In Pursuit of Queer Singapore: Tracing Queer Time and Space in Singaporean Speculative Fiction
In Pursuit of Queer Singapore: Tracing Queer Time and Space in Singaporean Speculative Fiction
By Joan Ang
Abstract
In this essay, I critically examine the presentation of queer temporality and spatiality in Singaporean speculative fiction, particularly Neon Yang’s Tensorate series and Ng Yi-Sheng’s short story collection, Lion City. First I interrogate the movement of the queer body through space, focusing primarily on Akeha’s transition in The Black Tides of Heaven by Yang and the magical male pregnancy of ‘the Crocodile Prince’ by Ng. By transmuting the transgender body and illuminating its physicality, both writers subvert the gendered spaces and structures that they inhabit. Then I analyze the passage of queerness through time, through fantastical elements of time travel and prophecy, as elaborated in ‘Garden’ by Ng and The Red Threads of Fortune by Yang, respectively. Though utilising different devices, both writers draw attention to the transformative power of queerness in reframing one’s understanding of their own agency amidst heteronormative temporality, suggesting a movement towards queer utopianism. Ultimately, I argue for the significance of such queer speculative works in their ability to wholly reimagine Singaporean queerness: to disturb the predominant pragmatic and homonormative queer narratives, and in doing so, pursue queer liberation.
Introduction
It is with equal parts trepidation and resignation that I view the assertion, ‘Singapore is a homophobic nation’, for there is much truth to be found in it, but also a remarkable amount of Orientalism. Writing in Singapore Literature and Culture, Ng Yi-Sheng notes the prevalence of Section 377A of the Singapore Penal Code, which forbids acts of ‘gross indecency’ between two men, as well as continued censorship in mainstream media and general homophobic societal attitudes, reflected in demographic surveys (256). On the other hand, Western coverage of this issue tends to be somewhat lacking, framing it as a question of ‘lag’ behind Western progressive countries (Victor, ‘Paris Jackson Apologizes for Harper’s Bazaar Cover in Singapore, Where Gay Rights Lag’). Such assertions are often rooted in a subtle Orientalism that signals the backwardness of non-Western locales, and do little to represent the truths of the issue. More representatively, Singaporean academic Audrey Yue distinguishes Singaporean homophobia from its Western counterpart as the product of the government’s attitude of ‘illiberal pragmatism ... characterised by the ambivalence between non-liberalism and neoliberalism, rationalism and irrationalism that governs the illegality of homosexuality in Singapore.’ (2) Though the Singaporean queer literary scene is vibrant and features significantly across both written and performed works, it remains ‘mainstream and marginal, alternately praised and proscribed’ (Ng 256).
In more recent years, Singapore has seen the rise of speculative fiction, a term used broadly to refer to science fiction and fantasy writing, as well as more generally speculative works (Ho, ‘Singapore fantasy fiction takes flight’). With science fiction and queer theory often sharing ‘both a dystopian view of the present and a utopian hope for the future’ (Pearson 159), as well as the genre more broadly offering different universes in which to construct alternative understandings and approaches to sexuality, we find the two often intersecting in Singaporean literature. Although the vast majority of queer theory and writing remains framed from the American perspective, they still ‘congeals (sic) at base around an urge to trouble homonormativity and thus envision new horizons for the queer political project’ (Oswin 416). In this dissertation, I thus seek to explore the construction of queer worlds, spatialities and temporalities in two sets of texts, Neon Yang’s Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated Tensorate series and Ng Yi-Sheng’s Singapore Literature Prize-winning short story collection, Lion City. I will examine how writers engage with contemporary queer theory, and which ideas they embrace, embody or reject in their writing. From Tensorate, I will be focusing on the twin novellas, The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune. From Lion City, I will be looking primarily at the short stories ‘The Crocodile Prince’ and ‘Garden’.
My work is divided into two sections. In the first section, I examine representations of the queer body in Black Tides and ‘The Crocodile Prince’, and the construction of a queer spatiality tied to queer embodiment. In the second chapter, I turn towards queer temporality in Red Threads and ‘Garden’, exploring how speculative fiction elements of time travel and prophecy translate to queer understandings of temporality and the location of individuals within it. Through these analyses, I divine an understanding of queerness as a radical and transformative ideology, one which pushes back against cisgender and heteronormative definitions of time and space, constantly demanding and hoping for more.
Transgenderism and Transmutation: Queer Bodies Across Space
In Female Masculinity (1998), Jack Halberstam critiques the social construction of the binary gender system and the conventional limits it places on gender variance. He does this by critically examining female masculinity, which he argues is ‘framed as the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing’ (1). Halberstam points out the contradictions within binary gender ideology, where ‘gender’s very flexibility and seeming fluidity is precisely what allows dimorphic gender to hold sway’ (20). Hence, the reality of gender variance is contradicted by, and yet facilitates, the binary gender model that restricts it. As an alternative to compulsory gender binarism, Halberstam instead proposes a model of ‘gender preference’, in which ‘people could come out as a gender in the way they come out as a sexuality’ (20) and thus allow for greater precision in gender classification. Halberstam expounds on these ideas in In A Queer Time And Place (2012) by referring to ideas of queer time and space, developed ‘in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality and reproduction’ (10). In these alternative temporalities and spatialities, participants are able to reimagine their futures outside of heteronormative paradigms of existence, such as birth, marriage, reproduction and death (11). In both texts, Halberstam is interested in representing queer experiences authentically, rather than forcing them to conform to structures such as binary gender or heteronormativity. He thus imagines alternative modes of understanding and structuring queer life by rooting these systems in lived and bodily experiences of queerness, and charts the body’s progression through space, from the sensory to the social.
