The homo-sexual ‘negative’ institutional facts, ‘status functions’ and its independent de-ontic powers
The structure of social reality, Searle argues (1995: pp. 4) is like an invisible and weightless web of institutional facts . Institutional facts are facts that require special human recognition for their existence (1995: pp. 27). Institutional facts are created by a very human capacity of attributing “status functions ” to physical structures and objects (2010: pp. 7) using a locution “counts as.” They all have a formal logical structure that “X (person or object) counts as Y (status) in C (context).” So, for our purposes, using the locution “count as,” we create a “new” reality of homo-sexuality (X) by giving homo-sexuality a series of new a posteriori, aberrant, deviant, mental illness, psychologically dysfunctional, bestial, animalistic, rotten and warped status functions (Y). Searle (1995, 2010) argues that so long as the collective recognizes and represents the negative reality of homo-sexuality as existing (2010, pp. 93), the reality of homo-sexuality as all of ‘Y’ status functions will be created and sustained.
Because this logical structure of “X counts as Y in Singapore (C)” is not exhaustive (1995: pp. 143), established Y status functions can be further iterated upon yet another set of status functions (Y2) and yet another set of status functions (Y3) using the locution “count as” to ad infinitum. Thus, for a woman to come out as lesbian in Singapore, she is liable to being count(ed) as all of Y status functions e.g. aberrant and if she is aberrant, she constitutively “counts as” a lesser moral being and being a lesser moral being constitutively “counts as” liable to being subjected to the encroaching scrutiny of the public eye when she goes out especially with her girlfriend, deprived of legal rights to have a house, be legally married, be granted basic hospital visitation rights when their partners fall ill, being forced to go for counseling to correct one’s mental problem or illness, having AIDS ad infinitum. I argue then that because homo-sexuality is constitutive of such an iterated structure of institutional facts that is constitutive of negative, dismissive and despairing status functions imposed upon it, “coming out” is always a very onerous, traumatic and intense affair wrought with a lot of resistance, emotional bloodshed, and thoughts of self-negation objectified as suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety.
Moreover, it is not just negative “stereotypes” that makes “coming out” problematic. Humans are social creatures who as Mead (2003) argues, internalize a totality attitudes of society or of the “generalized other” to individuate themselves into reality. Yet for homo-sexuals, these stereotypes constitutively “counts as” - the need to accept a “self” constituted by such derogatory status functions attributed by society to them. It does not matter whether it is a social performative in Butler’s (1990) terms or whether it is real or unreal and true or untrue. Once created simply by ontologically subjective collective recognition, status functions become new institutional epistemically objective facts independent of us which are endowed with deontic powers (Searle, 1995, 2010) and hence have a power-ful influence over “coming out.” Deontic powers are powers that give people reasons for action (2010: pp. 148) independent of their intentional-desires, of any essence of a Kantian transcendental subject, of a Weberian monopoly of power held by an entity called “the state” or of Marx’s historical materialist class-struggles framework. The Searlean deontic powers refer to status functions that once created by virtue of collective recognition, become epistemically independent (my italics) institutional facts objectified as rights (no rights for homo-sexuals to be equally respected), entitlements (no entitlements to lesbians to purchasing a HDB flat or have hospital visitation rights) duties (not fit for duty), and permissions (no permission to get legally married), etc (2010: pp. 9). This pervasive network of epistemically independent institutional facts and status functions endowed with deontic powers reinforced and sustained in power by collective intentionality (Searle, 2010: pp. 156) serve as an important epistemically independent inhibitor to “coming out.”
4.2 The act of non-conformity as automatically being subjected to discrimination
Yet who gets to use this powerful inhibitor against lesbians wanting to “come out?” Searle (2010) argues that “anybody (my italics) can exercise this [hetero-normative] power over anybody else” so long as that person shares the similar background hetero-normative norm of our society (Searle, pp. 156-157). Background directives want people to “conform!” and failure to conform automatically results in disapproval manifesting as lesbian-women being (potentially) disowned and socially disenfranchised. This I argue along with Searle (2010) based on my study from how reflecting how in one way or another, regardless of age, ethnicity or educational attainments, lesbian-women have in one way or another faced some form of “ensuring” or discrimination. The truism of Searle’s argument on how so long as one is non-conforming to hetero-normative background norms, one can be liable to being sanctioned by anyone who shares this same background can be further illuminated just by the real anecdotal situation on the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) trains in Singapore. Often, hetero-sexual couples will exhibit intimacy by kissing, touching each other’s thighs or hugging on the MRT train. But when a homo-sexual (gay and lesbian) couple does it, it invites immediately the scrutinizing and at times patronizing eyes of others. In the same light, if the Background rule or norm exist to not drink or eat in the MRT trains and you do actually drink or eat, anyone can legitimately go up to you and tell you not to. In other words, you are liable to being sanctioned and cautioned by others so long as you are non-conforming. Deontic powers are desire independent and epistemically objectively there to be used as for action (Searle, 2010) against all transgressors. One of the reasons why it is so hard to “come out” is then because such an act of non-conformity which violates hetero-normativity means automatically liable to being sanctioned by society in the form of expressions of disapproval to even strong forms of ostracism (Searle, pp. 157).
This is why in “coming out” (an act of non-conformity), lesbian-women are always cautioned of the prudent rule: “First, protect yourself.” Read the “coming out guide ,” know that you are likely to be berated and subjected to the obloquy of the public and your parents. Make sure you have supportive friends, if not, the lesbian community to support you in the event you are disowned or rejected. The coming out guide is literally a guide book on “how to come out.” In this book, one is taught to weigh the consequences and risks of coming out, accept that one may suffer the loss of friendship, face awkwardness in friendships, be discriminated at work, be called names etc. Hence, prior to coming out, one is encouraged to learn credible statements from major institutions like the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that justifies homo-sexuality as not a mental illness or depravity. Lesbian-women are also taught in the book places to go to for support in face of the likely emotional toll – anxiety, guilt, anger and blame. So long as one is ruminating and intending the very act of “coming out,” one needs to be sufficiently prepared and “ready” because the act of non-conformity is liable to being sanctioned by anyone almost potentially automatically. The existence of the nature of background norms (demanding conformity) and status functions with deontic powers and very much against homo-sexuality allow power to be wielded by anyone against any non-conformer.
4.3 Demise of the state (?) and the nature of hetero-normative power as everywhere suppressing “coming out”
“Coming out” I argue is so problematic also because power is phenomenologically everywhere as conceived by Foucault, keeping homo-sexuality within the confines of the order of hetero-normativity (Rich, 1980).
This is however, not to say that the state has no say nor influence in Singapore with regards to homo-sexuality and (or) lesbianism. Under the (in)famous Section 377A of the Penal Code of Singapore, sex between mutually consenting adult men is illegal. Several years back, in 2007, NMP Thio Li-Ann (2007) mounted a defense for 377A claiming that her defense is necessary for the fundamental moral ecology of Singapore. In Thio Li-Ann’s discursive speech, she invoked phrases such as “gender identity disorder,” “acts of gross indecency,” “moral repugnancy of homo-sexuality,” and she spoke of homo-sexuality on equal footing with “bestiality, incest and pedophilia” (2007). In fact, even the state’s non-action such as not giving legal recognition to homo-sexuals manifesting in the form of the dearth of legal marriage rights, rights to visitation if lesbian partners fall ill, non-action in terms of fostering a positive attitude towards having a “two mother” family unit and the Housing Development Board’ (HDB) rule which only allows hetero-married couples and singles above 35 to purchase a HDB flat play a huge role in shaping a priori normative notions of right and wrong good or bad and hence, the receptivity of the hetero-normative social spatiality. This influences the decisions of lesbian-women in coming out (or not). At times, State power may even be so potent that lesbian-women not only do not come out but in fact, contemplate moving abroad.
“There are a lot of issues, bills, rights and everything. So I really want the legal protection of being married. It’s very important. I don’t want to constantly have to worry about what happens to my partner and family if something happens to me. I don’t want to worry about the fact that one day someone is going to take away my kids and I am not fit to be a mother because I am gay. They can use the fact that you are a gay in divorce proceedings to win over custody of kids. I don’t want that to happen.”
(Interviewee Indira, mid-20s, Indian, Bachelors undergraduate)
Hence, that the state has power over what is homo-sexuality and what does it mean to be homo-sexual (with regards to the rights one has and does not have) is irrefutable. My only contention is that in analyzing the problematic of this “coming out” phenomenon, it is not very much because the state is actually taking any action against homo-sexuals. Because in fact, the Singapore government does not actively condemn homo-sexuality and proscribe against homo-sexual relationships . If we then ask, why do lesbian-women struggle to come out to themselves? Why do lesbian-women take decades even to come out to others? Why do some lesbian-women never come out as lesbian and choose to lead an “invisible” life? The answer cannot be “because the state” or “the law” is wielding power over homo-sexuals.
A more befitting perspective and explanatory model would be because “coming out” is associated with such derogatory “status functions” and power can be wielded by anyone non-conforming to the hetero-normative background presuppositions. The very nature of hetero-normative power is then, not in any entity but is everywhere functioning to reinforce the order of hetero-normativity upon the lesbian-women who in “coming out” acts in a non-conforming fashion.
As Foucault (1991) argues: “the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction.” Power is no longer within the threshold of “the state” but takes on a form of “Governmentality ” (Foucault, 1991: pp. 102-103) simultaneously diffused, deinstitutionalized and individualized by virtue of the possibility of being able to rationally calculate about and “manage” every aspect of this population’s well-being. Such an individualized power needs a spatiality to exert itself and this spatiality is created through what Foucault calls, the deployment of sexuality. Sexuality as Foucault argues, is a universal employment localized specifically upon the body. It is a universal phantasm, a construct, whose truth is given only for the very sake of the very deployment of power. In the exact words of Foucault, “sexuality is not feared by power, and instead is far more, a means through which (my italics) power is exercised (1990a: pp. 119).” The phantasm of sexuality is thus constructed as a sort of truth upon the body where discourses about the right form of pleasure, relationships, love, intensities, coexistences and attachments (Foucault, 1990a: pp. 116; 1990c) are constructed for power to give itself a possible reason to intervene and assert its puissance.
The truth discourse of sexuality is hence a formidable tool of control and power (Foucault, 1990a: pp. 114). This phantasm of sexuality once inscribed and localized upon the body of the subject is established as something that needs askesis i.e. taming, control and disciplining (1990a, 1990b) and as such becomes a universal productive space for power to impose itself. The (Any) subject who embodies a sexual body gives power its rightful deployment space and her sexuality becomes a roaming platform where power can assert itself simultaneously universally, continually and particularly through the fictitious relation it has established with the body. Power is hence, exercised everywhere upon the constructed “sexual body,” keeping lesbians within the confines of hetero-normativity and making “coming out” a very onerous affair because it is a need to go against power which is everywhere and everywhere “implanted” upon the material bodies of homo-sexual lesbian-woman.
“Sex is the most speculative, most ideal and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures.”
(Foucault 1995: pp. 203)
4.4 The power hypothesis
The normalizing power of hetero-normativity grips onto the very materiality of the lesbian-woman’s body and penetrates all spheres of her life. In all sense of the spatiality and temporality, once the lesbian-woman has internalized the cultural normative of hetero-normativity, she feels the power of hetero-normativity in all definite relations of her life. So long as she is lesbian, her non-conformity automatically makes her liable to being in every definite relation of her life subjected to the policing of hetero-normativity by anyone and even herself. The lesbian-woman’s very inabilities to “come out” to herself and others in all spheres of life are particular manifestations of the experience of the enforcement of ubiquitous hetero-normative power thoroughly infused upon her material body and being. The “automatic and ubiquitous nature” of hetero-normative power as everywhere wieldable by anyone including herself and infused upon the lesbian-woman makes “coming out” a process of sometimes, almost (never) coming out.
V Lesbianism as a modern self
5.1 What is modernity and the modern self?
The advent of 18th century Enlightenment ushered in an era called ‘modernity’ where traditional and religious authority became de-centered centers of power and legitimacy. Modernity demands that all existing things are to be subjected to logical formalism and Reason (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1987: pp. 20). Modernity as Giddens (1990) argues is a period where Reason triumphs free displacing (1990: pp. 250) all grand narratives and space from time rendering it possible to re-structure our entire experience of space and time. It makes the notion of “place” or our immediate locality a superannuated phantasmagoric (1990: pp. 250) notion to experience our self. In modernity, there is a notion that everything is possibly displaceable and changeable culminating in Horkheimer & Adorno (1987: pp. 20) arguing that in the abstract sense, in modernity, both the ‘traditional’ subject and object are nullified. Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant (1929) reasoned that the only thing that is non-displaceable is the transcendental subject symbolized as the “I think” necessary to give order and coherence our sensible world. In Kant’s brief publication on What is Enlightenment - Was ist Aufkerung? (1997) and the famous Critique of pure reason (1929), Kant bears the idea that modernity is about how we may properly use reason and our various faculties to derive valid objective knowledge and judgment of ourselves and our entire social reality. A legitimate modern self then embodies an ethos or attitude of constant questioning using Reason proper. A modern self as ‘modern’ French poet Baudelaire describes the flâneur, “must remain ever vigilant, constantly on guard and alert (Graeme, 1996).” Modernity and the modern ethos that deploys Reason into the lifeworld means that nothing can be left unproblematic. Reason subjects our lifeworld (Habermas, 1984) to intense scrutiny and opens up different and infinite possibilities of legitimation and contestation of all moral and cultural values (Eisenstadt, pp. 30). In modernity, our horizon of novelty becomes non-fenced (Goran, 1997), and new problematiques and re-intepretations continually arise.
