#stephanie dogfoot

[maybuds]

You are Six Years Old and She is Teaching You How to Ride a Bicycle by Stephanie Dogfoot

[Text ID:

You are Six Years Old and She is Teaching You How to Ride a Bicycle

Don’t wonder why she is doing this, just know that the rice, three      tins of sardines a day and something your mummy calls a      salary are enough.

Focus on her hands keeping you upright, one on the handlebars,      one on the seat, keep moving your legs, one, two….

There are no hungry people in the world any more. You know this      because last Sunday you put three coins into that box      marked ‘rice for the poor’.

Focus on the driveway in front of you, look ahead, don’t look      down.

She says ‘arai’ every time your pedal scrapes her calf, every time      she should be saying ‘ouch’. This is the only word you’ll      learn in her language.

If you remember anything else, remember this is not a machine,      but the closest you will come to levitation.

The way your arch your back, lower your head is not an      aerodynamic sitting position, but a prostration to freedom.

The way your heels lift off the ground, how you raise your right      knee and stretch out your left: nothing less than a      genuflection.

The way getting on your hands and knees to scrub someone else’s      floor for two tins of luncheon meat a day and the right kind      of currency is not an act of submission, but a form of      survival, of dignity.

One day you will read about workers’ rights, the global economy.

You will know all the right words but they won’t quite translate.

They tell you she’s got it relatively good here, that she can’t      complain.

Just focus on what you see in front of you.

How balance and muscle memory were moulded by a pair of      invisible hands so that you might someday fly through      cities built on tarmac laid by a thousand invisible hands,      past buildings put together by a thousand invisible men.

And suddenly, you are twenty-six years old and waiting in the      visitor’s room of the IMH with her passport and a one-way      ticket to Manila.

Your mother says she had it coming to her.

Your father says, remember that time she told us that she was      gay?

The doctors say psychotic episodes are often a one-off thing.

You pass her a shitty handmade card and a copy of a poem you      wrote about her teaching you how to ride a bicycle.

You are twenty-six still think that writing will absolve you, or at      least make you less complicit.

Remember the time she asked you ‘are you messaging your      girlfriend?’ and you smiled and shrugged.

The time you cut your hair short and she said ‘I wish I had that      hair style but your mum won’t let me’ and you said, ‘just do      it without telling her!’

The one time she said to you, ‘you and me are the the same kind      aren’t we?’ and you smiled and shook your head.

Or maybe, just remember this:

How women in your country never really left the kitchen, they      just changed names and nationality.

How every five minutes, somewhere in the world there is a young      girl from a small village teaching a small girl from a slightly      larger village how to defy gravity.

How none of us are truly free until every single one of us is.]

[koeningzine]

SWAMP LEGEND by Stephanie Dogfoot

-     

     They said they had raised a city out of a malaria-infested swamp. That where skyscrapers now loomed once stood stagnant water, insects, mud. How all the island had once been half-submerged, shrouded in moss and algae and knobbly-kneed roots rising out of the water. The unending smell of rot and damp. How the skies used to be darker, how the mangrove trees blocked out the sunlight. The swarms of mosquitoes that lay in wait to consume people. The mud lobsters that built towers the size of men out of soil and snipped off the toes of children wandering past in flip flops. The burbling spots of grey quicksand that people had to be careful not to fall into. The pythons that slithered silently into people’s bathroom windows. The mudskippers with sharp spikes on their backs. 100-kilo wild boars that roamed the neighbourhoods in gangs. Saltwater crocodiles that circled the stilt houses people built to live over the water, waiting for a dog or the occasional toddler to fall in. There were so many ways to die in the swamp. Be grateful, they told the children and grandchildren of the city, you have no idea what it was like.

     They sang worship songs to the machines that dug up roots, drowned animals, wrote epics about the years they had spent draining the swamp, the giant vacuums they used to suck every drop of water out. How the crocodiles and pythons were rounded up and sent to live in waterless cement pools on farms where they were bred so their scales could be turned into handbags. The wild boar rounded up to feed the reptile skin farms. The lobsters’ mud towers knocked down and the lobsters turned into local cuisine, never again to cut off children’s toes. The quicksand was tamed, dredged up and mixed with lime and moulded into skyscrapers. The last mudskipper was steamed with chilli oil. The mosquitoes and insects that hovered around the swamp spreading disease were extinguished with powerful new chemicals. The mangroves were cut down, and suddenly the whole island was bathed in sunlight. The new dry land turned into farmland, then factories, then cityscape. Every year the city prospered more and more. 