Halberstam’s proposed system of ‘gender preference’ is explored to its logical conclusions in Yang’s silkpunk fantasy series Tensorate. In the first chapter of Black Tides (2017), we are introduced to Sanao Sonami, one of the Protector’s children, who ‘had just turned fifteen, yet still wore the genderfree tunic of a child, their hair cropped to a small square at the top of their head and gathered into a bun’ (16). Rather than being assigned a gender at birth as in our world, children in the Protectorate are born androgynous, and typically choose to confirm their gender later in their lifetime: as man, woman, or even neither. This is possible due to the magical practice of slackcraft, the novum of Yang’s science fantasy universe, which draws inspiration from the traditional Chinese five elements system that is most commonly used in feng shui practices. Slackcraft users are able to bend the forces of nature to their will, influencing their ability to transform the physical body: ‘masters of forest-nature kept the markers of adulthood at bay’ (117). Thus, gender transition is built into the infrastructural norms of the story. As transgendered bodies are rendered normal, structural gender thus becomes queered. Rather than being assumed or even coincidental, each character’s gender identity instead becomes a purposeful and active choice, and each one’s confirmation (or lack thereof) is an act of self-definition.
The link between gender and self-definition is drawn most explicitly in Akeha’s experience of gender confirmation in Black Tides. Akeha’s twin, Mokoya, announces that they would like to be confirmed as a woman, thus creating a rift between the two, who ‘made a promise never to get confirmed’ (74) when they were six years old as an act of solidarity. Akeha is upset by this disruption, yet unable to articulate the source of their discomfort: ‘I’m not upset, they thought. This is not a big matter. But it was.’ (74) As androgynous twins, the two siblings have looked identical up until this point: gender thus becomes a point of friction in their relationship, as their identities shift from identical to fraternal. Mokoya’s use of the feminine first-person pronoun signals to Akeha a ‘pulling away from them, standing at the prow of a ship headed into uncharted waters where Akeha could not follow’ (117), the beginning of a ‘fundamental chasm’ (117) between the twins’ identities, destinies and desires. In a garden featuring a sculpture aptly titled Reflections upon the Past and the Future, Akeha ruminates to make sense of their own gendered experience and history. His self-determination is almost electric as he repeats, ‘I am. I want. I will ... I want. I want. I want ... I want. I want. I am.’ (118–9). Using the masculine first-person pronoun, Akeha lays claim to his own transmasculinity, and in doing so, also claims agency, destiny and desire. Gender, for Akeha, acts as a site of climactic self-realisation.
Yang, however, is sensitive to the distinction between the male body and its relationship to dominant and alternative masculinities. To Akeha, the idea of being a man alone is still ‘not right, exactly, but there was something there’ (119). It is only later that he realises the other source of his discomfort with masculinity, and ‘exactly what it was he wanted ... he surged up, like a storm wave, and kissed Thennjay’ (132–3). Jay Prosser notes that transgenderism itself is not an inherent marker of queerness or queer sexuality; ‘that is, by no means are all transgendered subjects homosexual’ (31), and that queer studies tends to queer gender through sexuality, and sexuality through gender (31). In Black Tides, however, both gender and sexuality are queered hand in hand; Akeha is not just a trans man, but a gay trans man, and his experience of his body and queerness are only fully realised when he interacts with others as such. Kissing Thennjay overwhelms Akeha’s senses with ‘a hundred different things at once, intoxicating and indescribable. Time warped and became meaningless’ (133) — for Akeha, homosexuality is electrifying and sensual. Echoing Halberstam’s writing, his sensory experience is enough to redefine temporality itself, removing both him and Thennjay from the heteronormative paradigm of Thennjay and Mokoya’s relationship. Simply existing within a system of gender preference is not enough to queer the individual: rather, it is the intersection of queer gender and sexuality that allows Akeha to fully experience his masculinity, and hence gain access to the liminalities and potentialities residing in queer temporality.
Queer bodily experiences also manifest the equalities and intersections of race and class, though they are less closely examined by the text. Yang’s mythos in Tensorate is almost entirely inspired by Asian mythology and culture, drawing predominantly from Singaporean multiculturalism. The dominant racial categories in the Protectorate loosely parallel that of the Singaporean racial makeup (dominantly Chinese, with Malay and Indian minority groups), and its imperial hierarchy is highly reminiscent of the Chinese dynastic system. Based on their respective social positions, Akeha’s experience of his gender transition thus differs significantly from that of Yongcheow. Akeha, raised in the highest tiers of the Protectorate, has access to a full month of confirmation medicine when he leaves Chengbee, while Yongcheow in comparison ‘got confirmed, but I didn’t go to the doctors’ (148). It is hence in the transgender body that the intersectionalities of identity collide, as race and class are manifested not just in social interaction, but in bodily experiences. Yang points to an understanding of gender that exists in dialogue with other aspects of the body, rather than being purely performative or social. By integrating the system of gender preference into the story’s infrastructure, Tensorate allows for nuances and differentials within the gender expressions that it depicts. Gender preference does not negate or erase the poles of gendered identity, but instead allows individuals to better navigate its specificities without being limited by the gender binary. It does so by highlighting sensory and bodily experiences of queerness; rather than removing the queer body from the equation, it centres it.