5.2 The modern lesbian self and the consequence of modernity
The lesbian-woman I argue is the beau ideal of a modern self-hood. Her non-conforming act of “coming out” as lesbian means that norms sanctioning hetero-normativity are antediluvian in her life. Being simultaneously displaced and situated in an antagonistic relation to her hetero-normative cultural order forces the lesbian-woman to question the very hetero-normative cultural standards of her time where her homo-sexuality is perceived as sexually hedonistic, licentiousness, lustful and promiscuous (Gagnon & Simon, 1967: pp. 248). “Coming out” into a lesbian being compels the lesbian-woman to adopt a reflexive modern ethos in restructuring her whole self. She is forced into a violent struggle to construct her own cultural aesthetics upon which her new moral quality can subsist. She is forced to question the very fundamental nature and identity of her self because pre-existing hetero norms and values are no longer applicable to her. However, the modern ethos of questioning one’s cultural lifeworld givens is one fraught with much trauma and toil. Because hetero-normativity is so ingrained and taken-for-granted, it requires an extraordinary amount of endeavouring to re-fashion anything that is not hetero (but homo) as normal. So long as a woman comes out as lesbian, she has to upend the whole hetero-normative substratum and take responsibility in creating a livable environment for herself. For some, this entails seeking out the visible community of lesbian-others to affirm that being lesbian is normal and ok. This is why with prior reference to Appendix A Table 2, 86.67% of my interviewees have at least participated in one way or another in the visible Singapore lesbian community. A lot of what the dinners, activities and support groups do in the visible lesbian community is not only to establish new relations of friendship with other lesbian-women but to implicitly know and show that lesbians are equally normal and robustly functioning human beings. Showing up for community events, talking to others, understanding homo-sexuality from the religious, social and scientific perspectives through programs like L.S.H.G which offer support group sessions to critically interpret bible passages supposedly against homo-sexuality are all very important in normalizing the stigmatized status of her new homo-sexuality. Many others attend Woman’s Dinner Night held on every last Saturday of the month to discuss pertinent issues with other fellow lesbian-women regarding things like homo-phobia, the accepting of her homo-sexual self, the possibility of maintaining a long term lesbian relationship with another woman etc. The act of being in a group sharing common interests and problems helps lesbian-women to fan off the vehement stresses of being a homo-sexual in Singapore.
Yet, contrary to the romanticized notion of the modern reflexive and rational self, my study of the phenomenon of lesbian-women’s “coming out” process shows that the stakes involved in adopting a modern ‘reflexive’ selfhood is grave and not as romantic or pleasant as it seems. “Coming out” as a lesbian-woman means exposing herself to the chronic danger of being disparaged and looked down upon often with skepticism by others regarding her sexual choice. As a corollary, the lesbian-women have to be perpetually prepared to defend her stance and such an endeavour means that she has to be ever-vigilant and ever-alert. Many of the lesbian-women I have spoken to had to deal with feelings of existential anxiety, fear, apprehensiveness, distress and ambivalence at some point in their lives. Some who are overwhelmed by the process grapple with depression and suicidal thoughts.
Just as modernity is sometimes conceived as a series of value-laden antinomies and binary opposites (Laban, 2002), in “coming out” as lesbian, lesbian-women are forced to embody a particular manifestation of modernity’s inner tensions, antinomian dichotomies and dialectical confrontations (Giddens, 1990) because they have to create a home where they can safely belong. This process is often a temporally protracted and emotionally laborious one because the lesbian-woman is going against all her hetero-normative social learning. As Habermas (1983) argues, modernity is an incomplete project and for the lesbian-woman, this is a truism that cannot be any more true.
5.3 The modern or not so modern reception of homo-sexuality
The reception of “coming out” stories range from a continuum of playing amnesia i.e. “pretending to have not heard” the message delivered, to hysterical melodrama involving unabating periods of sobbing, grieving and blaming. Why? I argue albeit hypothetically only that this is because ‘coming out’ is an epiphenomenon of modernity which is entails nihilism, nothingness and danger. It is symbolic of the fact that even the veracious hetero-normative order that hetero-sexuals have emphatically and unswervingly given loyalty to can be (or in a stronger sense: is) subverted and nullified. This I argue, then triggers a sense of chronic unease in most people, albeit subconsciously.
“Coming out” is hence always or most often received in a dramatic fashion because it means for the recipient of the “coming out” message, the need question, tear asunder and upend many cherished systems of believes not limited to the veracity of scientific bio-evolution, “God” who supposedly censured homo-sexuality and the faith in a social-moral sanctity of the hetero-normative order that governs now only supposedly healthy family units. Accepting the coming out message often demands an incredible amount of intellectual, emotional, social and physical re-fashioning to make sense of the new social reality. At the most extreme end of the argument, it maybe the need to accept the very ontological nothingness of modernity. “Coming out” is hence a very modern phenomenon that thrusts one directly into the spirit of modernity - the spirit of perpetual incertitude and change. “Coming out” is thus a very distressing moment and a fatiguing affair, of modernity, for both the lesbian-woman and the recipient of the message because it also implies that all certainty becomes only a temporarily plausible faith that maybe replaceable with yet another faith in the future. Such a reality maybe difficult to accept because of the surety and certainty that all man gravitate towards.
VI Conclusion: The heroines of modernity
“Coming out” then, to take the expression of Walter Benjamin, is a sort of consciousness. It is the recognition of “a messianic cessation of happening, a revolutionary chance in the fight for [an] oppressed past where one takes cognizance of [the happening] in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history.”
Yet this revolutionary fight I argue, is over romanticized in the context of “coming out” as a Lesbian in Singapore. To “come out” as a lesbian-woman means to use her modern reflexivity to upend the hetero-normative order that demands a existential murdering of the lesbian-woman’s selfhood, to put an abrupt end to a fictitious performativity, to re-instate a backstage where the lesbian-woman can repose in, but more importantly, for the lesbian-woman, it is fundamentally a reflexive act to create a safe and viable home for her true lesbian being. “Coming out” is however, is nothing more than an ideal will to health and freedom in the words of Nietzsche because the social stakes in “coming out” is real and costly. “Coming out” as a lesbian-woman means risking being seen as aberrant, deviant and abnormal. It means risking social rejection and estrangement. It means being subjected to interminable questioning and justification of her ‘lesbian’ choice. It means relinquishing the possibility of relying on cultural pre-givens to lead her life in an easier and more taken-for-granted manner. Because cultural pre-givens are hetero-normative and antithetical to her lesbian being, this requires a whole spate of constant restructuring of her self and social life.
The act of “coming out” is a very laborious affair and promises no certainty. Yet, the ideal of “coming out” is still very beguiling for many driven by the ideals of living freely and happily a life of one’s choice. Contrary to lesbian-women being seen as depraved and aberrant, these lesbian-women are in fact heroic revolutionaries of modernity who in wanting to live and love, answers truthfully to the modern calling: What is Enlightenment for me?
I have sought here to explicate the phenomena of “coming out” and understand what makes “coming out” so difficult. I have established that this phenomenon is grave, traumatizing and problematic. It is a very real life and death matter experienced by real living human subjects. The “coming out” (or not) phenomena marks a shift in the lifestyle and sexual preference of many Singaporeans who are forced into invisibility by the background norms of our society and our very pretense of their non-existence. Continued social, political and cultural inaction with regards to this large number of ‘invisible’ homo-sexuals will not foster harmony but only embolden social segregation and misunderstanding. Without background normative affirmation of homo-sexuals, we are, stretching Searle’s (1995, 2010) arguments, effectively sanctioning social discrimination against lesbians and gays alike who as human beings, do not deserve to be disregarded in our society. My study has brought up serious moral-ethical shifts and concerns and the need for not only more research with regards to the homo-sexual life-style but also political attention and action in addressing issues that we have swept away under the capitulating guise of ignorance for a long time.
APPENDIX A
Table 1
Demographic Characteristics of Lesbian Women Interviewed
Names Age Group "Ethnic group" Occupational Category Education Level Participation in the Singapore visible lesbian community*
UQWO RON GS WOR WDN LSHG Others
Kaia Ong Late-teens Chinese Student Pursuing Diploma ● ●
Alisson Late-teens Chinese Student Pursuing Diploma ●
Lisa Early-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ● ●
Beth Early-20s Chinese Student Pursuing Bachelors ●
Marylin Early-20s Chinese Protective Service Diploma ● ● ●
Nat Early-20s Chinese Student Pursuing Bachelors ● ●
Dorene Early-20s Chinese Self-Employed Bachelors ●
Lydia Early-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ●
Adree Mid-20s Chinese Arts, Design, Entertainment and Media / Student Bachelors ●
Estelle Mid-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ● ●
Indira Mid-20s Indian Student Pursuing Bachelors ●
Cyndi Mid-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ●
Jace Late-20s Chinese Management Diploma ●
Alia Late-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ●
Swee Keng Late-20s Chinese Self-Employed Bachelors ●
Octavia Late-20s Chinese Arts, Design, Entertainment and Media Diploma ●
Yun yi Early-30s Chinese Life, Physical and Social Science Doctorate ● ●
Nadia Early-30s Chinese Management Doctorate ● ● ●
Stesha Early-30s Chinese Education, Training and Library Bachelors ● ● ●
Safiah Early-30s Malay Student Pursuing Bachelors ●
Natasha Early-30s Malay Self-Employed Diploma ●
Ace Early-30s Chinese Sports / Civil Service Bachelors ● ●
Danielle Early-30s Chinese Production Bachelors ● ●
Vivian Early-30s Chinese Civil Service Bachelors ●
Christee Early-30s Chinese Production Bachelors ● ●
Lynn Early-30s Chinese Civil Service / Arts & Media Diploma ●
Connie Mid-30s Chinese Self-employed Bachelors ● ●
Yifen Mid-30s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ● ●
Kaitlyn Late-30s Chinese Arts, Design, Entertainment and Media / Pastoral Services Masters ● ●
Chloe Early-40s Chinese Civil Service Bachelors ●
N = 30 *Legend
Table 2
Key Characteristics Breakdown and Percentages (%)
Age Group Ethnic Group Educational Qualification (s) Number of Organizations Participated in the Singapore Lesbian Community
Age Group Chinese Malay Indian Pursuing Diploma Diploma Higher/University Education One Two Three
n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) N (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%)
Late-teens 2 6.67 2 6.67 0 0 0 0 2 6.67 2 6.67 0 0 1 3.33 1 3.33 0 0
20 < x < 30 14 46.67 13 43.33 0 0 1 3.33 3 10 3 10 11 36.67 8 26.67 3 10 3 10 30 < x < 40 13 43.33 11 36.67 2 6.67 0 0 1 3.33 2 6.67 11 36.67 4 13.33 6 20 3 10 Early-40s 1 3.33 1 3.33 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 3.33 1 3.33 0 0 0 0 Total (%) 100 90 6.67 3.33 20 23.34 76.67 46.67 33.33 20 N 30 27 2 1 6 7 23 14 10 6 Notes
My usage of the term “lesbian-woma(e)n” instead of the term “lesbian” may seem at first, tautological because the term “lesbian” is already reserved for homo-sexual women. But I insist on using of the term “lesbian-woman” instead of “lesbian” to give a more neutral and objective account of “lesbians” and to avoid the term “lesbian” being immanently be connoted with any pre-conceived sense of deviancy or abnormality prior to my giving of an account of “coming out as a lesbian in Singapore.”
‘Hetero-polarity’ can be understood as the keeping apart of binary categories “men” and “women” or gender categories such as “male” and “female.”
In all brevity, ‘noumena’ a term used by Kant (1929), which refers to that which our ‘faculty of sensibility’ cannot sense or see. Hence, it is an “object of non-sensible intuition [and it is something] abstract from our mode of intuiting it” (Kant, 1929: pp. 268). Kant (1929) often argues that we do not know or have valid knowledge of whether such noumena things exist or not, because we cannot intuit or see it. Hence, whether ‘abstract’ notions of substances such as “sexuality” or “sex (in-itself)” exist or not, we can only offer a postulate or working hypothesis. Although in social reality, this subtle yet important delineation is often neglected and “sex-in-itself” no longer is a problematic hypothetical substance but becomes taken as naturally existing.
In Book V of the Republic (Plato, 1955), the conversation between Socrates and Glaucon repetitively invoked the notion of the different natures of men and women rendering them pre-disposed for different pursuits. Greek philosophers believed that there is a natural dissimilarity between man and woman and woman are always weaker than man.
“Socrates: Can it be, then, that a woman is not by nature very different from a man?
Glaucon: Of course she is different.
Socrates: Then isn’t it also appropriate to assign a different job to each of them, the one for which they are naturally suited?
Glaucon: Certainly.”
(Plato, 1955: pp. 141)
Based on my study, Usha Queer Women Organization (UQWO) is touted the leading queer woman’s organization in Singapore. Usha Queer Women Organization has several functions.
1) UQWO Provides an online platform – forum for women questioning their sexual orientation to “voice out” their concern and connect with fellow ‘queer’ women. Their online platform also advertises for other auxiliary queer woman organizations such as Woman’s Dinner Night’s events.
2) UQWO organizes a yearly ‘Usha Queer Women Organization Camp’ – a ‘queer’ women self-development camp that organizes camp-trips abroad. The camp is a 3 day 2 night event where self-development seminars workshops allow lesbian-women to share their experiences of being a lesbian-woman in Singapore and by virtue of the act of sharing and bonding, learn to become more comfortable with themselves.
3) Usha Queer Women Organization organizes ad hoc ‘dinners’ for queer women to meet other queer women.
4) UQWO is an important intermediary where important lesbian self help books such as the “How to come out guidebook 2011” is sold at dinner party events.
Women’s Out Reach (WOR) is a queer-lesbian counseling and support group. I partook in one of a three-part series seminar support group put together to help ‘queer’ women develop a more confident sense of self, develop meaningful relationships with their partners and others in their lives and to plan ahead for a viable future. Another of their outreach group is now in its 5th successive run for queer women in Singapore.
God’s Sanctuary (GS)is a church that embraces homo-sexuals in Singapore. I participated in their Sunday Services, Christmas dinner 2010, Halloween Party and several cell group meetings. I ran interviews with several gay men and Lesbian-women consisting of one of FCC’s council member who pioneered a program called Lesbian Self Help Group (L.S.H.G) (now in its 7th run) and some of their key facilitators.
