Mobilities of Chinese privilege and performance of the "oppressed other": Imagining a culture-centered politics of radical queerness
Fatimah, Malay, 53-year-old, has struggled all her life with making a living. Her parents worked as cleaners in malls, precursors to the shiny ever-expanding structures of luxury that accentuate Singapore's skyline. The money that they made through the cleaning work supported the large family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Then when Fatimah's father died from a severe heart attack, it fell upon her mother to support the family. As the elder child in the household, Fatimah started working as well, picking up cleaning jobs that her father worked in.
She has had a wide range of cleaning jobs over the years, mostly temporary and without benefits. In these cleaning jobs, she often felt a deep sense of shame, seen as the other. She never belonged to the spaces where she worked. She recounts stories of being talked down to in Chinese-majority settings of work. She shares that she had gotten used to this sense of being othered, being unseen, as deserving of the disenfranchising normative behaviors thrown at her.
She was happy when she found a cleaning job at a university, in a department full of Malay and Indian staff. She had never seen this kind of organization before in her life. For the first time in her life, she felt welcome. At the Hari Raya celebrations and the Deepavali celebrations and the celebrations of the Chinese New Year, there was always food for her. She was a part of the celebrations. Her heart jumped with joy when she witnessed the hallways coloured with Hari Raya festivities. Fatimah felt at home.
And then, everything changed.
One day, a Chinese boss came in. The Malay and the Indian staff were leaving one by one. Fatimah was witnessing the space she so dearly came to love change day by day. The celebrations were gone. The beautiful colours of Hari Raya and Deepavali, the shades of green and gold and red were gone.
One day, while cleaning the women's bathroom, Fatimah witnessed what she thought was a man walk into the bathroom. She had over the years developed a sense of protectiveness, a sense of responsibility toward the people she worked with. She followed the man into the bathroom and told him that he has no business being in the women's bathroom.
When the man turned around, Fatimah realized she was speaking with a woman. The woman, Chinese, went on to tell Fatimah that she is the new boss.
Fatimah lost her job within the month.
The new boss, Cindy Tan, a Chinese Singaporean academic who had returned from making a career in the United Kingdom at the London School of the Arts, had made a career out of writing about race and Asian marginalization. Professor Cindy Tan, an expert on Asian marginalization in the West, wrote elaborate performative accounts of the marginalization of Asian identities in Western cultures. She discussed in depth the problem of yellow peril and its framing in the hegemonic discursive spaces in the West/Empire. Her writings on Empire and race were considered some of the foundational readings in the sociology of race.
Professor Tan perfected the art of performing Chinese marginalization in the White empire. Her performances were works of art, depicting with excruciating detail her experiences of marginalization as a Chinese in the Western academia.
These performances that drew such large audience in the White Western academe carefully tucked away the racism and Chinese privilege (Thanapal, 2015) that is the reality of everyday life in Singapore. In Professor Tan's performances, the White audience loved the demonstration of marginality, while entirely unaware of the violence of Chinese racism in Singapore (such performances of postcolonial marginalities in liberal Western academia are integral to keeping intact White multiculturalism while actively attacking and erasing radical articulations at the margins).
The mobility of the performance of the "other" and specifically the "queer other" in circuits of Whiteness works in terms that are palatable to the White structures of capital that sadly imitate the registers of Whiteness, as photocopies of the lexicon of Whiteness while ironically calling for decolonization, de-westernization, and internationalization. The openings thus created prop up new registers of capital from elsewhere, replicating the logics of White capital and extending its market reach, dressed up in the language of de-westernization while simultaneously erasing the everyday accounts, racism, and violence of racism in the everyday contexts of Asia.
Professor Tan's performance of the "oppressed queer other" in the Western academe existed alongside her Chinese privilege, and the deployment of this privilege to oppress the Malay "other" at the margins of "racially harmonious" Singapore.