Akeha’s transmasculinity puts him at odds with the matriarchal authority of the Protector, his mother: as she slyly comments, in his confirmation as a man, that ‘the spare child has finally chosen his path’ (122). Unlike his sister, Akeha is not blessed with the gift of prophecy, and has been sidelined in the eyes of the Protector throughout childhood. Therefore, his transmasculinity places him in binary opposition to the Protector, allowing him another form of escape from her control. Ng’s Lion City features a similarly authoritarian and matriarchal character, the Sultana, in ‘The Crocodile Prince’, whose son’s transgression against her authority is tied to his own queer masculinity. Unlike the Protector, the Sultana pedestals the Prince as her ‘greatest achievement’ (145), a figure divorced from his individuality, personal agency and desires. However, Sultana’s definition of the Prince, and ultimately her rule, is overturned by his queerness, for the Prince falls in love with a male white crocodile spirit, who lays an egg in him containing an albino human child.
Both Ng and Yang’s texts tussle with ideas of transmutation, transgendering and transgression, yet Yang’s queering of the body stays firmly rooted in gendered transmutation, transitioning from androgyny to other genders. In contrast, Ng’s text incorporates multiple forms of queer transmutation within the same story: a crocodile transforms into a man, while the Prince, occupying both straight female and gay male gender roles, gives birth to a child. This queering of gender roles is entirely unacceptable to the Sultana, who responds by murdering the crocodile spirit (151) and sending the Prince to a different country to ‘become civilised ... and grow to be thankful of what she had done to secure his future’ (154). She adopts the child herself, conforming to a traditionally female gender role of matriarchal child raising, and erasing the violence of his conception. She does this as an extension of the ‘motherly pride’ (145) she once had towards her own son the Prince, locating the crocodile child within a gendered familial hierarchy. Ng hence draws attention to the fixed and imposed gender binary that is being upheld by the Sultana, while simultaneously contrasting the true fragmented identities that the Prince and the crocodile inhabit. In doing so, Ng alludes to Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), where the boundaries are broken down between the genders, human and non-human, and human and machine (2046). Haraway argues that the fractured identities of both women and cyborgs should serve as a point of coalition and solidarity, rather than division. Rather than singularly attending to womanhood, Ng uses the fantastical fluidity of animal-human boundaries to tend to the fluidity of gendered relations, allowing him to examine the full spectrum of gender variance in the Halberstamian sense. By superimposing traditionally female childbearing onto a gay man’s body, Ng blurs the boundaries of gender variance, and asserts queerness to be a site of transcendence, love and balance. Furthermore, he disrupts nuclear and heteronormative temporality: the Sultana raises both her son and grandson in succession, as it is the Prince who experiences pregnancy rather than a female partner. The nuclear family unit is thus subverted, and though the Sultana attempts to foster some modicum of heteronormative temporality onto the crocodile child, this practice is unsustainable, as the boy escapes to the city following her death.
The Prince’s child is himself an oddity, and the queerness of his origins is manifested in his physical appearance. The boy is ‘the mirror image of the Prince himself as an infant, save for one detail. His skin and hair were chalk-white: the inheritance of his crocodile father’ (153). This queer inheritance, facilitated by the transgender birthing of the egg-child, is glaring, unmistakable and resistant to erasure. Though the Sultana attempts to ‘stain his milky hair with henna, or rub ointments and tinctures into his ivory skin, or else order the nurses to have him sit on a mat under some of the squares of sunlight that strained through the prison windows’ (154), such acts only make the child sick as the body physically resists attempts to impose a heteronormative order upon it. Despite his absence, the Prince’s homosexuality thus leaves a stark reminder, one that the Sultana is unable to subdue regardless of her efforts. Like Yang, Ng treats queerness not simply as social practice, but something that is embedded deeply in the physicality of the body. By having the child’s queer heritage be manifested in his albinism, Ng weaves queer resistance and inheritance into the bodily experience of the crocodile child. Queerness, which is typically marginalised and erased under cisheteronormativity, becomes hypervisible and undeniable, to the consternation of the Sultana. Despite her attempts to raise the child as her own, the queerness of the child and his acknowledgement of his true parentage persists. When questioned by the Prince as to why he should not leave, the boy responds, ‘Because my father is coming’ (157). In response to his declaration, the room fills ‘with the roar of crickets and the scent of mangroves and rainwater. There was a rumble of thunder, and there, in the light of the lanterns, was the white crocodile’ (157).