     And every year they told their children stories about the swamp that they defeated, the one they must never return to, the one they should be grateful for getting rid of. They told their children they had no idea how good they had it, how awful things had been before.  How they had to be thankful that their forefathers had the foresight and genius to tame their island, to transform their mosquito-ridden swamp into a metropolis. And every year the stories grew a little bit more exaggerated, and the swamp was painted to look a little bit more horrific. Soon stories of how bloodthirsty crocodiles entered people’s houses, snapped tables in half with their jaws, ravaged entire families. Pythons squeezed the breath out of sleeping villagers before swallowing them whole. The mud lobsters grew to the size of tigers, kidnapped children and held them hostage in their towers. The quicksand was now the size of football fields, yet somehow hard to spot and easy to fall into, and consumed 100-200 people a year. The wild boar gangs regularly charged into people and ate babies in their cots.

     History textbooks were mandated to include these horror stories in the first five pages of their first chapter and explain how the real history started the year the last drop of swamp was sucked away. Occasionally, someone who recalled life in the swamp would start telling stories about how they lived with the swamp, suggesting how things may have been quite as bad as everyone said, but they were laughed away or called dissidents. Soon, the last citizen who remembered the swamp passed on and the mythical spectre of the swamp was soon vastly more terrifying than the swamp itself had ever been.  

     No one could remember when people started disappearing in the city. Newspaper reports of babies being snatched in their sleep. People waking up to find their partners dead of strangulation. How sinkholes started appearing in the cement, started swallowing cars, buses, small houses. No one remembers the first time an underground rush hour train got derailed, and disappeared down a mysterious tunnel never to be seen again. The rumours of a giant crocodile escaping from its cement pen, twice the size of a wild crocodile after being fed a regular diet of supersized, selectively-bred boar. The viral photos, possibly fake, of giant wild boar gangs going through people’s rubbish. Mysterious cuts on people’s legs as they slept. A mysterious outbreak of a new kind of mosquito-borne infection despite the fact that mosquitoes had been wiped out decades earlier. Children waking up screaming with bloody feet and missing toes. Some of these were proven to be myths, but it was so much more exciting to believe they were true. The stories would always be far more terrifying and easier to swallow. 

     In later years, they would come to call this a national case of mass hysteria. Everyone knew someone, or someone who knew someone who had mysteriously disappeared, or been mysteriously harmed in their sleep. The people began to blame each other. What else was there left to blame? It had to be created by people. People controlled the whole island, every inch of it had been drained, torn up and rebuilt in their image. It must have been this type of person, or that other type of person, but really, probably these people. There was no way they could keep going with all these disappearances and random deaths. It had to be someone’s fault. 

     It could always be worse, though, the people said, at least we’re not living in a swamp.  

-

Stephanie Dogfoot

Stephanie Dogfoot is a writer, performer and producer from Singapore. They founded and run a poetry event called Spoke & Bird. Their first collection, Roadkill for Beginners (Math Paper Press, 2021) explores coming of age, desire, found family and falling in love with places in Singapore, Ohio and London. You can find their tweets at @stephdogfoot.  

[onceuponanaromantic]

a review of some poems

a review of some poems in each of the collections i’m studying

Gaze Back / Roadkill for Beginners / Tender Delirium

Roadkill for Beginners:

New Words for Never: nice interplay between fantasy and reality through the use of the peter pan storyline here. the constant references to drugs kept making me overthink about the meaning but i think it’s just the idea of transgression. ‘but fully grown airborne women just look pathetic’ well oof. 8/10

The Whole Thing about Janis Joplin and the Rabbit: its.. not one of the better poems in the collection ill say that much. v centered on a very christian? white person experience? which i don’t particularly like. the commentary on mythology and immortality and performance is. v oblique, but i do like the chang-e and the jade rabbit so. 2/10

Senior Year: god why is this poem so long. the way time is constructed is cool tho. i do appreciate ‘July (late)’ ‘Ethan’ and then ‘August’. ‘tried to imagine/ its last thoughts/ while trying/ not to write/ my thesis’ what a mood. a lot of varying on form but to what effect? 4/10

Satellites: as much as i like the image of wishing on satellites instead of stars... eh. i do appreciate the contrast between the inevitable tedium and respectability (and boredom) of adulthood and the adventure. very much a ‘city person thinks of stars’ poem. 3/10.