LSHG started in 2005. It functions as a Christian based support group and allows Lesbian-women to critically study bible verses against homosexuality. It provided a positive space for conflicted Christian women to exchange ideas, interact and bond and rationally develop a critical understanding of verses in the bible. Because the Christian lesbian self often feel guilty, dirty and depraved of their own sexual orientation and act, a rational and critical understanding of bible verses not only helps the Christian lesbian self to reconcile with her mode of being but such an understanding also allows her to defend and protect herself against people who excoriate them. Such excoriation is often described as “bible bombing.” The importance of God’s Sanctuary and L.S.H.G must be seen in the context of the conservative church stance against homo-sexuality in Singapore.
Women’s Dinner Night (WDN) holds interactive dinner discussions at the end of every month where lesbian-women meet to discuss various lesbian or queer women related issues such as how to handle relationships and financials as a lesbian-woman; how to “come out” to one’s friends and family and handle work-place related stress.
Reach Out Now (RON) has recently commenced their 3rd support group run mainly for youths from the age of 16-23. RON has also recently organized a forum event with Woman’s Out Reach called “Binding moments” inviting guest speakers to discuss about “coming out” to one’s family.
M.Sc stands for Master of Science; Ph.D stands for Doctor of Philosophy
The very term ‘phenomenology’ is a method that Husserl himself describes in his Logical Investigations a pure descriptive science of a subject’s consciousness without speculative abstract theorizing associated with traditional metaphysics (Moran, 2000: pp. 106-107). In the most general sense, phenomenology for Husserl has its exclusive concern, the experiences intuitively seizable and analyzable immanently in their pure essences. The term “social phenomenology” is then a distilled version of ‘phenomenology’ aimed at studying the subjective consciousness and awareness in one’s social world (Natanson, 1970). I chose and used the term “social phenomenology” so that my findings will clearly and distinctly illustrate the rich feelings and individual experiences of “coming out.” In my view, there is no other way this experience can be illustrated anymore accurately.
The term ‘monad’ is a term coined by philosopher Leibniz (1991) in his famous writings called The Principles of Philosophy, or the Monadology (1714). In this Publication, Leibniz defines the monad as “nothing but a simple substance that enters into composites – simple, that is without parts […] with no parts, [no] extension, nor shape, nor divisibility […] Monads are true atoms of nature and in brief, the element of things. (Leibniz, 1991: pp. 68)”
The term ‘intentionality’ in Searle’s (2001, 1995) writings is used to describe generally internal cognitive capacities and processes in our consciousness where our stream of conscious thought – desires, intentions, beliefs and perceptions etc occurs.
The term ‘transcendental’ is introduced by Kant in his 1st Critique of Pure Reason (1929) where he entitled the term ‘transcendental to “all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge (my italics) of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori (1929: pp 59).” His critical or transcendental philosophy then refers to all concepts expounded within this transcendental system. In general Kant’s critical transcendental philosophy especially in his 3rd Critique of Judgment wants to argue that the ultimate conditions of knowledge and ultimate judgment lies ‘transcendentally’ in the human subject.
What Sartre (Santoni, 1995) meant by ‘bad faith’ is often alluded to a certain notion of cynical lying or lying to oneself. The ideal type of lie or lying is a cynical consciousness where one affirms a kind of true in oneself but denies it in words and perhaps even denies that he has denied it (1995: pp. 49).
‘Straight’ is a term used by lesbian-women (and gay men) to also denote their ‘other’ ‘hetero-sexual’ others. The term is made sensible once we juxtapose ‘straight-ness’ (correctness of homo-sexuality) to the often purported ‘not-straight’ or ‘deviancy’ of homo-sexuals.
‘Performativity’ or ‘gender performative’ is introduced by Butler (1990) to explain how the true organizing principle of hetero-normativity i.e. is itself a construct that has to be performed and acted – and that its ‘constructedness’ is often, never revealed (1990: pp. 173). Underlying the notion of ‘performativity’ is the idea that the gendered body has no ontological status apart from the acts that constitute its very reality (1990: pp 173). In other words, without ‘performing’ hetero(or homo)-sexuality then, there can be no ‘hetero(or homo)-sexual’ reality.
‘Straight’ is a term used by lesbian-women (and gay men) to also denote their ‘other’ ‘hetero-sexuals.’ The term is made sensible once we juxtapose ‘straight-ness’ (correctness of homo-sexuality) to the often purported ‘not-straight’ or ‘deviancy’ of homo-sexuals.
In my field work, many lesbians often recount to me how no timing is ever a right timing because there is just no right timing when it comes to coming out implicitly implying that coming out is most often not well received no matter when or where one comes out as lesbian to others and even herself.
In the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1954), Nietzsche provokes us to think of the very idea of a possible the eternal recurrence of life. “The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent – not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back to this selfsame life (my italics), in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak again the word of the great noon of earth and man, to proclaim the overman again to men (1954: pp. 333).”
The original idea of ‘eternal recurrence’ is often used heuristically to think about “what if.” For instance, in this context, if for the lesbian-woman, life is such that it would eternally recur in the exact same manner, would she still want to “come out” even if it fails and the consequences are costly? If she is struggling to “come out” and has not done so even though she badly wants to, if life were to recur at this moment again and again, would she want to lead such a hidden invisible life and untrue to herself? Would this thought then make her want to “come out?”
To help understand the Searlean notion of “institutional facts” (1995, 2010) it might help to contrast it with Durkheim’s (1985) usage of social facts. Durkheim argues that “social” facts are “a category of social facts that are independent of the individual’s consciousness and inclinations (1985, pp. 59).” They are “neither logical nor psychological phenomena(s) (1985, pp. 59)” and so “exist entirely outside the individual consciousness (1985, pp. 61).” Social facts are “ways of acting that is able to exert an external (my italics) constraint on the individual.” Searle can be seen to be reacting against a Durkheimian notion of social facts. He argues that “institutional facts” are created by the individual subject and are entirely dependent on the collective recognition for it to exist. Without the collective recognizing it in their intentionality (or consciousness in Durkheim’s sense) this institutional facts cannot exist. They are hence, ontologically subjective even though they are epistemically objective (my italics) (Searle, 1995: pp. 123). Meaning to say that institutional facts are observer-relative. Yet, once created, they can as Durkheim argues, exert constraint over individuals. The uniqueness of Searle’s argument for institutional facts also consist in how he argues against Durkheim (1985) elsewhere that institutional facts have a biological basis because it is dependent on our very human consciousness and consciousness is biological and therefore, physical (1995: pp. 6). Both thinkers however concur that this is a “collective phenomena” that cannot (my italics) be reduced to an individual phenomena or “I phenomena” in Searle’s (1995: pp. 24) words.
In a very Sociological manner, Searle argues that humans simply do not experience things as material physical objects or molecules and atoms (Searle, 1995: pp. 14). In fact, humans experience a “world of chairs, tables houses, cars, lecture halls, pictures, streets gardens and so forth (1995: pp. 14)” What is happening is that we assign “status functions understood as values or symbolic meanings inclusive of teleology to causal processes and naturally occurring physical objects (1995, pp. 15-20). The persistence of “status functions” or new meanings on objects are then reinforced by a collective recognition and hence are dependent on collective subjective intentionality. (See for details, note 17).
This traits are not arbitrarily used but quoted and used by many in fact, almost all of my interviewees to describe themselves or to recount to me how others have described them.
In Searle’s (2010) book on Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization Searle further emphasizes on how status functions are always intentionality-relative (2010: pp. 43) implying that it is relative and dependent on humans and their “collective intentionality” and recognition of such status functions without which, such subjective propositions of what is good or bad of homosexuality or even any “ethnic” group for instance cannot be sustained. The crux of the argument is that status functions can only be sustained because we continue to give it recognition. In an earlier publication, Searle (1995) writes:
“The secret of understanding the continued existence of institutional facts is simply that individuals directly involved and a sufficient number of members of the relevant community must continue to recognize and accept the existence of such facts. Because the status is constituted by collective acceptance and because the function, in order to be performed requires the status, it is essential to the functioning that there be continued acceptance of the status (1995, pp. 117).”
Searle in many of his books uses the idea of “money.” Literally, money (1995, pp. 46) is ‘just a piece of paper’ but because we collectively recognize and give it the status function such as money counting as the medium of exchange and of store value (1995: pp. 46), money no longer is just a piece of paper it in fact, becomes a valuable paper that people may kill each other for.
The “How to come out guide book” is published by Usha Queer Women Organization, a queer community and advocacy group in Singapore for lesbian, bisexual and transsexual Asian women.
This is what was exactly said by current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (2007) in asserting the stance of the PAP government on 377A in 2007 repeal saga. In this speech, PM Lee recounted how MOE did not punish or sack the Raffles Institution Teacher who “came out” as gay with his reasons on his published blog. This teacher is still a teacher in Raffles Institution now (2007).
The term “Governmentality” is a form of rationality of revolving around governing “the population” – how to increase its welfare, wealth, longevity, health – which becomes the ends and object-target of the assertion of power by the government. A whole “ensemble” is then formed by institutions, procedures, analyses, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this power and to allow the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses (Foucault, 1991: pp. 102-103). In such a manner, power becomes diffused to everywhere and almost every aspect of human life.
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___ 2007 “PM Lee Hsien Loong states PAP's stand on 377A” Youtube. [Online video clip] Retrieved February 10th 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiNnJzcJJ9E (part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiNnJzcJJ9E&playnext=1&list=PLF7E6986EBBDEF252 (part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5xpndva3JY (part 3)
This study aims to explore the manifold problems of “coming out” as a lesbian woman in Singapore - a dominantly hetero-normative social order. The phenomena of “coming out” is intense, traumatic and confusing. It entails life and death social stakes when one is deciding between “coming out” (or not). The implications of (not) “coming out” includes living a “performative hypperreality” and the duplex epiphenomenon of an invisible and split life. This accentuates the importance of the role of the visible Singapore Lesbian Community in lesbian-women’s personal and social lives. Lesbian-women’s sui generis dilemma of “coming out” (or not) and at times, the very decision to (never) “come out” implies the existence of certain powerful social norms and forces at work. Going against these forces, is a revolutionary act of bravery symbolic of the enlightened spirit and ethos of modernity albeit with real sacrifices to be made.
(10, 497 words)
Acknowledgements
This six months undertaking would not been possible if not for many gracious and wonderful souls who have devoted their time to helping me understand many pertinent and heart wrenching issues of their lives. To these all people who have made my writings possible and taught me the real vicissitudes of life, I owe you everything. To my soul mate who has given me faith in times of incertitude and taught me once again how to live life, you have my most heartfelt gratitude. To the many others who have spent time scrupulously scrutinizing and listening to my analyses and thoughts over many drafts, you have my most heartfelt gratitude. This radical project and thought would not have been possible at all without the faith that none other than Professor Kwok Kian Woon could have given me to explore boundlessly the intellectual works of many great thinkers. His judicious opinions that I painfully devoured over many discussion sessions have contributed to the newfound sensibility and clarity of my writings. Without his heartening inspiration, this dauntless venture could not have been completed. To him and especially to the many wonderful ladies, I hope the product of my intellectual exercise may be a first step to helping everyone soar in their rights and inspirations to live freely and happily.
“Coming out” as a Lesbian-woman in Singapore
Contents
I The problem and study of “coming out” as a lesbian-woman
1.1 Defining the normality of the hetero-sexual spatial order and the concomitant abnormality of coming out
1.2 The problem “coming out” of hetero-normativity
1.3 Methodological Considerations & Strategies
II The Social Phenomenology of “coming out”
2.1 The intensity, trauma and confusion of “coming out”
2.2 The life and death social stakes of “coming out”
2.3 Considering “coming out” (not) in the hetero-normative spatiality
2.4 The duplex epiphenomenon of the invisible life and the split world
2.5 The visible lesbian community in Singapore and the role and importance of a ‘genuine’ culture
III To act or not to act; to be true or not true?
3.1 (Not) “coming out” as a performative hypperreality
3.2 “Coming out” of and into a “true,” lesbian being as a pure idealization
IV The powerful grip that is everywhere inhibiting “coming out”
4.1 The homo-sexual ‘negative’ institutional facts, ‘status functions’ and its independent deontic powers
4.2 The act of non-conformity as automatically being subjected to discrimination
4.3 Demise of the state (?) and the nature of hetero-normative power as everywhere suppressing “coming out”
4.4 The power hypothesis
V Lesbianism as a modern self
5.1 What is modernity and the modern self?
5.2 The modern lesbian self and the consequence of modernity
5.3 The modern or not so modern reception of homo-sexuality
VI Conclusion: The heroines of modernity
Appendix A
Notes
References
I The problem and study of “coming out” as lesbian-woman
A persistent and nearly universal quandary that surfaces in the lives of lesbian-women is this: “Coming out.”
What is “coming out?” What is the lesbian-woman “Coming out” of? Or “coming out” into? Why is there even a hullabaloo regarding “coming out:” When to “come out?” “How to “come out?” and what conditions must be present for a safe and successful “coming out” endeavour? Perhaps, the questions to ask are why does being a lesbian almost necessarily involve dealing with the issue of “coming out?” Why do some lesbian-women fail to “come out?” all their lives? Why is “coming out” even an issue to be reckoned with for Sociology?
“Coming out” is an act that questions the very “natural” and veracious nature of hetero-normativity. “Coming out” is often the sort of cogitation that involves a dialectical oscillation between the choice of whether the lesbian-woman should be true to her lesbian self or to continue to exact tremendous amounts of energy in maintaining a chimerical facade of a hetero-normative life. The choice may involve very real social sacrifices and the experience is an intense and stressful affair. Those who cannot cope may collapse under the powerful all-pervading grip of hetero-normativity and hence, contrary to the romantic notion of the modern questioning ethos as the most ideal mode of orientation, my account of the “coming out” of lesbians in Singapore will show that questioning the hetero-normative may not be all that pleasant and romantic an affair.
