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Who's afraid of Catherine Lim? The State in Patriarchal Singapore
Kenneth Paul Tan
"Through [the Internal Security Act, Sedition Act, Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act and Societies' Act] and other coercive instruments, the state has effectively castrated political opposition and alternatives in civil society, preventing them from mounting effective political challenges to the state—challenges that established liberal democracies would regard as necessary for democratic accountability, responsibility and responsiveness (Tan, 2001).
A spectacular example of political emasculation happened in 1987—two years after a serious economic recession—when the state accused 22 people of a Marxist conspiracy and detained them under the Internal Security Act...
The politically emasculating state assumes the superior status and controlling position of the patriarch—originating, elaborating and defending the "law of the Father" that has taken the form of an official national discourse that defines the conditions of possibility for what can be legitimately thought, expressed and communicated in Singapore...
The founding Father—who engenders and animates the state—writes himself as the sole protagonist in the national narrative, casts his allies in supporting roles and his enemies as antagonists, and interpellates Singaporean readers/citizens into infantile subjects paranoid about threats of race riots, Marxist conspiracies, hostile neighbouring countries, terrorism, disease, economic crisis, and the ceaseless challenges of striving to be number one in the world. Society, in all its lack, is the "negative mirror" that makes possible the state's heroic self-definitions. In contrast to a "masculine" state that possesses universal vision, the people are presented as selfish, ignorant, deficient, dangerous and "feminine", and thus cannot be trusted with matters of public significance unless tightly supervised by state-approved committees (Woo and Goh, 2007). Society, in this "monosexual imaginary", is the "negative elaboration" of the state which, in fact, actively subdues any rebellious ground energies by providing the people with "playgrounds" that simulate democratic participation. Widely publicised national consultation exercises such as the National Agenda in the late 1980s, Singapore 21 and Remaking Singapore at the turn of the millennium are highly controlled spaces for citizen committees to discuss questions scheduled by the state.
Singapore's official history and model of development record the nation's "paternal genealogy", but erase the "maternal genealogy" that could narrate society's organic, hidden or potential roles in the life of the nation. The Singapore state's refusal to acknowledge a national debt to civil society's "maternity" perpetuates the phantasie of a primal (pre-modern) mass that threatens to madden, kill and devour the modern and prosperous Singapore that rational and disciplined policy-makers have constructed, and that the founding Father literally promised/threatened to watch over even from the afterlife. This phantasie of a dangerous civil society is continually constructed and circulated using the vivid imagery of racial riots, radical movements, Marxist conspiracies, and political instability in modern Singapore's recent past and Third-World Asia's present—the more extreme this vision, the more able is the paternal state to define and justify its powers...
[Goh Chok Tong's inauguration and George Yeo's Banyan Tree] speeches marked a shift in emphasis from emasculation and infantilisation of civil society to its feminisation. In this seemingly new partnership, the state—in a "masculine" and "husbandly" voice of reason and control—began to urge civil society to be more active, but this would be limited to the "feminine" roles of providing care (through voluntary welfare organisations), producing consensus through communication (in national-level consultation exercises), and being delightfully, but not antagonistically, expressive (to enable the industrialisation of culture and the arts in a global city [Tan, 2008a). The jealous state's husbandly voice also forbade civil society to forge partnerships with foreign organisations, insisting that foreign interests should never meddle with domestic politics. In this still patriarchal partnership, civil society actors who exceed the limits of their usefulness to the state or challenge its authority---as a wife might challenge her husband's authority---will still be derogatorily described as hysterical, and treated with condescension, ridicule, reproach or even punishment.
Civil society is defined in terms of what the state is not: its lack, other, and extended phallus that commands obedience. In Singapore, "civic society" is the term used by the state to differentiate it from the more antagonistic caricature of "civil society" envisioned in liberal thought. Civic society---conceived as a depoliticised civil society---is encouraged by the state as a "free space": not free in the sense of maximal liberty, but in terms of the unpaid labour extracted from voluntarism to help the state shoulder the welfare burden in an ageing society facing a widening income gap and higher living costs. Like the mass mediated image of Lim Hwee Hua, civil society is legitimised as civic society when it can demonstrate some of the qualities of the state---controlled, rational and technically proficient---but not to the extent that it presents a competitive threat to state dominance. Otherwise, it will have to endure the state's emasculating violence...