You Throw a Party and Every Body You Have Ever Been Attracted To Is There: title itself is mildly a nightmare, both for how long it is and the concept of it. i do see the comment on attraction and the shame for being attracted to white guys with dreadlocks, but. this is very much a personal call-out to herself, so i forgive chan for the lack of good imagery here. 4/10

When the World Ends You Will Be Eating Hokkien Mee: my favoured one between her other food poems. and not just because we just lived through 2020. i like the emphasis on Singaporean arrogance and exceptionalism and the apathy. also, made me hungry for hokkien mee. good call-out for the Pandemic. 6/10

Notes on Adverse Possession: ‘the nightly occupation of the space between/your palm and your pillow, building barricades/down your spine’ oof. this poem always strikes me as queer even though you never see the gender of the addressee. i suspect its the transience and the physical intimacy mixed with violence of it. 7/10.

tldr: i will curse performance poets for their poems being so damn long. some nice imagery here, all things considered.

[zedecksiew]

Creatures of Near Kingdoms - some reviews

Creatures of Near Kingdoms has been available since late September. I was worried that it’d come out and meet benign indifference. “Oh, okay, cute.”*

But, hey: people seem to love our book! So many have said so many wonderful things about the book -- in person; on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook ephemera**; on blogs and Goodreads and elsewhere.

Here are some:

+

“Each story was a perfectly packed spoon of nasi lemak, to use an entirely Malaysian cliche because this book makes me feel so very connected to my roots and surroundings here in the Nusantara, where the bite is balanced and has a bit of everything and just right.” - Syar S Alia, on Goodreads

“... this is probably a very different book if you are Malaysian, or just live in SE Asia, and if you are not ... the book is twice-reflected. There is an extra hovering layer of interpretation. And also a lot of it is just the impression of someone in a cold grey place reading about a bright warm place (you actually feel a little colder in comparison when you read) ... The extra layer, or double gleam of unknowing, either doesn't hurt, or helps you feel like you know the place in an intimate way. There are lots of fragments of life that would never show up in any story you would read. You feel like you know what its like to be in a traffic jam because of Buffalo, to worry about parking your car beneath rare and aggressive species, to wake up prickling because of lizards, pigs under the house. Complex meanings in relatives gift-plants, an aggressive bioform on the beach, neighbours with ritual problems.” - Patrick Stuart, falsemachine.blogspot.com

“...  a beautiful and creepy catalogue of the local flora and fauna of Port Dickson, Malaysia, where the writer and artist are based, and offers a sincere vision for writing an environment without taking from it.” - Kaitlin Rees, for the Asian American Writer’s Workshop

“What Zedeck managed to do was letting us see the world through his eyes, but at the same time made us think these are all what we have been thinking about all along.” - Anis Suhaila, on Goodreads

“I suffer from Insomnia. The bad kind, the capital I kind, the kind that dictates the rhythms of a life, that affects my relationships with people. Lately I have taken to reading this curious little book before I go to bed. Three to four stories at a time. Stringing it out, savoring it. The nights that I do this, I sleep easier. Something about this book runs counter to the sharp, jagged metal anxieties that keep me up at night.” - Matt Bozin, tarsostheorem.blogspot.com

“THE LANTERN SQUIRREL: the cellophane squirrel that escapes into the forest to run wild after the lantern festival, & my FAVOURITE ANIMAL of 2018, found in my favourite book of 2018,” - Stephanie Dogfoot, on Instagram

“I wish Giant Skunk Pleco was a real being ...  As for the illustrations - so gorgeous! I had to resist the urge to colour them in with all that lovely, lovely white space.” - Alyssa J, on Goodreads

“The creatures are there, you know now, after reading the book. You wish to see them, to touch them. However, you know that your meat-constructed fingers could never brush against beautiful patterns in shadows shaped by true things in the world but misshaped by true things in the mind.” - Khairul Hisham, hishgraphics.com

+

*Sharon didn’t share my fear, because she is wiser.

**There isn’t any way to retrieve / refer back to Insta stories, is there???

Thank you. Thank you. I feel like the Smaug-y civet above, hoarding the warm words everybody has given me.

+

Creatures of Near Kingdoms has gone to a second printing.

[femnet]

Last August, I attended a panel called Shades of Purple: Bisexual & Pansexual Experiences in Singapore. It was moderated by a nonbinary bisexual person, Stephanie Dogfoot (poet, comedian, and my personal hero), so I entered the experience with high expectations.