1.1 Defining the normality of the hetero-sexual spatial order and the concomitant abnormality of coming out
Habermas (Habermas, 1984) argues that our lifeworld (lebenswelt) is the totality of taken-for-granted interpretive works, cultural stock of knowledge and background convictions presupposed by social agents as unproblematic (1984: pp. 50-51). A discourse of “coming out” as a lesbian-woman in Singapore must be situated in the taken-for-granted facticity of substance of “sex” and the entire hetero-sexual order because fundamentally, the lesbian-woman is “coming out” of this hetero-sexual and normative order. Hence, the etymology of “coming out” (of) has its direct genesis in the whole a priori order of hetero-sexuality.
The order of hetero-sexuality is primarily characterized by an unequivocal sexual binary of woman and men and hence, an unequivocal hetero-polarity. Hetero-polarity has a power-ful biological mandate (Weeks, 1985) grounded so rigorously in the “natural” categories of human beings (Somerville, 2000) such that once sexuality is conflated under the category of ‘natural biological order,’ ‘sexuality’ becomes an unchallenged verity in-itself. Sexuality as a noumena substance of sex in-itself becomes taken for granted as unproblematic. Anything that falls out of this natural categorization is seen as deviant of the automatically presupposed normal natural sexual form.
This stemmed most fundamentally from ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle who proposed concepts of “natural” laws of being and the state (Plato, 2004). It was further inspired by 1) Darwin’s (2003) monistic or one-way evolutionary model in the Origin of the Species insinuating the idea of how the human subject naturally inherited a set of distinctive reproductive organs upon ‘compulsory’ adaptive use for the perpetuation of the human species. The naturalness of hetero-polarity reaches its acme in the psychoanalytic literature where Freud (1963) argues that a child’s bi-sexual (and pre-sexual) polymorphous sexual libido develops in two hetero-polar trajectories into a “mature” state of hetero-sexuality. Boys’ ‘Oedipus complex’ or sexual love for his mother and desire to kill his father - is repressed through a ‘castration anxiety’ – fear of castration by his stronger father whereas girls’ ‘Electra complex’ or sexual love for her mother is resolved by ‘penis envy’ where Freud suggests that because the girl realizes that she lacks the anatomical penis, she cannot love her mother and has to re-direct her sexual desire for her mother to her father (Freud, 1963). Hetero-sexuality is presupposed in a child’s natural sexual development. Anything that deviates from this mature hetero-sexual stage is a form of psychoneurosis. What is inherited by this whole naturalistic tradition of thought is hence a sort of “natural” and unquestionable sexual dimorphism of “natural” sexual proclivities of man and woman and the whole edifice of this ‘natural sexual division’ forms the basis of defining socially what is “normal” (Weeks, 1985) or “normative.” What is normal for,
“a normal man is to be hetero-sexual (attracted to the opposite sex); to be a normal woman is to be a welcoming recipient of male wooing.”
(Weeks, 1985: pp. 86)
“with respect to sexuality, there is a female human nature and a male human nature, and these natures are extraordinarily different… because throughout the immensely long hunting and gathering phase of human evolutionary history, the evolutionary history of the sexual desires and dispositions that were adaptive for either sex were for other tickets to reproductive oblivion.”
(Symons, 1979: pp. 358)
Once conceived as natural, the qualitative distinction between sexuality and gender becomes infinitesimal and glossed over. Female or “feminine” modes of being, thinking and acting become uncritically affixed to the sexual nature of women.
“…sex is taken as an “immediate given,” a “sensible given,” “physical features,” belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an “imaginary formation.”
(Wittig, 2003: pp. 159)
As such, postulation of a normative sexuality that is “before,” “outside,” or “beyond” the hetero-sexual order or matrix becomes a cultural impossibility (Butler, 1990) because the hetero-polar binary of men (acting masculine) and woman (acting feminine) is the fixated totality of what can be culturally normal. Such a discursive formation or plenitude of discourses of ‘hetero-normativity’ is further enforced in Singapore by a whole matrix of religious and cultural believes against homo¬-sexuality. Because everything that is natural and normal is confined within the institution of hetero-sexuality enforced by a multiplicity of cultural discourses, “coming out” as a homo-sexual lesbian-woman is then, unnatural and culturally and socially inconceivable. Such a cultural inconceivability is manifests itself as an act of deviancy if not, abnormality.
1.2 The problem “coming out” of hetero-normativity
‘Hetero-normativity’ has two distinctive dimensions. In Adrienne Rich’s (Rich, 1994) definition of ‘compulsory hetero-sexuality,’ she delineates the power of compulsory hetero-sexuality as 1) keeping women within its confines and also 2) as keeping women down and subordinated (Jackson, 2003). “Coming out,” to be a lesbian-woman or as lesbian is then coming out of this entire normative order of hetero-sexuality and into an entirely different mode of being, way of life and sexual orientation. But because the institution of hetero-sexuality is the entire edifice of what is natural and normal, “coming out” of hetero-sexuality is often “coming out” into a spatiality that the hetero-sexual matrix has pre-defined as neurotic, abnormal and unnatural.
A preliminary definition of “coming out” can hence be conceived as “coming out” of a hetero-sexual social spatiality into a homo-sexual social spatiality which is socially problematic because it is deemed as unnatural and abnormal. Because “coming out” is going up against the whole ontological substrate and power of the entire order of hetero-sexuality, this makes most “coming out” inextricable with the act of resisting the power of hetero-normativity and this has its very real consequences.
I.3 Methodological considerations & strategies
This research and study has been conducted based on an investigation in four prime sites which for heuristic purposes, I shall define as the visible segment of the Singapore Lesbian Community (SLC) comprising of events, support groups, camps, ad hoc dinners and lunches organized by Usha Queer Woman Organization (UQWO) , Woman Out Reach , God’s Sanctuary Church , Woman’s Dinner Night and Reach Out Now (RON).
In order to even grasp an understanding of what the life of a homo-sexual is like and what problems they face, I partook in the Woman’s Out Reach lesbian-women support group and seminars of which gracious lesbian-women introduced me to the UQWO’s queer woman community. I also attended UQWO’s newbie dinner and anniversary party, two Woman’s Out Reach lesbian-women discussion sessions and the God’s Sanctuary Church’s Sunday Services, cell group meetings, Christmas celebration dinner and Halloween party. Through my “field-immersion,” I began to the immense and sui generis problems that homo-sexuals face. Lesbian-women and gay-men alike have to deal with their own internalized homo-phobia, the homo-phobic treatment of others’, potential social ostracism and many issues related to “coming out” as a homo-sexually oriented person to their family, friends and co-workers just because they love someone of a same-sex. Because homo-sexuality is so stigmatized, my biggest difficulty was not only to maintain trust and friendship connections with these lesbian-women but also to overcome my own preconceived sense of homophobia.
For a period of six months, I took ethnographic notes, did participant observations and interviewed a total of 30 lesbian-women. With specific reference to Appendix A table 2 (and table 1 for detailed profiling), 90% of my interviewees are between the age-range of 20 < x < 40, 90% are Chinese, 76.67% have higher university education qualifications (Degrees; M. Sc; Ph.D ) and everyone of these lesbian-women have in one way or another participated in events organized by SLC. 46.67% of my sample population is active in one organization in the community, 33.33% in two organizations and 20% in three. With regards to being a lesbian (or homo-sexual for that matter), I found that age group, ethnicity or whether one had higher education (or not) does not matter. Although “coming out” stories were highly different and unique, they had equally distressing and poignant moments.
II The Social Phenomenology of “coming out”
Because my motive is to give a critical analysis of the subjective individual experience of, “coming out,” I will use a social phenomenological approach to illustrate how the phenomenon of “coming out” is 1) intense, traumatic and confusing for the lesbian-woman, 2) how “coming out” is a matter of life and death with high social stakes, 3) how women consider “coming out” (or not) in the hetero-normative spatiality, 4) how (not) “coming out” often implicates a duplex epiphenomenon of the invisible life and the split world and 5) the importance of the role of the “visible lesbian community” in Singapore in making life easier for lesbians who have “come out” (or not).2.1 The intensity, trauma and confusion of “coming out”
To use the expression of Walter Benjamin (1968: pp. 263), the phenomenon of “coming out” is an arrest of the flow of thoughts in time where the act of cogitating “coming out” suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions and gives the configuration an unpleasant shock, crystallizing into a monad . The very act of “coming out” is a phenomenon of immense mental and emotional intensity characterized by the colossal amount of deliberation and cogitation occurring a priori, at the level of intentionality . Because the act of “coming out” as lesbian to herself and her greater sociality is an act against the moral order and veracity of hetero-normativity, “coming out” against such a ‘truth’ is often to the lesbian-woman is very traumatic, confusing and painful.
“You go through the period of confusion you don’t know you are normal, dirty, freak of nature, you don’t know whether you wanna commit suicide. These kind of feelings you will feel. A lot of confusion a lot of panic. Because you suddenly discover something about yourself and you have to hide it.”
(Interviewee Siew Keng, late-20s, Chinese, self-employed)
“The bible says out very clearly, you should not be homo-sexual because all these people will be condemned to hell. So what am I suppose to do? I love god but I love girls too. So that’s when I started to self doubt I even cried. I asked myself, I tried to commit suicide and for three or four years, I ran away from church…”
(Interviewee Kaitlyn, late-30s, Chinese, provides pastoral services)
In “coming out,” lesbian-women are thrusted into a very tempestuous process of self-conflict. They begin to feel as though they are ‘freaks of nature,’ ‘dirty,’ ‘shameful,’ and ‘guilty.’ Many overwhelmed by such feelings feel so immoral and unworthy of their ‘selves’ that they cogitate suicide and suffer from depression.
2.2 The life and death social stakes of “coming out”
To come out to herself, means to recognize her lesbian self. To come out to others, means to expose herself as lesbian to others. The stakes of “coming out” are high. In “coming out,” lesbian-women have to risk being seen as immoral and aberrant beings.
“I had this guy who called me an animal he says that it is unnatural and everything. I mean what is natural?”
(Interviewee Lisa, early-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
“Coming out” to one’s family also means risking pre-existing familial relations. Because hetero-normativity such a simultaneously central and taken-for-granted mode of orientation and acting, it does not matter if one’s parents is ‘liberal’ or ‘traditional.’ The ‘hurt and disappointment’ that parents experience when their children “come out” as lesbian to them is universally felt as in ‘liberal’ parents of Lynn and the ‘traditional’ Chinese parents of Cyndi.
“People get disowned, some people, in the family will get very angry because a lot of people don’t have the notion of homo-sexuality as also normal. So in coming out, there is really no good time. It will hurt. It will always hurt in the beginning. Even my parents who are so liberal are very hurt and disappointed.”
(Interviewee Lynn, early-30s, Chinese, civil servant)
“My mum suspected very long ago already. So I told her the thing that you suspect… what if it is real. She told me “I rather not know until I die” and she took it very, very badly when I eventually told her, her face was all black and not only she was crying all that but I was just crying and crying too.”
(Interviewee Cyndi, mid-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
“Coming out” (or not) is thus, often a matter of having to deal with very real impending threat(s) of social rejection and hence, estrangement and anomie (Durkheim, 1933) – a sense of ‘normless-ness’ resulting from being forcibly dislodged from one’s sociality.
“You worry you lose friends, you worry you lose financial support as somebody who is not working yet, you worry... that you might enter a world of isolation and maybe eventually kill yourself.”
(Interviewee Siew Keng, late-20s, Chinese, self-employed)
Women whom I have spoken to and who are in one way or another bonded to the government by scholarships, working as civil servants and teachers face an even greater deal of risk and stress. These women who have to uphold the ‘moral sanctity’ of ‘a civil servant, ‘a teacher’ or ‘a scholar’ find it hard to “come out” as lesbian at work and to their colleagues. For them, “coming out” is a risk that may possibly destroy their entire career and job.
“I was a civil service scholar. I felt I and I was scared that I would get my career shut off or just basically… well, they’ll never find any evidence to support this but some people can find other reasons if they are uncomfortable with you. So when I came back I tried to act really straight and really discretely like really and I was going crazy. I showed up at work on the first day and wore like one of those smart pleaded skirts... sling bags you know, put on make up…”
(Interviewee Lynn, early-30s, Chinese, civil servant)
It does not matter where, when, how and to whom the lesbian-woman is coming out to because when she is coming out within the framework of hetero-normativity as lesbian, the stakes are high in all aspects of her life. Some women risk losing their jobs, others risk losing their family and friends and a very small minority may lose their lives.
2.3 Considering “coming out” (not) in the hetero-normative spatiality
“Coming out” is hence, like ‘the great leap forward’ that many lesbian-women may for a certain period of time in their lives, try to avoid because “coming out” is risky and it entails having to deal with a lot of melodrama that many lesbian-women feel, will yield no favourable outcomes nor benefits.
“…a lot of explanation, emotional outburst, blaming, a lot of questioning, just don’t want to deal with all these things. How will it help my relationship, my family, my relationship with myself? I only see the negative although I know there is the positive.”
(Interviewee Danielle, early-30s, Chinese, works in a production firm)
There is simply ‘no point in coming out’ if it will severely create ruptures in pre-existing social ties. If the lesbian-woman can live their personal love-life fairly comfortably, some feel that they do not need to risk going through the melodrama of “coming out” to their families.
“I am already bringing my girlfriend around … so there is no need to further traumatise my parents to force them to accept.”
(Interviewee Indira, mid-20s, Indian, Bachelors undergraduate)
Women like Indira adopt a “don’t ask don’t tell policy” whereby so long as her parents do not question her and her girlfriend’s presence at home, she does not disclose her true lesbian self. Whether a lesbian-woman ever gets to “come out” as lesbian is very subjective and highly contingent on a multiplicity of circumstances. It is a question of whether her family, social circle and workplace is “open-minded” enough. Acting within a hetero-normative order with cultural and religious discourses disapproving of homo-sexuality means that lesbian-women have to resort to “testing waters.” This a term used to indicate an inspection of their social environment to judge if conditions are ripe and appropriate enough to “come out” (or not). “Testing waters” means deducing from attitudes and passing remarks, the receptivity of the lesbian-woman’s hetero-sexual sociality on homo-sexuality. In the event their sociality has negative opinions about homo-sexuality, lesbian-women often avoid “coming out.” For the case of Alia below, results of her waters” is unfavourable and she still has not “come out” to her father.