In his effort to locate queerness in the body, Ng heavily associates genderqueer sexuality with the white crocodile and organic, abundant and wild nature, which exists in opposition to the heavily urbanised city over which the Sultana rules: the divide between the cisheteronormative and the queer is reinforced through very literal spatiality. It is within the jungle, during a fictionalised version of Singaporean national military service, that the Prince first encounters the white crocodile and they begin their romance (148–9). This transgression infuriates and horrifies the Sultana, who sees in the spirit world a ‘menagerie of impossible creatures, [a] city on her island over which she had no dominion’ (150). She thus responds by ordering the ‘northern jungle razed to its very roots, and the western river filled in with concrete ... she declared their common aim: that their land should become a modern kingdom, led by her own enterprising vision’ (152). Even the child himself is restricted to the dungeons of the palace until the Sultana’s death; the Sultana’s desire for conformity thus forces queerness into marginality and erasure. Though in private she dotes on the child to re-enact her fantasy of maternal childrearing, in public she seeks to make it invisible. In her attempts to subjugate it, the natural landscape is thus queered, acting as an extension of the queer body, and vice versa.
The city is, of course, loosely inspired by modern Singapore, and the Sultana herself a version of its pioneer figure, Lee Kuan Yew — in an interview, Ng commented that although the story began as an ‘analog ... it became much more a story about love, both romantic and familial’ (Chiew, ‘Elaine Chiew Talks to Ng Yi-Sheng, author of Lion City’). In the story, as in real life, the city thus serves to suffocate the natural landscape for the sake of modernity, an extension of a thinly veiled grasp at cisheteronormative control and authority. In the jungle, gender and sexuality blur together, as does the physical form of the body. A white crocodile transforms: ‘Its smooth belly split open, and a pair of hands emerged, then a pair of lanky arms, slithering out from the suture ... the body of the crocodile fell away, and out of its waxen skin there came a young man, as tall and as handsome as her son’ (151). The transmutative, transgressive queer body is thus located not within the heteronormative confines of the Sultana’s palace, but in the liminal and wild spaces of the jungle: it becomes transcorporeal, situated within a larger ecosystem of natural and queer wildness. Ng thus makes sense of the queer body by examining its physicality and mapping out its spatiality, drawing our attention to its disruptions to cisheteronormative space and time. It is this that precipitates the destruction of the urban caused by the reunion of the Prince with the crocodile, roaring up as a reclamation: ‘in the north, a jungle began to grow amidst the abandoned factories. An old river flooded and broke forth from the earth.... And in the waters of that river, two white crocodiles swam together’ (159).
Much of transgender writing is centred around the representation of genitalia, and the cisheteronormative gaze towards it: transphobic narratives often centre around the reveal of trans genitalia, specifically the repulsion and subsequent abuse by other cisgender characters. Even where dimorphic sex is not the arbiter of one’s ‘true’ gender (and whatever that happens to entail in the context of the narrative), it still remains a large part of trans narratives, either by its overwhelming presence or discomforting absence. Discussions of trans bodies in popular media thus tend to centre specifically on the presentation of genitalia, and a focus on trans-medicalism, or a trans paradigm that revolves exclusively around gender dysphoria and medical transitioning. Yang very particularly subverts this in their work, not by averting the gaze or erasing genitalia, but simply by demonstrating an ambivalence towards its existence. Returning to Yongcheow’s explanation of his transition, Akeha commands Yongcheow to undress in order to dress and clean his wounds. Yongcheow hesitates, ‘There’s something ... you need to know’ (148). In another narrative, the revelation of the state of Yongcheow’s transition might have been groundbreaking, or even repulsive to the cisheteronormative reader, as is common in too much of popular culture. Yet, Akeha is completely indifferent to Yongcheow’s confession that he ‘didn’t get confirmed’ (148), cutting him off by saying that he does not care, instead turning away and focusing on the ‘work to do’ (148). Akeha’s display of ambivalence, however, is more than a focus on his ‘work’. He does not focus his gaze on Yongcheow’s genitalia, nor does he purposefully avert his gaze: in doing so, the cisheteronormative gaze becomes depowered because of his ambivalence, for its significance is completely discounted.
While Ng does explicitly reference genitalia in a sexual context, he does not fetishize it. As the crocodile spirit encounters the Prince physically for the first time, he has ‘a boy’s body, warm and slender, but firm, with strong muscles in its chest and abdomen. It had hands, and they were holding him close. It had a cock, and it was pressed against his own, hot against the chilly current of the river’ (149). For the transgender Prince, his birthing of the crocodile’s child, while miraculous, notably omits any images of vaginal childbirth. Instead, physicians ‘cut open his belly and peeled aside layers of muscle and mesentery until they beheld the object that had been steadily growing inside him’ (153). Genitalia is de-emphasized and presented as one of the aspects of the queer body, rather than its defining characteristic. By doing this, Ng allows for greater fluidity in his representations of gender, and represents queer bodies more holistically. Rather than involving genitalia alone, both Ng and Yang’s magical treatments of the body view the transgender body as a complete organism; the particulars of genitalia itself, while not absent, are not the whole picture. In doing so, they further obscure the cisheteronormative gaze that so deeply pervades writing about trans bodies.
