Transnational lesbian identities : lessons from Singapore?

Lesbians in Asia have come under scholarly attention within the study of nonnormative sexualities. This is due to the theoretical insistence on including accounts of non-Western sexualities and sexual identities that disrupt hegemonic Western practices and meanings as embodied by the globalised lesbian and gay subject. Understandings of sexuality, as this claim goes, have been dominated by Anglo-American images of the 'out' gay person with a fixed and unitary identity who has access to particular sexual rights and freedoms. This conception casts sexuality as an autonomous and anterior aspect of identity, and at the same time, elides the different meanings and expectations placed on sexuality in other contexts. As and where alternative conceptions of what it means to be lesbian and gay emerge, these are indexed against a Western developmental teleology that renders these sexual variations as 'premodern', 'inauthentic', 'not legitimate' or simply 'not lesbian and gay enough', much to the chagrin of Western and non-Western scholars studying sexualities outside the West. Ethnographic studies of female same-sex relations have appeared across Asia, complicating and contributing to this core debate in sexuality studies. These include monographs on female non-normative sexual identities and practices in Japan, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand and Taiwan.2 Further exemplary research focusing on lesbians in Asian contexts can be found in Wieringa, Blackwood and Bhaiya's (2007) collection, as well as Khor and Kamano's (2006) edited volume. These works attest to the burgeoning intellectual interest in Asian women's non-normative sexualities.