“I will never forget that my dad actually said a statement and said that you should change your sex to ever like a person of the same sex. Because to him he is a very fundamentalist kind of Christian so he literally takes the bible as he is. So really you must be a man and a woman so you must change your sex in order to like another sex.”
(Interviewee Alia, late-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
Just as Marx (1985) thought material conditions had to be ripe for a socialist revolution to take place, lesbian-women are like revolutionary proletariats who have to prepare and shore up for their eventual “coming out” revolutionary moment. One of the nearly indispensable conditions for lesbian-women to “come out” especially to her family is being financially independent.
“I had to be and I was ready. I made sure I was financially independent, so that if they kick me out of the house or disown me... my ex-wife actually got disowned and I had to take care of her.”
(Interviewee Ace, early-30s, Chinese, civil servant and sports coach)
Financial independence will prevent the lesbian-woman from becoming a loitering vagabond if she is disowned and will prevent her family from using the withdrawal of her allowance as “a weapon” to force her to be hetero-sexual. Having a priori a group of friends who have accepted the lesbian-woman as lesbian will also facilitate “coming out” to others. This a priori group often acts as “ancillary units” giving the lesbian-woman a source of psychological ease and strength to “come out” later on, to others.
2.4 The duplex epiphenomenon of the invisible life and the split world
Yet, because the statement “I am lesbian” is often poorly received, the epiphenomenon of leading “the invisible life” for many lesbian-women becomes a natural corollary. Such an invisible life is euphemized with the metaphor of “being in the closet” and it immediately entails another epiphenomena called “living in split worlds,” hidden and invisible from the hetero-sexual world. The upshot of these epiphenomenon(s) is often, a strictly partitioned, invisible and closeted life which often in one way or other, isolates the lesbian-woman’s personal life from her other life-spheres.
“Nobody knew… I broke up with my girlfriend, I was broken for two years, but I couldn’t and didn’t tell anyone.”
(Interviewee Yifen, mid-30s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
Living ‘invisibly’ and split from the hetero-sexual world entails facing a sui generis manifold of problems such as dealing with homo-phobia, stresses from needing to ‘hide’ her lesbian love life, fears of being seen as ‘aberrant and abnormal,’ managing asphyxiating stress from cogitation about “coming out” (or not) that hetero-sexuals would never have to think and bother about. This makes many lesbian-women feel strongly about a cognitive-experiential gulf between themselves and their hetero-sexual majority. Many lesbian-women feel that hetero-sexuals cannot even imagine what it is like to be a lesbian-woman and much less, understand the predicaments they are sometimes faced with. This raises a parallel problem Thomas Nagal (1974) once raised in his philosophical enquiry.
“What is it like for a bat to be like a bat?”
(Nagal: 1974: pp. 435-436)
Nagal (1974) argues that in wanting to understand what is it like to be a bat, one can only (italics emphasized) turn to one’s own background of experience as basic material for imagining what it is like to be a bat. One can never (italics emphasized), Nagal (1974) argues, transcend one’s own imaginative boundaries into the bat’s consciousness and truly understand what being a bat feels like. Lesbian-woman feel exactly like this. They feel that it is impossible for hetero-sexuals to what it is like to be a Lesbian. In Searlean (2010) terms, this first-person phenomena and ontology (2004: pp. 98) experienced as being a lesbian is something that no third person i.e. hetero-sexuals can possibly understand.
“It is not possible for other people to understand us. You need to go through it put yourself in their shoes in order to understand. It’s like lets say you have never gone through depression before and you are talking to someone who has depression you can never fully understand what depression must be like because you can never gone through it yourself. So no matter how hard you try, no matter how good a friend you want to be, you will never reach 100% empathy it is just how it is.
I got this one of this good straight guy friend. He’s the Casanova ladies man, really good with girls Very good looking, charming, sociable… glib tongue, and he’s like my relationship guru. I got love problems I talk to him but he will never understand the homophobia I go through you know.”
(Interviewee Lisa, early-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
Continued invisibility I argue, perpetuates the myth that homo-sexuality is “non-existent” and “not of grave majority-concern” in Singapore. It accentuates the feeling of isolation and the experiential-cognitive gulf between ‘the homo-sexual’ and ‘hetero-sexual’ simply because there is no (italics emphasized) communication of true feelings, problems and thoughts between two sexual worlds. It also compounds the “shock” factor if and when lesbian-women eventually “come out” to their family and friends exacerbating the stresses (from “relationship damage control”) that lesbian-women have to deal with after they “come out.”
2.5 The visible lesbian community in Singapore and the role and importance of a ‘genuine’ culture
In a hetero-normative world where lesbian-women face a high risk of social rejection and alienation, the visible lesbian community in Singapore (comprising of, Usha Queer Woman Organization (UQWO), Woman Out Reach, God’s Sanctuary Church, Woman’s Dinner Night and Reach Out Now (RON) is an important as a safe haven where lesbian-women can find acceptance with their own homo-sexuality, build a strong and stable ancillary network of friends and safely be lesbian with other lesbians.
“The community is like your second parachute in case the first one fails. The first parachute is like the people you come out to and fail to come out properly and things turn nasty. And then they don’t become your friends anymore so it is this community you can fall back on to give you the friendship and support.”
(Interviewee Lisa, early-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
“Joining FCC was important for me to find acceptance. You find acceptance in friends. If you are a friend and if you find friends who go through the same things as you, you not only learn to accept your self, your other friend who is learning to accept you, it will also indirectly teach them to accept themselves you get what I mean? You not only get to view another person who is gay you know but you also get to feel that acceptance of being gay. You find peace and peace is an important marker in my life that things are ok.”
(Interviewee Alia, late-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
The community helps lesbian-women fan off the stresses and pressures of “coming out” (or not). Being with other lesbian-women like themselves and seeing that these other lesbian-women are leading healthy and successful lives starts a positive psychological feedback loop that normalizes their otherwise stigmatized lesbian identity in the hetero-sexual world.
“You start out very unsure very low self esteem, not sure if you are right in this matter and then as you go along, knowing more people they reinforce your values about yourself that you being gay and then you get to know more people you talk to them about what it is to be gay and then life still goes on even after they know even after they know you are gay, so all these experiences from both the straight world and the gay world, helps you become more sure about yourself.”
(Interviewee Lisa, early-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
The importance of the visible lesbian community to lesbian-women must be seen in light of how human beings are social-cultural beings. As Gellner (1955) writes, one may be born free but is everywhere in cultural chains. Both the necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of a sense self is as Mead (2003: pp. 35-37) argues, to 1), internalize the attitudes of other human individuals toward herself entailing the embodiment or bringing of the entire social process as a whole into her individual experience and adopting these attitudes of other individuals toward herself and towards others. 2), To take the entire sociality’s attitudes euphemized as the “generalized other” towards other social activities that she is engage in. “Culture” then, at variance with Kant’s (1929) a priori primacy of the transcendental subject , functions like our primary internal cognitive model of reality orienting our sense of time, space, causality and how we perceive our everyday reality (Keesing & Strathern, 1998). We have, as Lakoff (1997) argues, built-in, unconscious, automatic ways of conceptualizing ourselves.
The hetero-normative order is built into our taken-for-granted lifeworld - lebenswelt (Habermas, 1984: pp. 50-51) and internalized. For the homo-sexual lesbian self however, this is hetero-normative order often acts in a detrimental fashion to one’s construction of a coherent homo-sexual lesbian self-hood resulting in some of the lesbian-women feeling “guilty,” “dirty” and “abhorred” with themselves. What is ‘genuine’ of culture (Sapir, 1949) to the hetero-sexual becomes (or is) antithetical to the homo-sexual lesbian self. A ‘genuine’ culture Sapir (1949) argues, “must be looked upon as a steady plant growth [with] each remotest twig of [being] organically fed by the sap at the core (1949: pp. 316).” Core norms and values must serve the central interest of its members (1949: pp. 316). Hence, when the hetero-normative culture does not commensurate with the actual daily-lived experiences and problems of lesbian-women, such a culture becomes a chronic farce to them. If uncritically accepted, it is ‘bad faith ’ in Sartre’s etymology or ‘fallenness’ and inauthenticity’ of one’s being (dasein) (Heidegger). What the visible lesbian community does is then to create another imagined community to use the term by Benedict Anderson (), outside of the hetero-normative matrix to furnish lesbian-women with social-cultural norms affirmative of their lesbian being. By connecting with the lesbian community, lesbian-women have a lower chance of facing social dislocation or in Durkheim’s terms, anomie and a greater possibility of exposure to fellow women who face the same problems as them.
“I think it is important recently I join YOH. I think it is really very helpful especially for young questioning youths because they really discuss every single almost every all aspects of being a gay teen. It really helps. We talk about coming out to family members, gay relationships, breakups, safe sex, schools, work-place… You get close to many young people and that is really important so you won’t feel so alone.”
(Interviewee Kaia, late-teens, Chinese, Diploma undergraduate)
III To act or not to act; to be true or not true?
3.1 (Not) “coming out” as a performative hypperreality
For lesbian-women living in an invisible and split world life is a contrivance, a continual flagrant misrepresentation of one’s self as a ‘straight-acting ’ hetero-sexual. Social life consists of tremendous acts of dramaturgy or impression management properly conceived as acts of concealing, mystification, ascetic control and scrupulous calibration of distance-maintenance between one’s lesbian self and the hetero-sexual others. Her closeted life is subjected to scrupulous performances, highly contrived and painstakingly put together (Goffman, 1959a: pp. 77). All aspects of her lesbian desires, affections, decorum and behaviour must be hidden and modulated using a repertoire of punctiliously created titles, lies and idealized images. Everyday is like a ceremony of play-acting and make-believe bedeviled with intense self-policing and incertitude of whether the manifold performance is formidable and elaborate enough a simulacrum. There is incessant fear of committing a faux pas – an unintentional and unthinking omission or contribution of gesture or speech act that will result in the destruction of a the lesbian-woman’s mandatory simulacrum (Goffman, 1959b: pp. 204). For the lesbian-women, life has no backstage where as a performer, she gets a momentary break. Once she takes up her subverted lesbian identity, she has to up-play this simulacrum or false representation all the time and everywhere, at home, at work, in school, with friends and relatives. Her real lesbian identity has to be hidden and hence invisible to the presumed social reality ‘out there.’ Her lesbian existence or the substance of her self hence ironically transmutes into a phantasmagoric illusion. Her identity is simultaneously a productive fabrication of a nonexistent representation of ‘straightness’ expressed by Butler (1990) as “an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive hetero-sexuality (1990: pp. 136).”
“It is extremely repressive if you don’t come out… you are not being authentic you are repressing yourself and just lying your way through life.”
(Interviewee Alia, late-20s, Chinese, works in the Finance industry)
The lesbian-woman’s very straightness has no ontological substrate except for her very performativity of acting straight. It is sustained by a repertoire of lies and make-believe mystification of her non-lesbianness. My interviewee Alia, who is not “out” to her parents, avoids hugging her girlfriend or holding her girlfriend’s hands at crowded places. To live up to the ideal of a filial daughter, Alia also avoids bringing her girlfriend home and constantly speaks of her fantasies of guys to her parents. If she receives repeated phone calls from a girl, she tells her parents it is just her best friend. When she moves in with her girlfriend, she introduces her girlfriend to her parents as ‘the landlord.’ Consciousness of another of my interviewee Cyndi heightens with greater proximity to her home or workplace and social distance. Cyndi for instance, avoids wrapping her hands over her girlfriend and walks with a certain distance apart. There exist a tactic of ‘friends-cycling’ that she also uses to create a mystification or an illusion that she is going out with many friends instead of just her one girlfriend.
This whole edifice of “straightness” is a performative negation of lesbianness that demands tremendous amounts of dramaturgical prudency to efface the essence of lesbianness from every aspect of her lesbian self in to forge a chimera of the straight acting self. The closeted lesbian self thus conceived, is the straight-acting self. To herself, she thinks she is straight; at home, she acts as a good straight-daughter, in public, she acts as the good straight-citizen; at work, she acts as the good straight-worker, to her relatives; she acts as the good straight-niece; in school, she acts as the good straight-student.
If we understand social life as a performative with no ontological status apart from the very acts that constitute its reality, then the lesbian-woman’s social life is one with no real ontological reality because her very reality is an everyday performative act to a negate herself from its very reality by acting straight. Her life is marked with deviousness, treacherous, scrupulous and ceaseless inauguration of representations that at once performatively create and embody the ideal paradigm of ‘straightness.’ In other words, her life is nothing but self-negation, duplicity and deceit to herself, family, friends, friends, co-workers and relatives. It is thus, not a coincidence why this metaphor of ‘being in a closet’ or ‘closeted’ is constantly evoked to describe this dark and stealthily hidden continual reproduction of the performative negation of self in every aspect of her everyday life. This performativity is stressful to keep up with.
“I have always been close with my parents at that point it was like do I hide a part of myself from them, or do I just come out and then we see what happens?”
(Interviewee Stesha, early-30s, Chinese, educator in a private university)
The immutable and indubitable certainty of the sanctity of the ideal hetero-normative straightness is thus constituted and upheld only by performative acting and mystification tactics. This very performativity of straight-acting creates an epiphenomenon of the invisibility of the lesbian world which serves only to sustain the chimerical appearance and ideality of its hetero-normative counterpart. Reality so conceived is then hyperreal (Baudrillard, 1998). A “real” reality that is not signified by any “real” values or referentials (1998) but simply, by performative acts whose very acts constitute reality (Butler, 1990).