Domestic workers help to restore the castrated egos of basically working-class Singapore men and provide an outlet for many Singapore women to deal with their frustrations in the workplace by physically and psychologically abusing their maids..
Lim began her article by stroking the state's ego - specifying in a markedly feminine voice the phallogocentric qualities that were vital to the state's self-definition... Lim then deliberately held up a negative mirror---constructed out of feminine lack and otherness---to the government's narcissistic male ego, as she described the PAP leaders' "pet aversion [to] noisy, protracted debate that leads nowhere, emotional indulgence, frothy promises, theatrics and polemics in place of pragmatics". In this seductive move, her feminine words came, in a Lacanian sense, to be the government's extended phallus... Lim deliberately allowed herself to play up her role as "admiring wife" to the manly state; and then, in this role, articulated claims that the state would not appreciate but needed to hear, constructing a skilful argument that would make any assertions about hysterical women seem quite ridiculous...
[Khoo Tsai Kee] pointed proudly to the party's consistent ability to win more than 60 per cent of the popular vote -"the only test that counts". He then accused Lim, a prominent socialite, of basing her analysis on the chatter of "people [who] gather in coffeehouses and cocktail parties to relax, joke and have fun, not to pass judgment on serious issues"... [Lim] wrote a seemingly unrelated piece for The Straits Times...
At some deep subconscious level, males fear females most when they receive that nice cup of coffee from those delicate hands. / For a proffered drink, as history has shown, has always been woman's deadliest weapon against man. /… She can put into it some secret potion… that is guaranteed to put her husband or lover under her spell forever. / Or she can administer a strong drug that will make him fall into a deep sleep, so that like Delilah or Lorena Bobbitt, she can denude him of his manhood forever.
Suspicious of Lim's feminine ability to charm and perhaps even to castrate, the government ungraciously refused her cup of coffee...
On the question of critics fearing to speak out in Singapore, Lim pointed to a general impression that the "risks are too great". In an ironic and prescient gesture, she identified as a source of this impression the "discomfiture of seeing a formidable PAP juggernaut ranged against a lone, helpless individual who then excites sympathy as the pitiable underdog". The interview concluded with a self-deprecating Lim wondering to herself if she was "an ingrate to suggest to this very competent Government that, on top of all the good things they are providing for the people, would they behave nicely to the people, please?"...
Lim observed how
Given his fierce commitment to the nation he built up, shaped and protected over three decades (who can forget that touching promise he once made about springing up from his coffin, if necessary, to intervene on Singapore's behalf?)
Lim, in a deliberately naive (even cheeky) gesture, described the horror (and high camp) of Lee's grave promise as "touching"; yet her words did not fail to affirm the leader's great stature. But in refusing "death", this eternal Father—consciously or unconsciously—made it difficult for Goh, his successor, to self-actualize as the nation's leader. This infantilisation has, in fact, been palpable...The prime minister's press secretary, Chan Heng Wing (4 December 1994), wrote a letter to The Straits Times the following week. His tone, in stark contrast to Lim's, was defensive, mocking, harsh and foreboding. His ad hominem arguments belittled her analysis by suggesting that the novelist could not tell the difference between "real life" and "fiction" and that she demonstrated a "poor understanding of what leaders in government have to do". Remarkably, Chan dismissed "public consultation" as useless for making the entire range of public policies and decisions; but he maintained that the prime minister welcomed "alternative viewpoints" only if they were correct ones: "mistaken views" and "fallacious propositions" would be refuted "sharply" and "robustly" so as not to "take hold and confuse Singaporeans, leading to unfortunate results". Chan assumed that tough prime ministerial action against unacceptable viewpoints would earn him the respect of the people. This position completely misunderstood the significance of consultation as a means of pooling a broad range of resources for a more rounded and multi-perspectived practice of collective decision-making, particularly important as more complex societies enter into uncertain times. Instead, Chan assumed that there were already correct arguments and that the government knew what they were; thus, public consultation was not meant to serve as a process of decision-making, but as a propaganda tool for getting people to buy into what had already been decided by the state. Remarkable also was Chan's assertion that Lim—and in fact "journalists, novelists, short-story writers or theatre groups"- should not "set the political agenda from outside the political arena", but should join a political party and run for election if they had strong political views...