Prosser notes in Second Skins (1998) that it is despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the abundance of abstract concepts such as ‘materiality’ and ‘embodiment’ in queer studies that the body is often forgotten, or excluded from discussions on gender and sexuality. In doing so, it removes the body and its experiences, particularly in the context of transness, as a ‘discernible referential category’ (41). Halberstam concurs with Prosser in ‘Global Female Masculinities’ (2012), acknowledging that modern understandings of genderqueerness have developed beyond the binary discourse of ‘real transsexuals’ and ‘playful, performative queers’ (338), and thus present greater complexities and variations in gender identity. Both Ng and Yang thus trace their own depictions of gender and queer structures not by avoiding the body, but by centring queer bodily experiences of gender and sexuality within the narrative. By making transgender bodies the subject of their stories, they are able to more closely interrogate the narratives of gender in which they are embedded, allowing for greater precision in gender and sexual expression. Furthermore, this centring of trans bodies is facilitated by the speculative fiction genre in which both writers operate, as they incorporate queer ideas into the fantastical elements of their stories.
Travel and Choices: Queer Lives Across Time
One device that coincidentally features in the works of both Ng and Yang, enabled by the speculative genre in which they operate, are elements of time manipulation, be it time travel or seeing the future. In Ng’s work, meta elements tend to come into play as well, as narrative time warps across various stories, from the choose-your-own-adventure style of ‘Garden’, to the fictional bibliography and alternate storylines featured in ‘The Boy, The Swordfish, The Bleeding Island’. The use of time in both their works thus resonates with ideas surrounding queer temporality, particularly in opposition to cisheteronormative temporality. I have already mentioned Halberstam’s work on queer temporality in In A Queer Time and Place, which suggests that queer people experience time differently due to their exclusion from heteronormative time structures and milestones, such as marriage and reproduction (11). One example Halberstam uses is of gay men during the AIDS crisis who due to their shortened life spans, found themselves ‘rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity, and by making community in relation to risk, disease, infection, and death’ (10). Halberstam’s example here references the work of Lee Edelman, best known for his later polemic against reproductive futurism; that is, imaginings of the future that centre on the image of the Child (3). As many queer relationships are excluded from the traditional modes of reproduction, such rhetoric thus serves to exclude queer people, as their erasure from the future serves to remove them from the present as well. Edelman’s work has been critiqued by multiple theorists, including José Esteban Muñoz, whose work on queer utopia refutes the negativity proposed by Edelman, instead arguing towards a queer utopia, one which centres on the potentialities of queer happiness and prosperity (1). In this section, I will be examining how and where such ideas intersect with the works of both Ng and Yang, and the intricacies of their own engagement with queer temporality.
In ‘Garden’, Ng uses time travel first as a narrative device. He styles the text as a choose-your-own-adventure novel, with different decisions informing the reader to flip to different pages in the story. However, instead of page numbers, Ng uses dates, corresponding to the year in which a bisexual woman, Dang Anom, has travelled through time. While these sections are arranged chronologically, Anom’s time travelling creates a nonlinear narrative, interrupting the structure of heterosexual time that ends with the death of Anom in 1398 at the hands of her male lover, the King (207). As she calls on the gods to save her from murder by the King’s guards (173), Anom’s propulsion into queer time begins with heterosexual and misogynistic violence, and so Batara Kala, the Lord of Time, sends her hurtling through his domain. Anom flies through the centuries in a panic, encountering Singaporean historical and literary figures, such as Sir Stamford Raffles (182) and Chen Cuifen (186). Interestingly, it is also this story in which Ng and Yang’s writing intersects: in the section set in 2287, The Merlion, an interstellar probe landed on the uninhabitable Singapore, references a ‘military coup by clones of Lee Kuan Yew’ (202) as a reason for Singapore’s downfall. Said clones are a nod to ‘Auspicium Melioris Aevi’, one of Yang’s earlier publications. ‘Garden’ is thus an ode to ‘Singaporean history, legend, and science fiction’ (220), paying homage to alternative understandings and reimaginings of Singapore in writing. Halberstam writes that queer time emerges once one ‘leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’ (13). Ng expounds on this by extracting Anom not just from the matrix of heterosexual violence, but also by placing her as an outsider to the Singaporean historical narrative, unable to engage with heterosexual time at all.
In this vein, Anom’s curse is twofold: most of her early time traveling is out of her control, and multiple paths have her face egregious amounts of violence and suffering, dying in multiple endings. More than that, she is alone in her travels, and any moments of human connection she encounters are temporary. Her attitude towards time thus becomes oppositional and defiant, wreaking havoc on her body. This changes when she is nursed back to health by the Peri, who explains that her wounds result from her attempts to meddle with history. Anom protests that she is trying to ‘change it for the better’ (180), but is rebuked by the Peri, for ‘The Lord of Time does not take kindly to those who interfere with His projects’ (180). In contrast to the heterosexual violence that propelled Anom into lonely time, the queer relationship between her and the Peri is defined by the tenderness and healing that the Peri extends towards her. Anom and the Peri bond over their shared queer alienation, or feeling ‘lonesome’ (180), as the Peri describes it, in the wake of their previously volatile heterosexual entanglements: Anom notes that ‘She does, in fact, understand the variety of love the Peri speaks of’ (180). Nature once again becomes tied to queerness as the Peri builds her garden to ‘tempt’ and ‘court’ Anom (181). The garden thus becomes a metaphorical invitation into sexual awakening and queer pleasure: ‘Stay a night, a month, a year ... Let me teach you the rudiments of pleasure. Let us tend this garden together’ (181).