Perhaps those unrealistically high expectations were part of the reason why I was so thoroughly disappointed, but I was also able to pinpoint a very specific sentiment that bothered me about the talk: the idea that, as a bi person, I am some sort of in-between straight ambassador for gay people and vice versa. It’s taken me five months to write this article because that sentiment made me so deeply uncomfortable that it’s unearthed some previously repressed emotions, so this’ll be a ride and a half.

Some choice quotes from the panel included the phrases “we are in a liminal space”, “undercover agent”, and “be a bridge”. Now, while it’s worth noting that while it was a panel for bi and pan people, all of the panellists were bi. They’re welcome to their interpretations of their sexuality, of course, but I don’t think that this mentality really helps, especially not if it’s presented as though it is representative of the entire bi/pan community.

Let’s tackle the “undercover agent” thing. The idea that bi/pan people are somehow deceptive or lying to the people around them is a pervasive and harmful stereotype that’s often used by gatekeepers of the LGBT+ community, and I don’t see how perpetuation of this stereotype will help the matter. It also denies bi/pan people the option of being out and proud in the name of some nebulous liberation that doesn’t even include us in its grand vision of an accepting utopia anyway. Who says I want to be a bridge? Who says I want to let other people walk over me? There are plenty of common areas between cishet people and the LGBT+ community, and it would be a far better use of our time to find and cultivate these areas of communication and education than to ask bi/pan people to “pretend to be straight”.

Here’s the thing: a bi/pan person pretending to be straight is still closeted. We share a lot of the anxiety and self-hatred of closeted gay people, and asking us to pretend like this experience isn’t also a painful product of homophobia in society is trivialising it. From the moment we are born, we’re inundated with clothes and colour schemes and government policies (housing permits, cash bonuses for having babies, life insurance and compulsory savings, etc) that usher us down a predetermined narrative of the Singaporean Citizen, trademark 1965. The SC™ goes to school, graduates, the men have compulsory national service for two years and the women go on to start careers that they will later put on hold to marry. The nuclear family, the building block of society, has near-exclusive access to housing (in a small, increasingly overcrowded country). It will see itself reflected in movies and books that will never get banned for its mere existence, and it is the key to happiness and fulfilment. Or so the story goes. The day I admitted to myself that I liked women was the day the gates to this narrative slammed itself shut in my face. Even if I marry a man, I have still lived a lifetime of being alienated from heterosexual narratives of romance.

When I am with a man, I am not straight in the moment. When I am with a woman, I am not a lesbian for the moment. My attraction to men does not automatically mean I suddenly have access to the straight narrative, not when my life has been so radically changed by the constant anxiety of not having a future in my own country. It doesn’t just shut off on command. Again, being straight isn’t just about being a female-aligned person experiencing attraction to men. It’s a cultural phenomenon, a set of behaviours and cultural cues that were forbidden to me the moment I was born.

I could keep on talking for ages, but the long and short of it is this: I don’t want to go back into the closet. It’s a suffocating, lonely place and cheerfully slapping a “secret agent” sticker over it doesn’t change that. And what about those of us who cannot—or will not—go stealth? The bi/pan people who are visibly and proudly gender nonconforming or in same-sex relationships? What then? This mentality helps no one in that it perpetuates existing harmful stereotypes and trivialises bi/pan experiences with homophobia. It’s time to let it go.

[queerzinefestsg-blog]

All images courtesy of Farzanah Hussein

Queer Zinefest SG 2018

14 July 2018 (12:30-17:30) at Camp Kilo Charcoal Club

Zinesters: Gorgeous Glam Gays, Franklewinkle, Deer-tea, Phi & Eko’s Curiosities, The Gay Agenda, EggGore, I’M FINE, Drawwins, Marvellous Monstrosities, Quirky Good Vibes, Douchebagbobo, Detourist, SWING Magazine, Creatures of Habit, bever.gif, DIV., The Aromantic Manifesto, The Local Rebel

Volunteers: Darius Boey, Farzanah Hussein, Afiq Julius, Anis, Audi, Joelle Kwek, Max, Tan Liting, Nat Tai, Sendra, Roshini Marshall, Christine Yeo Khalid, Siti Rafidah, LiTing

Workshops: Project X, Andreas Chua, Aloysius D, Bhavani Bala, Prout

Zine Library: Squelch Zines

Musicians: RON, Empatlines, Jean Seizure, Chris Hong, Aeriqah

Organising Committee: Gabbi Wenyi Ayane, Stephanie Dogfoot, Joy Ho, Akansha Aether

Special Thanks: Wynn, Elle, Cynthia Cheng, Rhea O’Brien, Singapore Art Book Fair, Eddie, CongZheng, Andrea, Becca, Huzir Sulaiman, Claire Wong