The elite Chinese privilege that is held up and bolstered through Chinese networks, while simultaneously reproducing racialized oppressions of Malay and Tamil others at the classed margins, is perfectly aligned with the multicultural goals of White capital punctutated through Singapore as the gateway to Asian investments, accommodating diverse articulations, even and more so articulations of decolonization, to prop up new market opportunities.
Indeed, the politics of queer negotiations of space captured in the interaction above offers a register for critical interrogation, dialogue, and most importantly, structural transformation. The intersectionality of raced, classed, and gendered negotiations of power had offered a possible anchor for what could have been the basis for imagining structural transformations through the active work of crafting solidarities. Instead, the deployment of raced-classed privilege worked in confluence to perform violent erasure, both symbolic and material. Professor Tan's embedded Chinese networks quickly assembled together to materially disenfranchise a Malay working class woman in a janitorial job in the University, at the margins of elite Singapore society, stealing from her the basic anchor to a livelihood.
Let's read this account through a culture-centered register.
What would an actual politics of intersectional solidarity anchored in the culture-centered approach (CCA) look like in this instance? What are the workplace protections in Singapore available to janitorial workers like Fatimah? What is the role of unions and collective organizing in protecting essential work such as cleaning work at the bottom of Singapore's neoliberal economy?
Culture-centered solidarities seek out radical imaginaries, recognizing that these imaginaries require work, the work of imagining them through the placing of the "body on the line" in difficult conversations. Inverting Professor Tan's oppressive behavior, culture-centered imaginaries seek registers for worker collectivization to resist such violence while simultaneously seeking openings for emancipatory gender practices.
We must begin with acknowledging that the crafting of solidarities takes real work and is tenuous, not armchair posturing from air-conditioned spaces of elite privilege (and certainly not pretending that one is "oh-so-oppressed" occupying any academic space, and that too a space of professorship). The work of the CCA is gritty, and it is dirty labour. It is hard because it is dirty. And it is continually reflexive, in the sense of being accountable to a collective politics of transformation.
I am called out by student collaborators, community organizers, community members, activists when they see my commitments fail or when they question the strength of my commitments. And fail I will. (I recall when working with families experiencing poverty in Singapore, how often as an expatriate bearing signs of privilege, I would encounter distrust. In other instances, I would be told gently that my kind is taking the jobs in Singapore. The recognition of the material registers that constitute these interactions form the basis of building reflexive registers).
A culture-centered reading suggests that the politics of queerness in Singapore must foundationally grapple with the classed and raced interplays of privilege to create registers for social change. It must address questions such as, What does it mean to forge transformative registers for queer politics at the Malay margins? What does queer organizing look like amidst the precarious livelihoods of sex workers? What does a working class queer politics look like at Singapore's Malay and Tamil margins?
Devoid of these critical and necessary engagements, queer theorizing in Singapore will remain limited to the capital-friendly seductive advertising of Pink Dot, replete with the symbols of finance capital and as cultural artefacts of authoritarian governmentality, working incessantly to whitewash it to global investors.
A commitment to communicative equality transforms the spaces of queer organizing, continually displacing the performance of a shallow market-friendly identity politics (occupied by upwardly mobile and upper class queer academics-activists) that keeps the authoritarian structures intact to a politics of radical structural transformation through commitments to co-creating infrastructures for voices at the "margins of the margims." The starting point of this transformation is the conscious reflexive movement from "How can I profit from performing a certain marginalized identity that will earn me capital (literally)?" to recognizing the possibilities that are opened up through the ongoing interrogations of my privilege, its complicity with power, and a sincere commitment to opening up the spaces for those that inhabit and struggle at the "margins of the margins" of an authoritarian neoliberal economy (Tan, 2012).
References
Tan, K. P. (2012). The ideology of pragmatism: Neo-liberal globalisation and political authoritarianism in Singapore. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 42(1), 67-92.
Thanapal, S. (2015). Chinese privilege, gender and intersectionality in Singapore: A conversation between Adeline Koh and Sangeetha Thanapal. boundary 2.