Thus, the lesbian-women wants to come out, and out of draconian and exacting continual reproduction and performativity of a false representation of one self; tearing asunder the pretense and simulation of a straight reality or the simulacrum of falsehood. She wants come out into her true species-being or one’s true consciousness. As Marx (1998) writes:
‘As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are therefore coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.’
(Marx, 1998: pp. 37)
Through the very performativity of one’s acts, one objectifies oneself in reality. But the lesbian-woman’s performativity is a pretentious acting of straight which does not coincide with her true species-being (Marx, 1998) or true nature. Thus conceived, ‘coming out’ is a revolt against one’s bitter alienation from her very lesbian species-being. It is a revolt against the subservience of her lesbian individuality to a collective straight purpose that has only remote relevancy to her true lesbian relationship, identity and strivings. Again, borrowing Edward Sapir’s (1949) coining, it is to create a genuine (1949: pp. 314) lesbian self and in all hope, a lesbian life and culture which he defines as a synthesis of all spheres consisting of a unified attitude towards life (1949: pp. 316). This is so that her whole reality and being is not just a front stage or an entire artifice of contrivance that requires perpetual policing of a straight appearance where the lesbian-woman has to ensure that her performances are coherent, her behaviour is sufficiently straight-looking and well embellished and lies have continuity in their fictional stories. There is no backstage where the closeted lesbian-woman can momentary relax. Even her home is turned into a dramatized front. So, the lesbian in her wants to come out, as lesbian.
3.2 “Coming out” of and into a “true,” lesbian being as a pure idealization
But “coming out” as lesbian I argue is a pure idealization because “coming out” is often in actuality, never even “coming out.” It is a socio-personal struggle to “come out.” Most often, “coming out” to one’s parents takes many years, some never even get to “come out” to their parents while others delude themselves into waiting for a “right timing .” The ideal of coming out as lesbian faces repeated failure and this failure is not yet externalized as action. In Nietzsche’s (1954: pp. 332-333) words it is an eternal recurrence of failure. The lesbian-woman wants to declare: “I am… lesbian” to her mother, her father, her co-workers or friends for that matter but these three words are incredibly hard to be uttered. The very effort takes years of serious cogitation and musing. The manifestation of the pure idealization of “coming out” as lesbian, is objectified in the various fissures or non-space where what is intended or thought is never articulated and acted out in social reality. This is what Searle (2001) legitimately calls, volitional gaps.
“Gaps occur when the beliefs, desires, and other reasons are not experienced as causally sufficient conditions for a decision (the formation of a prior intention); and the gap also occurs when the prior intention does not set a causally sufficient condition for an intentional action; and it also occurs when the initiation of an intentional project does not yet set sufficient conditions for its continuation or completion (2001: pp. 62-63)”
There are in Searle’s (2001) system of argumentation, three gaps. The intricacies of volitional gaps are unimportant for our purposes. Yet, I wish to highlight how, there exists many volitional gaps or “lapses” in thought and action. Firstly, the lesbian-woman may not even dare to “come out” to herself as lesbian. She does not dare to have such an “intention” – desire or belief that she is lesbian. Even if she “comes out” to herself, she has trouble materializing her already-intended lesbian self into action (Searle, 2001) i.e. “coming out to others” much less continuing to be lesbian throughout her life. There are lesbian-women who take decades to “come out” to themselves and to people in her social milieus and other lesbians who have “turned straight” after being lesbian for decades. To me, these volitional lapses signify powerful forces acting to keep the intention-of-being lesbian and actually-being lesbian apart.
IV The powerful grip that is everywhere inhibiting “coming out”
In section 5.1, I will proffer using Searle’s (1995, 2010) argument that “coming out” is difficult because institutional facts created and maintained by attributing and collectively recognizing a manifold of negative and dismissive status-functions to homo-sexuality makes “coming out” to accepting such a lesbian-self as a very tough affair. In section 5.2, I will argue again using Searle’s (1995, 2010) argument that because the act of non-conformity automatically subjects one to the possibility of being censured, lesbian-women have the tendency to defer from “coming out.” In section 5.3 I will reject the notion of power as subsisting in any “essence” of the state or subject and propose to understand “coming out” as problematic because power is everywhere and everywhere reinforcing the order of hetero-normativity.
4.1 The homo-sexual ‘negative’ institutional facts, ‘status functions’ and its independent de-ontic powers
The structure of social reality, Searle argues (1995: pp. 4) is like an invisible and weightless web of institutional facts . Institutional facts are facts that require special human recognition for their existence (1995: pp. 27). Institutional facts are created by a very human capacity of attributing “status functions ” to physical structures and objects (2010: pp. 7) using a locution “counts as.” They all have a formal logical structure that “X (person or object) counts as Y (status) in C (context).” So, for our purposes, using the locution “count as,” we create a “new” reality of homo-sexuality (X) by giving homo-sexuality a series of new a posteriori, aberrant, deviant, mental illness, psychologically dysfunctional, bestial, animalistic, rotten and warped status functions (Y). Searle (1995, 2010) argues that so long as the collective recognizes and represents the negative reality of homo-sexuality as existing (2010, pp. 93), the reality of homo-sexuality as all of ‘Y’ status functions will be created and sustained.
Because this logical structure of “X counts as Y in Singapore (C)” is not exhaustive (1995: pp. 143), established Y status functions can be further iterated upon yet another set of status functions (Y2) and yet another set of status functions (Y3) using the locution “count as” to ad infinitum. Thus, for a woman to come out as lesbian in Singapore, she is liable to being count(ed) as all of Y status functions e.g. aberrant and if she is aberrant, she constitutively “counts as” a lesser moral being and being a lesser moral being constitutively “counts as” liable to being subjected to the encroaching scrutiny of the public eye when she goes out especially with her girlfriend, deprived of legal rights to have a house, be legally married, be granted basic hospital visitation rights when their partners fall ill, being forced to go for counseling to correct one’s mental problem or illness, having AIDS ad infinitum. I argue then that because homo-sexuality is constitutive of such an iterated structure of institutional facts that is constitutive of negative, dismissive and despairing status functions imposed upon it, “coming out” is always a very onerous, traumatic and intense affair wrought with a lot of resistance, emotional bloodshed, and thoughts of self-negation objectified as suicidal thoughts, depression and anxiety.
Moreover, it is not just negative “stereotypes” that makes “coming out” problematic. Humans are social creatures who as Mead (2003) argues, internalize a totality attitudes of society or of the “generalized other” to individuate themselves into reality. Yet for homo-sexuals, these stereotypes constitutively “counts as” - the need to accept a “self” constituted by such derogatory status functions attributed by society to them. It does not matter whether it is a social performative in Butler’s (1990) terms or whether it is real or unreal and true or untrue. Once created simply by ontologically subjective collective recognition, status functions become new institutional epistemically objective facts independent of us which are endowed with deontic powers (Searle, 1995, 2010) and hence have a power-ful influence over “coming out.” Deontic powers are powers that give people reasons for action (2010: pp. 148) independent of their intentional-desires, of any essence of a Kantian transcendental subject, of a Weberian monopoly of power held by an entity called “the state” or of Marx’s historical materialist class-struggles framework. The Searlean deontic powers refer to status functions that once created by virtue of collective recognition, become epistemically independent (my italics) institutional facts objectified as rights (no rights for homo-sexuals to be equally respected), entitlements (no entitlements to lesbians to purchasing a HDB flat or have hospital visitation rights) duties (not fit for duty), and permissions (no permission to get legally married), etc (2010: pp. 9). This pervasive network of epistemically independent institutional facts and status functions endowed with deontic powers reinforced and sustained in power by collective intentionality (Searle, 2010: pp. 156) serve as an important epistemically independent inhibitor to “coming out.”
4.2 The act of non-conformity as automatically being subjected to discrimination
Yet who gets to use this powerful inhibitor against lesbians wanting to “come out?” Searle (2010) argues that “anybody (my italics) can exercise this [hetero-normative] power over anybody else” so long as that person shares the similar background hetero-normative norm of our society (Searle, pp. 156-157). Background directives want people to “conform!” and failure to conform automatically results in disapproval manifesting as lesbian-women being (potentially) disowned and socially disenfranchised. This I argue along with Searle (2010) based on my study from how reflecting how in one way or another, regardless of age, ethnicity or educational attainments, lesbian-women have in one way or another faced some form of “ensuring” or discrimination. The truism of Searle’s argument on how so long as one is non-conforming to hetero-normative background norms, one can be liable to being sanctioned by anyone who shares this same background can be further illuminated just by the real anecdotal situation on the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) trains in Singapore. Often, hetero-sexual couples will exhibit intimacy by kissing, touching each other’s thighs or hugging on the MRT train. But when a homo-sexual (gay and lesbian) couple does it, it invites immediately the scrutinizing and at times patronizing eyes of others. In the same light, if the Background rule or norm exist to not drink or eat in the MRT trains and you do actually drink or eat, anyone can legitimately go up to you and tell you not to. In other words, you are liable to being sanctioned and cautioned by others so long as you are non-conforming. Deontic powers are desire independent and epistemically objectively there to be used as for action (Searle, 2010) against all transgressors. One of the reasons why it is so hard to “come out” is then because such an act of non-conformity which violates hetero-normativity means automatically liable to being sanctioned by society in the form of expressions of disapproval to even strong forms of ostracism (Searle, pp. 157).
This is why in “coming out” (an act of non-conformity), lesbian-women are always cautioned of the prudent rule: “First, protect yourself.” Read the “coming out guide ,” know that you are likely to be berated and subjected to the obloquy of the public and your parents. Make sure you have supportive friends, if not, the lesbian community to support you in the event you are disowned or rejected. The coming out guide is literally a guide book on “how to come out.” In this book, one is taught to weigh the consequences and risks of coming out, accept that one may suffer the loss of friendship, face awkwardness in friendships, be discriminated at work, be called names etc. Hence, prior to coming out, one is encouraged to learn credible statements from major institutions like the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that justifies homo-sexuality as not a mental illness or depravity. Lesbian-women are also taught in the book places to go to for support in face of the likely emotional toll – anxiety, guilt, anger and blame. So long as one is ruminating and intending the very act of “coming out,” one needs to be sufficiently prepared and “ready” because the act of non-conformity is liable to being sanctioned by anyone almost potentially automatically. The existence of the nature of background norms (demanding conformity) and status functions with deontic powers and very much against homo-sexuality allow power to be wielded by anyone against any non-conformer.
4.3 Demise of the state (?) and the nature of hetero-normative power as everywhere suppressing “coming out”
“Coming out” I argue is so problematic also because power is phenomenologically everywhere as conceived by Foucault, keeping homo-sexuality within the confines of the order of hetero-normativity (Rich, 1980).
This is however, not to say that the state has no say nor influence in Singapore with regards to homo-sexuality and (or) lesbianism. Under the (in)famous Section 377A of the Penal Code of Singapore, sex between mutually consenting adult men is illegal. Several years back, in 2007, NMP Thio Li-Ann (2007) mounted a defense for 377A claiming that her defense is necessary for the fundamental moral ecology of Singapore. In Thio Li-Ann’s discursive speech, she invoked phrases such as “gender identity disorder,” “acts of gross indecency,” “moral repugnancy of homo-sexuality,” and she spoke of homo-sexuality on equal footing with “bestiality, incest and pedophilia” (2007). In fact, even the state’s non-action such as not giving legal recognition to homo-sexuals manifesting in the form of the dearth of legal marriage rights, rights to visitation if lesbian partners fall ill, non-action in terms of fostering a positive attitude towards having a “two mother” family unit and the Housing Development Board’ (HDB) rule which only allows hetero-married couples and singles above 35 to purchase a HDB flat play a huge role in shaping a priori normative notions of right and wrong good or bad and hence, the receptivity of the hetero-normative social spatiality. This influences the decisions of lesbian-women in coming out (or not). At times, State power may even be so potent that lesbian-women not only do not come out but in fact, contemplate moving abroad.
“There are a lot of issues, bills, rights and everything. So I really want the legal protection of being married. It’s very important. I don’t want to constantly have to worry about what happens to my partner and family if something happens to me. I don’t want to worry about the fact that one day someone is going to take away my kids and I am not fit to be a mother because I am gay. They can use the fact that you are a gay in divorce proceedings to win over custody of kids. I don’t want that to happen.”
(Interviewee Indira, mid-20s, Indian, Bachelors undergraduate)
Hence, that the state has power over what is homo-sexuality and what does it mean to be homo-sexual (with regards to the rights one has and does not have) is irrefutable. My only contention is that in analyzing the problematic of this “coming out” phenomenon, it is not very much because the state is actually taking any action against homo-sexuals. Because in fact, the Singapore government does not actively condemn homo-sexuality and proscribe against homo-sexual relationships . If we then ask, why do lesbian-women struggle to come out to themselves? Why do lesbian-women take decades even to come out to others? Why do some lesbian-women never come out as lesbian and choose to lead an “invisible” life? The answer cannot be “because the state” or “the law” is wielding power over homo-sexuals.
A more befitting perspective and explanatory model would be because “coming out” is associated with such derogatory “status functions” and power can be wielded by anyone non-conforming to the hetero-normative background presuppositions. The very nature of hetero-normative power is then, not in any entity but is everywhere functioning to reinforce the order of hetero-normativity upon the lesbian-women who in “coming out” acts in a non-conforming fashion.
As Foucault (1991) argues: “the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction.” Power is no longer within the threshold of “the state” but takes on a form of “Governmentality ” (Foucault, 1991: pp. 102-103) simultaneously diffused, deinstitutionalized and individualized by virtue of the possibility of being able to rationally calculate about and “manage” every aspect of this population’s well-being. Such an individualized power needs a spatiality to exert itself and this spatiality is created through what Foucault calls, the deployment of sexuality. Sexuality as Foucault argues, is a universal employment localized specifically upon the body. It is a universal phantasm, a construct, whose truth is given only for the very sake of the very deployment of power. In the exact words of Foucault, “sexuality is not feared by power, and instead is far more, a means through which (my italics) power is exercised (1990a: pp. 119).” The phantasm of sexuality is thus constructed as a sort of truth upon the body where discourses about the right form of pleasure, relationships, love, intensities, coexistences and attachments (Foucault, 1990a: pp. 116; 1990c) are constructed for power to give itself a possible reason to intervene and assert its puissance.