[sgwritersfest]

What a fantastic start to Day 9 of SWF! • "All really good writing is about rewriting. You don't have to get it right the first time." -- A.L. Tait, [Unleash Your Writing Superpowers] • “Before I start with literature as a medium for advocacy, I would like touch on the danger of creating camps claiming what is real literature.” - Fahd Pahdepie, [Sastera Sebagai Advokasi, Literature as Advocacy] • [CindeRilla goes to the Party] CinderRilla was written as a sign of friendship between Indonesia and Singapore, in celebration of ASEAN 50 • [Bunny Slopes and other Fun Stories with Claudia Rueda] • [Women Voices in Tamil Literature with Kutti Revathi • "Languages are filled with history and culture. If you want to know people, you should know their language." - Nhã Thuyên [Translating Asia] • “Each of us had to read all 900 (shortlisted) poems.” — Stephanie Dogfoot, on editing SingPoWriMo at the Math Paper Press book launch IV • #sgwritersfest #swf2017 #swfaram #swfinsider

[tingsantimes]

This is for all of you who make up your own games

as you go along, who choose whom to kiss based on

their shoes or their hair, who have learnt to be that

little bit less afraid, who woke up and realised what

century they were in and thought, hell yeah,

who aren’t trying to be ladies, or lads

or Kate Middleton or Tyra Banks.

-from This one goes out to all the girls who like to wear mustaches by Stephanie Dogfoot

[nocountryformixedraceyoungwomen]

That Foreigner Poem

Paddington Bear was a dirty Latino

from the darkest of dark Peru.

Then he got saved by that nice English family

who taught him to speak Proper,

dressed him in a mac and Wellington boots.

Now he’s cuddly, tame and cultured,

fits in so well with their living room!

Then again, who am I to judge?

I mean, I’m not that different myself:

Just swap the marmalade for marijuana,

the macintosh for dreads and Doc Marten boots,

and I’m just another Londoner in Paddington station:

your token Oriental girl for hire

to make your subculture look diverse!

Fitting in so well with your shabby-chic furniture

and the latest gypsy folk-punk band.

See, we all like our foreigners ‘different’

but only in such a way that we can understand.

Just enough to call ourselves ‘tolerant’,

but not so much that we get out of hand.

Because beneath every rallying call for diversity

is that throbbing baseline beat:

Foreigner go home, foreigner go home, foreigner go home,

unless you’re serious about being just like me.

Then again, maybe I’m being too cynical,

I mean, I like the way I tweak my accent,

choose my clothes and cut my hair.

I like the looks I get when I go back home

as people stop and stare, muttering,

just another middle-class asshole,

corrupted  by the West.

  But these days I’m more likely to get flak

back home for how I speak Chinese,

see, my Mandarin’s tainted by a Beijing drawl

from making too many friends

who happen to have been born there.

These days, people tend to glare,

asking, are you PRC*?

Meaning: how much can I respect you?

Are you one of us? Are you about to spit?

Did you shower in the past week?

Can I end this conversation now?

Didn’t you know, it’s the latest threat

to Singapore today: this flood of

People’s Republic-born Chinese,

out to flaunt their nouveau-richness

steal your husband, your job, your baby!

Because xenophobia is a meme,

found in every country.

I wish it WAS confined to

Daily Mail readers from Essex,

but its been here throughout history,

ever since the first Neanderthal

saw the first Homo Sapiens getting off

a boat from Africa and grunted,

hey, you’re not from here.

Then devolved into complaints

about too many Jewish and Irish people

clogging up London’s streets

Then it was the Italians, the South Asians,

the Eastern Europeans: its like

every generation there’s a new culture

to discover, to blame, to hate.

And in the end, its not even being from

‘over there’, more like a constant test,

a list of boxes you must tick:

like passport colour, skin colour, accent,

language, clothes, most important:

how long it takes for you to get

one of their jokes.

You only pass when someone says

THEY CAN’T DEPORT YOU,

YOU’RE MORE BRITISH THAN ME!

(but who is ‘them’ and who is ‘we’?)

And on and on and on it goes,

this constant litany, of

Foreigner go home, foreigner go home, foreigner go home

(but I’d really love to visit your village one day!)

Foreigner go home, foreigner go home, foreigner go home

(but leave us your cleaning skills, your football skills,

your takeaways, your lovely jewellery!)

Foreigner go home, foreigner go home, foreigner go home

(see I’ve always had this fantasy about, is it true that Asian girls…)

Foreigner go home, foreigner go home, foreigner go home

with me.