Should Anom choose to stay with the Peri, she then travels to 2287, where Anom encounters The Merlion. The Anom we encounter in this scene is much less frantic than her earlier iterations: previous segments have her rush through a year in a single paragraph. In contrast, she encounters the probe by asking thoughtful questions regarding its character, such as ‘Are you a god?’ and ‘When will you die?’ (203). This suggests a shift in her attitude towards temporality, moving from one of opposition towards one of acceptance. As she asks the probe to postpone its death in order to assist her in rebuilding the garden, her words here are ‘oddly powerful’ (203), driven by a resounding confidence in her expertise, which she acknowledges as the result of ‘some training from a lover’ (203). Her queer experiences in the garden thus give her the means not to wrest control of her own future, but to cultivate and reimagine its potentialities. As Anom explains to Yva Yolan in 2400, in rebuilding Singapore as a garden, she did not change history, only ‘[walk] its paths and [grow] into it’ (205). She proclaims to Yva before disappearing, ‘Our stories are already written ... But take every risk possible. There are more endings than we know of. It is possible too, to live between the lines’ (206). Ng finds in the image of the garden not just spatial reckonings, but temporal ones as well; the garden is not a manicured one, but drawn from the Malay conception of it, a ‘liminal space where anything can happen’ (Chiew, ‘Elaine Chiew Talks to Ng Yi-Sheng, author of Lion City’). It is through this method of gardening that Anom is able to reckon with her own liminally queer temporality and make sense of it.
Anom, tossed through time, is removed from Singaporean history, in a method that directly results from her position as concubine, woman and queer. Her travels thus become ‘uniquely gendered and sexualised’ (Halberstam 14), albeit via a fantastical method distinct from Halberstam’s imagining. Anom, in embracing her place in the liminalities of history, also embraces the liminalities of her sexuality and gender, and thus becomes able to navigate them. It is only in doing so that she is able to make sense of her own personal history, and to truly ‘live’ (206). Rather than be pushed around by the propulsions of linear, heterosexual motion, Anom takes advantage of the nonlinearity of her experiences to make an impact. It is only in this queering of temporal ideology, and Anom’s acceptance of the potentials within temporal liminality, that she is finally able to leap through time herself (206).
Yang’s use of fantastical time is similarly gendered through her focus on Mokoya, Akeha’s twin sister and the ex-Prophet of the Protectorate. The Red Threads of Fortune, the companion novella to The Black Tides of Heaven, explores the fate of Mokoya following the death of her daughter at the end of Black Tides, and her resulting estrangement from her husband, Thennjay, the Head Abbot of the Grand Monastery. Mokoya possesses the ability to receive visions through the Slack, the governing force of the Tensorate world. In Black Tides, we receive our understanding of the Slack through Akeha’s abbreviated and exasperated narration (37); in Red Threads, we get from Mokoya the full version of the First Sutra of the Five Natures (25–26). To Mokoya, narratives and worldly understanding affect her much more than her twin: as the Sutra concludes, ‘For the lines and knots of the Slack are the lines and knots of the world, and all that is shaped is shaped through the twining of the red threads of fortune’ (26). Mokoya’s recitation of the Sutra thus suggests an attitude of despair and resignation towards her visions, which she has come to resent following the death of her daughter. The trauma of Eien’s death haunts Mokoya, and the visions that once granted her knowledge of the future now only bring her ‘moments from her past, even ones she herself had forgotten’ (32). Though she seeks to escape them, Mokoya’s flashbacks trap her emotionally between the past, present and future, unable and unwilling to confront that which she has lost. In this respect, she complicates our understanding of queer time, which is typically defined in opposition to heteronormative temporality and the reproductive matrix. Halberstam associates heterosexual time with ‘birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (11), as well as the ‘kinds of hypothetical temporality ... that demands protection’ (12). Mokoya, who experiences all of these in her lifetime, thus blurs the boundaries between queer and heteronormative temporality, a queer woman defined by her heteronormative losses. She experiences this in a way that only further alienates her from the ‘time of inheritance ... [which] connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability’ (Halberstam 12). Mokoya has walled herself off from society and emotional connections, ‘walking with this sheet of glass between [herself] and the world’ (59); her lack of participation is not one of sexual inability, but of traumatic loss.