The truth discourse of sexuality is hence a formidable tool of control and power (Foucault, 1990a: pp. 114). This phantasm of sexuality once inscribed and localized upon the body of the subject is established as something that needs askesis i.e. taming, control and disciplining (1990a, 1990b) and as such becomes a universal productive space for power to impose itself. The (Any) subject who embodies a sexual body gives power its rightful deployment space and her sexuality becomes a roaming platform where power can assert itself simultaneously universally, continually and particularly through the fictitious relation it has established with the body. Power is hence, exercised everywhere upon the constructed “sexual body,” keeping lesbians within the confines of hetero-normativity and making “coming out” a very onerous affair because it is a need to go against power which is everywhere and everywhere “implanted” upon the material bodies of homo-sexual lesbian-woman.
“Sex is the most speculative, most ideal and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures.”
(Foucault 1995: pp. 203)
4.4 The power hypothesis
The normalizing power of hetero-normativity grips onto the very materiality of the lesbian-woman’s body and penetrates all spheres of her life. In all sense of the spatiality and temporality, once the lesbian-woman has internalized the cultural normative of hetero-normativity, she feels the power of hetero-normativity in all definite relations of her life. So long as she is lesbian, her non-conformity automatically makes her liable to being in every definite relation of her life subjected to the policing of hetero-normativity by anyone and even herself. The lesbian-woman’s very inabilities to “come out” to herself and others in all spheres of life are particular manifestations of the experience of the enforcement of ubiquitous hetero-normative power thoroughly infused upon her material body and being. The “automatic and ubiquitous nature” of hetero-normative power as everywhere wieldable by anyone including herself and infused upon the lesbian-woman makes “coming out” a process of sometimes, almost (never) coming out.
V Lesbianism as a modern self
5.1 What is modernity and the modern self?
The advent of 18th century Enlightenment ushered in an era called ‘modernity’ where traditional and religious authority became de-centered centers of power and legitimacy. Modernity demands that all existing things are to be subjected to logical formalism and Reason (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1987: pp. 20). Modernity as Giddens (1990) argues is a period where Reason triumphs free displacing (1990: pp. 250) all grand narratives and space from time rendering it possible to re-structure our entire experience of space and time. It makes the notion of “place” or our immediate locality a superannuated phantasmagoric (1990: pp. 250) notion to experience our self. In modernity, there is a notion that everything is possibly displaceable and changeable culminating in Horkheimer & Adorno (1987: pp. 20) arguing that in the abstract sense, in modernity, both the ‘traditional’ subject and object are nullified. Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant (1929) reasoned that the only thing that is non-displaceable is the transcendental subject symbolized as the “I think” necessary to give order and coherence our sensible world. In Kant’s brief publication on What is Enlightenment - Was ist Aufkerung? (1997) and the famous Critique of pure reason (1929), Kant bears the idea that modernity is about how we may properly use reason and our various faculties to derive valid objective knowledge and judgment of ourselves and our entire social reality. A legitimate modern self then embodies an ethos or attitude of constant questioning using Reason proper. A modern self as ‘modern’ French poet Baudelaire describes the flâneur, “must remain ever vigilant, constantly on guard and alert (Graeme, 1996).” Modernity and the modern ethos that deploys Reason into the lifeworld means that nothing can be left unproblematic. Reason subjects our lifeworld (Habermas, 1984) to intense scrutiny and opens up different and infinite possibilities of legitimation and contestation of all moral and cultural values (Eisenstadt, pp. 30). In modernity, our horizon of novelty becomes non-fenced (Goran, 1997), and new problematiques and re-intepretations continually arise.
5.2 The modern lesbian self and the consequence of modernity
The lesbian-woman I argue is the beau ideal of a modern self-hood. Her non-conforming act of “coming out” as lesbian means that norms sanctioning hetero-normativity are antediluvian in her life. Being simultaneously displaced and situated in an antagonistic relation to her hetero-normative cultural order forces the lesbian-woman to question the very hetero-normative cultural standards of her time where her homo-sexuality is perceived as sexually hedonistic, licentiousness, lustful and promiscuous (Gagnon & Simon, 1967: pp. 248). “Coming out” into a lesbian being compels the lesbian-woman to adopt a reflexive modern ethos in restructuring her whole self. She is forced into a violent struggle to construct her own cultural aesthetics upon which her new moral quality can subsist. She is forced to question the very fundamental nature and identity of her self because pre-existing hetero norms and values are no longer applicable to her. However, the modern ethos of questioning one’s cultural lifeworld givens is one fraught with much trauma and toil. Because hetero-normativity is so ingrained and taken-for-granted, it requires an extraordinary amount of endeavouring to re-fashion anything that is not hetero (but homo) as normal. So long as a woman comes out as lesbian, she has to upend the whole hetero-normative substratum and take responsibility in creating a livable environment for herself. For some, this entails seeking out the visible community of lesbian-others to affirm that being lesbian is normal and ok. This is why with prior reference to Appendix A Table 2, 86.67% of my interviewees have at least participated in one way or another in the visible Singapore lesbian community. A lot of what the dinners, activities and support groups do in the visible lesbian community is not only to establish new relations of friendship with other lesbian-women but to implicitly know and show that lesbians are equally normal and robustly functioning human beings. Showing up for community events, talking to others, understanding homo-sexuality from the religious, social and scientific perspectives through programs like L.S.H.G which offer support group sessions to critically interpret bible passages supposedly against homo-sexuality are all very important in normalizing the stigmatized status of her new homo-sexuality. Many others attend Woman’s Dinner Night held on every last Saturday of the month to discuss pertinent issues with other fellow lesbian-women regarding things like homo-phobia, the accepting of her homo-sexual self, the possibility of maintaining a long term lesbian relationship with another woman etc. The act of being in a group sharing common interests and problems helps lesbian-women to fan off the vehement stresses of being a homo-sexual in Singapore.
Yet, contrary to the romanticized notion of the modern reflexive and rational self, my study of the phenomenon of lesbian-women’s “coming out” process shows that the stakes involved in adopting a modern ‘reflexive’ selfhood is grave and not as romantic or pleasant as it seems. “Coming out” as a lesbian-woman means exposing herself to the chronic danger of being disparaged and looked down upon often with skepticism by others regarding her sexual choice. As a corollary, the lesbian-women have to be perpetually prepared to defend her stance and such an endeavour means that she has to be ever-vigilant and ever-alert. Many of the lesbian-women I have spoken to had to deal with feelings of existential anxiety, fear, apprehensiveness, distress and ambivalence at some point in their lives. Some who are overwhelmed by the process grapple with depression and suicidal thoughts.
Just as modernity is sometimes conceived as a series of value-laden antinomies and binary opposites (Laban, 2002), in “coming out” as lesbian, lesbian-women are forced to embody a particular manifestation of modernity’s inner tensions, antinomian dichotomies and dialectical confrontations (Giddens, 1990) because they have to create a home where they can safely belong. This process is often a temporally protracted and emotionally laborious one because the lesbian-woman is going against all her hetero-normative social learning. As Habermas (1983) argues, modernity is an incomplete project and for the lesbian-woman, this is a truism that cannot be any more true.
5.3 The modern or not so modern reception of homo-sexuality
The reception of “coming out” stories range from a continuum of playing amnesia i.e. “pretending to have not heard” the message delivered, to hysterical melodrama involving unabating periods of sobbing, grieving and blaming. Why? I argue albeit hypothetically only that this is because ‘coming out’ is an epiphenomenon of modernity which is entails nihilism, nothingness and danger. It is symbolic of the fact that even the veracious hetero-normative order that hetero-sexuals have emphatically and unswervingly given loyalty to can be (or in a stronger sense: is) subverted and nullified. This I argue, then triggers a sense of chronic unease in most people, albeit subconsciously.
“Coming out” is hence always or most often received in a dramatic fashion because it means for the recipient of the “coming out” message, the need question, tear asunder and upend many cherished systems of believes not limited to the veracity of scientific bio-evolution, “God” who supposedly censured homo-sexuality and the faith in a social-moral sanctity of the hetero-normative order that governs now only supposedly healthy family units. Accepting the coming out message often demands an incredible amount of intellectual, emotional, social and physical re-fashioning to make sense of the new social reality. At the most extreme end of the argument, it maybe the need to accept the very ontological nothingness of modernity. “Coming out” is hence a very modern phenomenon that thrusts one directly into the spirit of modernity - the spirit of perpetual incertitude and change. “Coming out” is thus a very distressing moment and a fatiguing affair, of modernity, for both the lesbian-woman and the recipient of the message because it also implies that all certainty becomes only a temporarily plausible faith that maybe replaceable with yet another faith in the future. Such a reality maybe difficult to accept because of the surety and certainty that all man gravitate towards.
VI Conclusion: The heroines of modernity
“Coming out” then, to take the expression of Walter Benjamin, is a sort of consciousness. It is the recognition of “a messianic cessation of happening, a revolutionary chance in the fight for [an] oppressed past where one takes cognizance of [the happening] in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history.”
Yet this revolutionary fight I argue, is over romanticized in the context of “coming out” as a Lesbian in Singapore. To “come out” as a lesbian-woman means to use her modern reflexivity to upend the hetero-normative order that demands a existential murdering of the lesbian-woman’s selfhood, to put an abrupt end to a fictitious performativity, to re-instate a backstage where the lesbian-woman can repose in, but more importantly, for the lesbian-woman, it is fundamentally a reflexive act to create a safe and viable home for her true lesbian being. “Coming out” is however, is nothing more than an ideal will to health and freedom in the words of Nietzsche because the social stakes in “coming out” is real and costly. “Coming out” as a lesbian-woman means risking being seen as aberrant, deviant and abnormal. It means risking social rejection and estrangement. It means being subjected to interminable questioning and justification of her ‘lesbian’ choice. It means relinquishing the possibility of relying on cultural pre-givens to lead her life in an easier and more taken-for-granted manner. Because cultural pre-givens are hetero-normative and antithetical to her lesbian being, this requires a whole spate of constant restructuring of her self and social life.
The act of “coming out” is a very laborious affair and promises no certainty. Yet, the ideal of “coming out” is still very beguiling for many driven by the ideals of living freely and happily a life of one’s choice. Contrary to lesbian-women being seen as depraved and aberrant, these lesbian-women are in fact heroic revolutionaries of modernity who in wanting to live and love, answers truthfully to the modern calling: What is Enlightenment for me?
I have sought here to explicate the phenomena of “coming out” and understand what makes “coming out” so difficult. I have established that this phenomenon is grave, traumatizing and problematic. It is a very real life and death matter experienced by real living human subjects. The “coming out” (or not) phenomena marks a shift in the lifestyle and sexual preference of many Singaporeans who are forced into invisibility by the background norms of our society and our very pretense of their non-existence. Continued social, political and cultural inaction with regards to this large number of ‘invisible’ homo-sexuals will not foster harmony but only embolden social segregation and misunderstanding. Without background normative affirmation of homo-sexuals, we are, stretching Searle’s (1995, 2010) arguments, effectively sanctioning social discrimination against lesbians and gays alike who as human beings, do not deserve to be disregarded in our society. My study has brought up serious moral-ethical shifts and concerns and the need for not only more research with regards to the homo-sexual life-style but also political attention and action in addressing issues that we have swept away under the capitulating guise of ignorance for a long time.
APPENDIX A
Table 1
Demographic Characteristics of Lesbian Women Interviewed
Names Age Group "Ethnic group" Occupational Category Education Level Participation in the Singapore visible lesbian community*
UQWO RON GS WOR WDN LSHG Others
Kaia Ong Late-teens Chinese Student Pursuing Diploma ● ●
Alisson Late-teens Chinese Student Pursuing Diploma ●
Lisa Early-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ● ●
Beth Early-20s Chinese Student Pursuing Bachelors ●
Marylin Early-20s Chinese Protective Service Diploma ● ● ●
Nat Early-20s Chinese Student Pursuing Bachelors ● ●
Dorene Early-20s Chinese Self-Employed Bachelors ●
Lydia Early-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ●
Adree Mid-20s Chinese Arts, Design, Entertainment and Media / Student Bachelors ●
Estelle Mid-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ● ●
Indira Mid-20s Indian Student Pursuing Bachelors ●
Cyndi Mid-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ●
Jace Late-20s Chinese Management Diploma ●
Alia Late-20s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ●
Swee Keng Late-20s Chinese Self-Employed Bachelors ●
Octavia Late-20s Chinese Arts, Design, Entertainment and Media Diploma ●
Yun yi Early-30s Chinese Life, Physical and Social Science Doctorate ● ●
Nadia Early-30s Chinese Management Doctorate ● ● ●
Stesha Early-30s Chinese Education, Training and Library Bachelors ● ● ●
Safiah Early-30s Malay Student Pursuing Bachelors ●
Natasha Early-30s Malay Self-Employed Diploma ●
Ace Early-30s Chinese Sports / Civil Service Bachelors ● ●
Danielle Early-30s Chinese Production Bachelors ● ●
Vivian Early-30s Chinese Civil Service Bachelors ●
Christee Early-30s Chinese Production Bachelors ● ●
Lynn Early-30s Chinese Civil Service / Arts & Media Diploma ●
Connie Mid-30s Chinese Self-employed Bachelors ● ●
Yifen Mid-30s Chinese Finance Bachelors ● ● ●
Kaitlyn Late-30s Chinese Arts, Design, Entertainment and Media / Pastoral Services Masters ● ●
Chloe Early-40s Chinese Civil Service Bachelors ●
N = 30 *Legend
Table 2
Key Characteristics Breakdown and Percentages (%)
Age Group Ethnic Group Educational Qualification (s) Number of Organizations Participated in the Singapore Lesbian Community
Age Group Chinese Malay Indian Pursuing Diploma Diploma Higher/University Education One Two Three
n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) N (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%)
Late-teens 2 6.67 2 6.67 0 0 0 0 2 6.67 2 6.67 0 0 1 3.33 1 3.33 0 0
20 < x < 30 14 46.67 13 43.33 0 0 1 3.33 3 10 3 10 11 36.67 8 26.67 3 10 3 10 30 < x < 40 13 43.33 11 36.67 2 6.67 0 0 1 3.33 2 6.67 11 36.67 4 13.33 6 20 3 10 Early-40s 1 3.33 1 3.33 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 3.33 1 3.33 0 0 0 0 Total (%) 100 90 6.67 3.33 20 23.34 76.67 46.67 33.33 20 N 30 27 2 1 6 7 23 14 10 6 Notes
My usage of the term “lesbian-woma(e)n” instead of the term “lesbian” may seem at first, tautological because the term “lesbian” is already reserved for homo-sexual women. But I insist on using of the term “lesbian-woman” instead of “lesbian” to give a more neutral and objective account of “lesbians” and to avoid the term “lesbian” being immanently be connoted with any pre-conceived sense of deviancy or abnormality prior to my giving of an account of “coming out as a lesbian in Singapore.”
