Re-examining ‘transnationality’ through Singapore lesbian identities

![CDATA[Research work on lesbian sexualities in Asia have demonstrated that ‘transnational turn’ in lesbian and gay scholarship, deploying the ‘transnational’ to disrupt hegemonic understandings of sexual identities as the product of uni-linear global flows from the West to the rest. However, I contend that the existing scholarship on lesbian sexualities in Asia only illustrate in a limited way what ‘transnationality’ means. Stronger evidence of transnational sexualities is needed. I argue that asking how globally connected middle-class lesbians in Singapore rework their sexual identities around local cultural norms add empirically and theoretically to transnational debates about sexual identity. First, I discuss how existing materialist accounts of transnational lesbian sexualities in Asia tend to reinforce rather than problematise the local-global dichotomy, revealing the limits of the ‘transnational’ in these analyses. Second, I re-test the limits of transnationality by asking after how highly mobile and well-educated local middle-class lesbians in Singapore make meaning of ‘coming out’, a chief current in the global circuit of queer knowledge production. I aim to bring a more nuanced cultural analysis to bear on the existing literature on transnational sexualities. In the final section, I discuss the political significance of a transnational perspective for the Singapore context.]]