Mokoya’s transfemininity is less closely interrogated than Akeha’s transmasculinity in the text, in large part because of the relationship between Akeha’s gender and its representation of the estrangement between the two. Yang’s novum also allows her to sidestep the issues with childbirth that transgender women otherwise face. For the earlier parts of her life in Black Tides, Mokoya thus conforms neatly to the institutions and roles that have been laid out for her, as mother, daughter, wife and prophet: though she does not do so unquestioningly, she still thrives in these positions until the death of Eien. Mokoya bitterly believes that the vibrance of her ‘died in the explosion that took her daughter’s life’ (59) and the damaging of the reproductive cycle, where a child dies before her parent, causes her to fall into a deep grief due to her inability to protect Eien in the accident (44). This highlights the somewhat misogynistic and reductive paradigms of Edelman’s argument on reproductive futurism, for the role of the child in Mokoya’s present is not one of impossibility or exclusion from the reproductive matrix, but one centred around the loss of her child. Edelman relies primarily on a narrow conception of reproduction, as one that is understood through the lenses only of heterosexual relationships and heterosexual sex. Such a paradigm is drawn almost exclusively from gay and cisgender male relationships, where neither partner is able to carry a child. Edelman also argues that queerness acts as a ‘resistance to the viability of the social’ (3) and a refusal to accept or participate in the normativity of heterosexual relations. In contrast, Mokoya does not resist or refuse childbearing but actively celebrates it, thus leading to her deep loss and extended mourning at the death of her child. Her estrangement from her broken family unit is not the result of its impossibility but of a very real grief and broken maternal bond. Though Edelman points to negativity as a point of ‘access to the jouissance that at once defines and negates us’ (5), Mokoya’s pain offers her only entrapment, not liberation.
It is only in the development of her relationship with Rider, a nonbinary naga rider who can bend the Slack to teleport, that Mokoya begins to repair her relationship with childbearing and temporality. After meeting Rider, who clarifies the history of the naga that Mokoya is pursuing through the desert, Mokoya has sex with them and spends the night. Waking up in the morning, Mokoya distinguishes between her attraction to Rider and that of her previous lovers:
She was used to slipping from between the thighs of people for whom names and faces were mere formalities, soon to be forgotten. Yet here she was, imagining futures with this person whose history and mind were gray blanks to her. But what bright futures they were! Days spent hunting, nights spent entwined like this. She was not too old and broken to be snagged on the dangerous barbs of hope. (79)
Mokoya is quick to self-deprecatingly dismiss her feelings, but Rider offers Mokoya an alternative glimpse of queer hope out of her despair and grief, towards the possibility of a future defined by happiness rather than her past traumas. This image of futurity resonates with the queer utopianism elaborated by Muñoz in Cruising Utopia. Muñoz posits a theory of utopianism in direct opposition to Edelman’s anti-relational negativity: queerness is not ‘the province of the child ... [but] primarily about futurity and hope’ (11). It is about ‘the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’ (1). Muñoz’s vision of queer, utopian hope thus offers a way out to Mokoya through the potentialities of her relationship with Rider. This glimpse of the future pushes Mokoya forward, encouraging her to reengage and rebuild her emotional and social connections, moving past and through the death of her daughter.
More than this, Rider offers Mokoya a different way of viewing the Slack, one that sees the Slack not as individual threads and connections twined together but as ‘a wholesale shift’ (83). It is this that allows Mokoya to begin to untwine what has so deeply plagued her throughout her lifetime; namely, her lack of agency in relation to her visions. Mokoya believes that she has ‘no control over the process’ (82) when her visions arrive, and no way to change the outcomes of her visions either. This belief becomes perilous when Mokoya is faced with a vision of Rider’s death (165). In order to prevent this, Mokoya begins to unravel the true nature of her relationship to the Slack. Though the Slack is systematically taught to Tensors as a structure composed of five elements, Quarterlanders such as Rider instead view it as ‘raw, contiguous and endless’ (189). It is only by dissolving her understanding of herself and succumbing to her mind eye that Mokoya realises that as a prophet, she is ‘able to control the time-nature of the Slack’ (190), and thus change the fortunes. Very literally, Mokoya is able to transform temporality itself, a realisation that grants her a renewed sense of agency and purpose in engaging with the world. Like Anom, Mokoya begins the story seeing herself as trapped in a temporal flux, one which she cannot escape regardless of her efforts; this leads her to struggle ‘with helplessness ... It was as if fortune itself were mocking me’ (192). Both women regain their agency not by violently seizing control of the situation, but by reimagining the future through queer perspectives and queer methodologies. Anom, through her relationship with the Peri, learns to cultivate the future she desires, while Mokoya is inspired by Rider into a new hope for the future. While Ng and Yang both allude to ideas of heteronormative versus queer temporality, they are more interested in what individuals trapped in these paradigms are able to do in order to regain their own agencies, and how they choose to act as a result. It is only in cutting the ‘red threads of fortune’ (201) that Mokoya finds herself finally able to be ‘free’ (201).