‘Hetero-polarity’ can be understood as the keeping apart of binary categories “men” and “women” or gender categories such as “male” and “female.”
In all brevity, ‘noumena’ a term used by Kant (1929), which refers to that which our ‘faculty of sensibility’ cannot sense or see. Hence, it is an “object of non-sensible intuition [and it is something] abstract from our mode of intuiting it” (Kant, 1929: pp. 268). Kant (1929) often argues that we do not know or have valid knowledge of whether such noumena things exist or not, because we cannot intuit or see it. Hence, whether ‘abstract’ notions of substances such as “sexuality” or “sex (in-itself)” exist or not, we can only offer a postulate or working hypothesis. Although in social reality, this subtle yet important delineation is often neglected and “sex-in-itself” no longer is a problematic hypothetical substance but becomes taken as naturally existing.
In Book V of the Republic (Plato, 1955), the conversation between Socrates and Glaucon repetitively invoked the notion of the different natures of men and women rendering them pre-disposed for different pursuits. Greek philosophers believed that there is a natural dissimilarity between man and woman and woman are always weaker than man.
“Socrates: Can it be, then, that a woman is not by nature very different from a man?
Glaucon: Of course she is different.
Socrates: Then isn’t it also appropriate to assign a different job to each of them, the one for which they are naturally suited?
Glaucon: Certainly.”
(Plato, 1955: pp. 141)
Based on my study, Usha Queer Women Organization (UQWO) is touted the leading queer woman’s organization in Singapore. Usha Queer Women Organization has several functions.
1) UQWO Provides an online platform – forum for women questioning their sexual orientation to “voice out” their concern and connect with fellow ‘queer’ women. Their online platform also advertises for other auxiliary queer woman organizations such as Woman’s Dinner Night’s events.
2) UQWO organizes a yearly ‘Usha Queer Women Organization Camp’ – a ‘queer’ women self-development camp that organizes camp-trips abroad. The camp is a 3 day 2 night event where self-development seminars workshops allow lesbian-women to share their experiences of being a lesbian-woman in Singapore and by virtue of the act of sharing and bonding, learn to become more comfortable with themselves.
3) Usha Queer Women Organization organizes ad hoc ‘dinners’ for queer women to meet other queer women.
4) UQWO is an important intermediary where important lesbian self help books such as the “How to come out guidebook 2011” is sold at dinner party events.
Women’s Out Reach (WOR) is a queer-lesbian counseling and support group. I partook in one of a three-part series seminar support group put together to help ‘queer’ women develop a more confident sense of self, develop meaningful relationships with their partners and others in their lives and to plan ahead for a viable future. Another of their outreach group is now in its 5th successive run for queer women in Singapore.
God’s Sanctuary (GS)is a church that embraces homo-sexuals in Singapore. I participated in their Sunday Services, Christmas dinner 2010, Halloween Party and several cell group meetings. I ran interviews with several gay men and Lesbian-women consisting of one of FCC’s council member who pioneered a program called Lesbian Self Help Group (L.S.H.G) (now in its 7th run) and some of their key facilitators.
LSHG started in 2005. It functions as a Christian based support group and allows Lesbian-women to critically study bible verses against homosexuality. It provided a positive space for conflicted Christian women to exchange ideas, interact and bond and rationally develop a critical understanding of verses in the bible. Because the Christian lesbian self often feel guilty, dirty and depraved of their own sexual orientation and act, a rational and critical understanding of bible verses not only helps the Christian lesbian self to reconcile with her mode of being but such an understanding also allows her to defend and protect herself against people who excoriate them. Such excoriation is often described as “bible bombing.” The importance of God’s Sanctuary and L.S.H.G must be seen in the context of the conservative church stance against homo-sexuality in Singapore.
Women’s Dinner Night (WDN) holds interactive dinner discussions at the end of every month where lesbian-women meet to discuss various lesbian or queer women related issues such as how to handle relationships and financials as a lesbian-woman; how to “come out” to one’s friends and family and handle work-place related stress.
Reach Out Now (RON) has recently commenced their 3rd support group run mainly for youths from the age of 16-23. RON has also recently organized a forum event with Woman’s Out Reach called “Binding moments” inviting guest speakers to discuss about “coming out” to one’s family.
M.Sc stands for Master of Science; Ph.D stands for Doctor of Philosophy
The very term ‘phenomenology’ is a method that Husserl himself describes in his Logical Investigations a pure descriptive science of a subject’s consciousness without speculative abstract theorizing associated with traditional metaphysics (Moran, 2000: pp. 106-107). In the most general sense, phenomenology for Husserl has its exclusive concern, the experiences intuitively seizable and analyzable immanently in their pure essences. The term “social phenomenology” is then a distilled version of ‘phenomenology’ aimed at studying the subjective consciousness and awareness in one’s social world (Natanson, 1970). I chose and used the term “social phenomenology” so that my findings will clearly and distinctly illustrate the rich feelings and individual experiences of “coming out.” In my view, there is no other way this experience can be illustrated anymore accurately.
The term ‘monad’ is a term coined by philosopher Leibniz (1991) in his famous writings called The Principles of Philosophy, or the Monadology (1714). In this Publication, Leibniz defines the monad as “nothing but a simple substance that enters into composites – simple, that is without parts […] with no parts, [no] extension, nor shape, nor divisibility […] Monads are true atoms of nature and in brief, the element of things. (Leibniz, 1991: pp. 68)”
The term ‘intentionality’ in Searle’s (2001, 1995) writings is used to describe generally internal cognitive capacities and processes in our consciousness where our stream of conscious thought – desires, intentions, beliefs and perceptions etc occurs.
The term ‘transcendental’ is introduced by Kant in his 1st Critique of Pure Reason (1929) where he entitled the term ‘transcendental to “all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge (my italics) of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori (1929: pp 59).” His critical or transcendental philosophy then refers to all concepts expounded within this transcendental system. In general Kant’s critical transcendental philosophy especially in his 3rd Critique of Judgment wants to argue that the ultimate conditions of knowledge and ultimate judgment lies ‘transcendentally’ in the human subject.
What Sartre (Santoni, 1995) meant by ‘bad faith’ is often alluded to a certain notion of cynical lying or lying to oneself. The ideal type of lie or lying is a cynical consciousness where one affirms a kind of true in oneself but denies it in words and perhaps even denies that he has denied it (1995: pp. 49).
‘Straight’ is a term used by lesbian-women (and gay men) to also denote their ‘other’ ‘hetero-sexual’ others. The term is made sensible once we juxtapose ‘straight-ness’ (correctness of homo-sexuality) to the often purported ‘not-straight’ or ‘deviancy’ of homo-sexuals.
‘Performativity’ or ‘gender performative’ is introduced by Butler (1990) to explain how the true organizing principle of hetero-normativity i.e. is itself a construct that has to be performed and acted – and that its ‘constructedness’ is often, never revealed (1990: pp. 173). Underlying the notion of ‘performativity’ is the idea that the gendered body has no ontological status apart from the acts that constitute its very reality (1990: pp 173). In other words, without ‘performing’ hetero(or homo)-sexuality then, there can be no ‘hetero(or homo)-sexual’ reality.
‘Straight’ is a term used by lesbian-women (and gay men) to also denote their ‘other’ ‘hetero-sexuals.’ The term is made sensible once we juxtapose ‘straight-ness’ (correctness of homo-sexuality) to the often purported ‘not-straight’ or ‘deviancy’ of homo-sexuals.
In my field work, many lesbians often recount to me how no timing is ever a right timing because there is just no right timing when it comes to coming out implicitly implying that coming out is most often not well received no matter when or where one comes out as lesbian to others and even herself.
In the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1954), Nietzsche provokes us to think of the very idea of a possible the eternal recurrence of life. “The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent – not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back to this selfsame life (my italics), in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak again the word of the great noon of earth and man, to proclaim the overman again to men (1954: pp. 333).”
The original idea of ‘eternal recurrence’ is often used heuristically to think about “what if.” For instance, in this context, if for the lesbian-woman, life is such that it would eternally recur in the exact same manner, would she still want to “come out” even if it fails and the consequences are costly? If she is struggling to “come out” and has not done so even though she badly wants to, if life were to recur at this moment again and again, would she want to lead such a hidden invisible life and untrue to herself? Would this thought then make her want to “come out?”
To help understand the Searlean notion of “institutional facts” (1995, 2010) it might help to contrast it with Durkheim’s (1985) usage of social facts. Durkheim argues that “social” facts are “a category of social facts that are independent of the individual’s consciousness and inclinations (1985, pp. 59).” They are “neither logical nor psychological phenomena(s) (1985, pp. 59)” and so “exist entirely outside the individual consciousness (1985, pp. 61).” Social facts are “ways of acting that is able to exert an external (my italics) constraint on the individual.” Searle can be seen to be reacting against a Durkheimian notion of social facts. He argues that “institutional facts” are created by the individual subject and are entirely dependent on the collective recognition for it to exist. Without the collective recognizing it in their intentionality (or consciousness in Durkheim’s sense) this institutional facts cannot exist. They are hence, ontologically subjective even though they are epistemically objective (my italics) (Searle, 1995: pp. 123). Meaning to say that institutional facts are observer-relative. Yet, once created, they can as Durkheim argues, exert constraint over individuals. The uniqueness of Searle’s argument for institutional facts also consist in how he argues against Durkheim (1985) elsewhere that institutional facts have a biological basis because it is dependent on our very human consciousness and consciousness is biological and therefore, physical (1995: pp. 6). Both thinkers however concur that this is a “collective phenomena” that cannot (my italics) be reduced to an individual phenomena or “I phenomena” in Searle’s (1995: pp. 24) words.
In a very Sociological manner, Searle argues that humans simply do not experience things as material physical objects or molecules and atoms (Searle, 1995: pp. 14). In fact, humans experience a “world of chairs, tables houses, cars, lecture halls, pictures, streets gardens and so forth (1995: pp. 14)” What is happening is that we assign “status functions understood as values or symbolic meanings inclusive of teleology to causal processes and naturally occurring physical objects (1995, pp. 15-20). The persistence of “status functions” or new meanings on objects are then reinforced by a collective recognition and hence are dependent on collective subjective intentionality. (See for details, note 17).
This traits are not arbitrarily used but quoted and used by many in fact, almost all of my interviewees to describe themselves or to recount to me how others have described them.
In Searle’s (2010) book on Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization Searle further emphasizes on how status functions are always intentionality-relative (2010: pp. 43) implying that it is relative and dependent on humans and their “collective intentionality” and recognition of such status functions without which, such subjective propositions of what is good or bad of homosexuality or even any “ethnic” group for instance cannot be sustained. The crux of the argument is that status functions can only be sustained because we continue to give it recognition. In an earlier publication, Searle (1995) writes:
“The secret of understanding the continued existence of institutional facts is simply that individuals directly involved and a sufficient number of members of the relevant community must continue to recognize and accept the existence of such facts. Because the status is constituted by collective acceptance and because the function, in order to be performed requires the status, it is essential to the functioning that there be continued acceptance of the status (1995, pp. 117).”
Searle in many of his books uses the idea of “money.” Literally, money (1995, pp. 46) is ‘just a piece of paper’ but because we collectively recognize and give it the status function such as money counting as the medium of exchange and of store value (1995: pp. 46), money no longer is just a piece of paper it in fact, becomes a valuable paper that people may kill each other for.
The “How to come out guide book” is published by Usha Queer Women Organization, a queer community and advocacy group in Singapore for lesbian, bisexual and transsexual Asian women.
This is what was exactly said by current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (2007) in asserting the stance of the PAP government on 377A in 2007 repeal saga. In this speech, PM Lee recounted how MOE did not punish or sack the Raffles Institution Teacher who “came out” as gay with his reasons on his published blog. This teacher is still a teacher in Raffles Institution now (2007).
The term “Governmentality” is a form of rationality of revolving around governing “the population” – how to increase its welfare, wealth, longevity, health – which becomes the ends and object-target of the assertion of power by the government. A whole “ensemble” is then formed by institutions, procedures, analyses, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this power and to allow the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses (Foucault, 1991: pp. 102-103). In such a manner, power becomes diffused to everywhere and almost every aspect of human life.
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___ 2007 “377A serves public morality : NMP Thio Li-Ann” in The Online Citizen Retrieved on February 10th 2011 from http://theonlinecitizen.com/2007/10/377a-serves-public-morality-nmp-thio-li-ann/
___ 2007 “PM Lee Hsien Loong states PAP's stand on 377A” Youtube. [Online video clip] Retrieved February 10th 2011 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiNnJzcJJ9E (part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiNnJzcJJ9E&playnext=1&list=PLF7E6986EBBDEF252 (part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5xpndva3JY (part 3)
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