Because, Paddington Bear?

I bet even he gets tired of passing sometimes,

tired of playing that simpering, gentle toy

who should be so grateful to this country.

So keep your guilt, keep your ‘tolerance’

as if foreigners were alcohol,

so if you come across more than ten of us

in one night, you’re gonna start a pub brawl?

Keep your deep knowledge of my country.

I don’t even care if you’ve never heard of it before,

as long as you can imagine

a world before  they created West and East,

just drop your assumptions, read my lips

and listen when we speak.

Stephanie Dogfoot

[onceuponanaromantic]

I know this is late, but (from the WIP tag game)...queerness in modern Singaporean poetry?? If you want to talk about it, I'm listening intently

okay so I am always down to talk about queerness in modern Singaporean poetry especially when I’m avoiding other deadlines.

To begin with, Singapore’s queer scene interacts a lot with the writing scene, but especially the poetry scene. (To the point where I once exasperatedly asked in my sg writing circles if everyone in the writing circles was connected to everyone else by a string of exes and received several wry comments to the effect of ‘yes’.) There are historical and sociological reasons for this but basically it boils down to the fact that in singapore, the media and art is very much government funded and even apart from that, usually subjected to a lot of government restrictions, including the infamous Out-of Bounds Markers (OB Markers).

(Before anyone gets on my ass about ‘oh if you take govt money for sponsorship you should be beholden to govt restrictions’, literally all art scenes in all countries take some amount of government funding and art is literally meant as a reflection and criticism of current societies AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN)

Okay so back onto OB markers, and there is a long list. But for the purpose of this discussion, homosexuality is taboo and we have this lovely colonial era law called 377A that despite civil society attempts to get overturned, still remains and still criminalises anal sex between two men. (There’s an interesting discussion on whether colonialism, racism or homophobia should be blamed for its creation but my personal stand is all three.) And if you hit one of the OB markers, your funding can get suddenly withdrawn and you may not be allowed to present the work in Singapore. (Also, sometimes you get sued and the ministers in Singapore come after you in parliament, which has happened to several artists who dealt with sensitive political issues in ways the state didn’t like.)

So in Singapore, most creative work, and here I include film, plays, TV shows and novels, tends to either avoid discussing homosexuality and queerness in general at all, or else tends towards homophobic depictions and very bland stereotypes of gay men, if they are even depicted at all, with a focus mostly being on gay suffering.

Poetry, on the other hand, is a more niche area. And as a result of that niche, more nuanced depictions of queerness (including depictions of queer people who aren’t gay men) are allowed to flourish. So for example, one of the texts I’m looking at called Roadkill for Beginners is by the poet called Stephanie Chan, also known as Stephanie Dogfoot, and they’re nonbinary and bi. So in Roadkill, there are poems about their attraction to men as well as women as well as other aspects of their identity such as being a Singaporean student going to college overseas and their family. And their relationship with food, which is very important too.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the poetry scene is like The Most Diverse and Progressive because there’s still issues with Chinese men, even gay men, getting more opportunities and exposure than other demographics, and that’s part of the reason why I decided that I explicitly wanted to look at queer female/feminine presenting poets. I also won’t say that there’s necessarily a push towards more diverse representation in prize winners for Singaporean literary prizes even though Marylyn Tan’s Gaze Back did win the Singapore Literature Prize for Poetry, because a singular writer winning a prize does not necessarily translate into wider social changes but it is a good sign (especially because a lot of the previous winners are like old chinese guys).

(I have mixed feelings about Gaze Back because it’s amazingly explicit in its presentation of femininity and queerness and I love that but also Tan really likes her sex imagery and at one point, I was trying to puzzle through one of her longer metaphors using biological imagery before I realised that it was... about sex. Sex is squick for me but it’s bold of Tan, especially given social disapproval towards women explicitly enjoying sex.)

Anyway! So that’s basically an overview of queerness of modern Singaporean poetry, and like I could go even deeper into queer theory and like especially the writers that I discuss and their takes on respectability politics. (Oh so there’s this... thing where like middle/upper class chinese gay guys and women are like ‘Oh we are Just Like Straight Chinese Cishets just gay’ and like... lean into racism and classism among other things and also stereotypes about other queer people, so being gay is not a substitute for social awareness and deliberate pushes for progressive change but then, that’s not a phenomenon isolated to Singapore.) Yeah! I hope you enjoyed this ramble because I’m always down to talk about this shit.