Interestingly, the Child returns to us as a figure in Mokoya’s final vision, where, while unconscious, she sees herself visiting her daughter’s grave with Rider as their twin children play behind them (202–3). Yang thus draws a continuity between Mokoya’s lost child and the children she will have with Rider, a peaceful union of the past and future that Mokoya has so deeply struggled with. Despite the ‘happy endings’ (203) implied in the scene, Mokoya finds herself with ‘a dislocation between vision and reality’ (203), a future just out of reach in her dreams. We thus find ourselves directly refuting Edelman’s work: children can be part of queer futures, though they are hardly their sole determiner. Furthermore, for queers who are not cisgender gay men, having children can be meaningful and even positive. Mokoya’s vision eludes conformity to the monogamous and heterosexual gaze, simply because it does not erase her marriage to Thennjay or their shared loss of Eien. Instead, it builds on it, for having children with Rider brings the cycle of grief to a close and allows Mokoya to experience a transcendent degree of queer peace and joy. However, such a vision remains just out of reach for Mokoya, a utopian imagining limited to the future. This thus echoes Muñoz’s powerful assertion in Cruising Utopia: ‘Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer ... Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’ (1). It is precisely the untouchable nature of Mokoya’s vision that asserts it as a form of queer utopia and highlights the importance of the potentiality of a future with Rider. Though the truth of her vision remains ambiguous, even in Yang’s sequel texts The Descent of Monsters and The Ascent to Godhood, this does not really matter, for what the vision offers to both Mokoya and the reader is a challenge to ‘feel hope and to feel utopia’ (Muñoz 18). At the end of the novella, Mokoya’s body remains heavily injured, and the city of Batamaar destroyed; yet, queer futurity presents us with a method of peace, out of despair and helplessness, out of destruction and oppression, a map perhaps, to something beyond.
Conclusion
Natalie Oswin does commendable work in charting the queer geographies and temporalities inhabited within modern Singapore, pointing to prevailing ‘assimilationist and homonationalist’ (‘Queer time in global city Singapore’, 414) strains in Pink Dot celebrations, as well as the entrenchment of the nuclear family unit into public housing policy (‘The modern model family at home in Singapore’, 257). Such sociological insights are highly valuable to understanding the Singaporean queer mindset; however, they are not as directly prevalent in speculative fiction, which removes itself from modern Singapore by incorporating fantasy and science fiction elements. The queer temporalities and spatialities that we encounter in Ng’s and Yang’s works thus do not engage as closely or fully with the sociopolitical elements of contemporary queer discourse in Singapore, much of which is centred around persistence of Section 377A and its trickle-down effects onto Singaporean society. However, I also disagree with the notion that fiction must necessarily and heavy-handedly engage with the political issues of the day in a conventional or direct manner. One statement from Ng, commenting on ‘The Crocodile Prince’, continues to strike me: ‘Stories don’t always stand for things in the real world—they can have a reality unto themselves’. (Chiew, ‘Elaine Chiew Talks to Ng Yi-Sheng, author of Lion City’). The alternative realities presented in both Lion City and Tensorate offer us ways of deconstructing the cisgender and heteronormative systems that bind us at present, as well as ways of queering those systems. More than this, the preoccupation with the label of ‘speculative fiction’ in literary Singapore suggests a deep urgency for these kinds of fiction, ones that do speculate and dare to imagine the beyond, or even to dream.
In her introduction to Queer Singapore, Audrey Yue highlights how the majority of Singaporean LGBT activism has been characterised by ‘pragmatic modes of resistance’ (25), ones developed in response to the illiberal pragmatism practiced by the Singaporean government. Oswin cites this to note that these methods of pragmatic resistance have thoroughly defanged the majority of local activism, which is now forced to work in a state-sponsored paradigm, and conform to homonormative and assimilationist narratives of legitimacy (‘Queer time in global city Singapore’, 414). This ‘will likely make little dent in heteronormative logics that ... are complex and deeply rooted and cannot be countered through appeals for LGBT inclusion alone’ (414). Here, I return to the potentialities contained within Muñoz’s assertion of queer utopianism, and its ability to create ‘affective and cognitive maps of the world’ (18). Queer utopianism directly challenges ‘today’s hamstrung pragmatic gay agenda’ (18) by offering the possibility of ‘futurity and hope’ (19): it does not propose a future built on pragmatic inclusivity politics, but one that aspires to a radical hope for community and liberation. This call for queer utopianism thus becomes deeply crucial not just to queer academia, but to modes of queer organising, particularly in illiberally pragmatic Singapore. In queer Singaporean speculative fiction, we find echoes of utopia and its potentialities, the liminal spaces of queer joy between temporalities and spatialities, between Mokoya and Rider, between Akeha and Yongcheow, between the crocodile spirit and his Prince.
Queerness is disruptive. It calls for a troubling of societal norms, and challenges us to confront that which is different, liminal, and often, strange. By tracing queer time and space in these works of Singaporean speculative fiction, we trace the struggle to represent queerness authentically, even as it contradictorily resists definition. As Edelman writes, ‘queerness can never define an identity; it can only disturb one’ (17). Queerness in the speculative works of Ng and Yang thus seeks to disturb a realist and pragmatic Singaporean imagining of queerness, one which is convenient and conforms to the logic of the cisgender and heteronormative state. Instead, they propose a queerness that is fantastical and radically transformative, rooted in a holistic understanding of the queer body and the agency it has in cultivating its own destiny. Their characters do not just recognise the liminalities of queer time and space, but wholly embrace them, and thus become personally liberated. It is ultimately by chasing this liminal and inherently oppositional queerness that we remain eternally in pursuit of it, the multitudes contained within it and the eternal horizon of utopian joy.
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Joan graduated with a BA (1st Class Hons) in English Literature from the University of York in 2021. Their interests include Singaporean literature, food writing, and postcolonial and queer critique. You can follow them on Twitter @joanofradius, or read their book reviews at https://soyabean.substack.com/.
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