[After 1991's loss of 4 seats to the Opposition] Lim's masculine arguments conveyed in an overtly feminine voice evoked the prime minister's primal instinct to fear and resist the vagina dentata. In fact, 1994 was a particularly repressive year, in which two other academics were reprimanded (one actually fled the country) and two art forms -"performance art" and "forum theatre"- were proscribed. The new administration needed to remasculate itself to replace its "softer" image with a strongman quality that it assumed the people felt more comfortable with...
The prime minister's press secretary then added new levels of hyperbole to this "western decadence vs Asian values" approach, describing Lim's commentaries as "destroy[ing] the respect accorded to the Prime Minister by denigration and contempt…[leading not] to more freedom but confusion, conflict and decline" (quoted in The Straits Times, 29 December 1994). In the same letter, he cited homosexuality, single motherhood, and the "rampant and overbearing hubris" of the media as examples of western practices that "would be disastrous for Singapore" (quoted in The Business Times Singapore, 29 December 1994). In this bizarre sleight of hand, Lim, the writer of English-language love stories, was transformed—through a phallogocentric postcolonial ideology that disparages feminine qualities as degenerate and a threat to national discipline and control—into an uncouth, insolent, insubordinate, immoral, traitorous and dangerous woman who dared to overstep her boundaries in traditional Asian (read patriarchal) society. Unable to deal with Lim's suspicious offer of a cup of coffee, the state resorted to a crude, hyperbolic and even monstrous characterisation of Lim that was much easier to discipline and control. This is a Freudian disavowal of the maternal-feminine that "perpetuates the most atrocious and primitive phantasies—woman as devouring monster threatening madness and death" (Whitford, 1991b, pp. 25-26), just as a vocal Catherine Lim was presented as a westernised monster threatening to devour the values of Asian civilisation...
When critics who are genuinely interested in Singapore's well-being are demolished by an intolerant state or forced to live overseas, should "foul play" be suspected? But the piece also seemed to suggest that the state had missed the point of Lim's two political commentaries entirely, choosing to be obsessed about her "grammar", as it were, instead of her message. The state, perhaps, did not want to have to deal with Lim's inconvenient message, or it chose to focus not on a woman's substance but on her manner and tone...
A few days later, the structural violence referred to in Lim's "foul play" commentary exploded into a remarkably brutal display of phallic physicality and strength through the use of violent metaphors. In parliament, the prime minister described Lim's political commentaries and criticism from other Singaporeans as an "attack" that the government would have to reciprocate: "If you land a blow on our jaw, you must expect a counter-blow on your solar plexus" (quoted in The Straits Times, 24 January 1995)... Soon after, Lee—the castrating Father—expressed his approval of Goh's tough action in an interview with local tabloid The New Paper. Outdoing his successor yet again, the "formidable PAP juggernaut" raged against Lim, employing a battery of metaphoric weapons to reinforce his point:
Everybody now knows that if you take on the PM, he will have to take you on… If he didn't, then more people will throw darts, put a little poison on the tip and throw them at him. And he'll have darts sticking all over him.
[...]
everybody knows if I say that we are going in a certain direction and that we're going to achieve this objective, if you set out to block me, I will take a bulldozer and clear the obstruction.
[...]
The PM has to carry his own big stick, or have someone carry it, because now it's his policy and his responsibility to see his policy through (quoted in Ng, 3 February 1995).
I would isolate the leaders, the troublemakers, get them exposed, cut them down to size, ridicule them, so that everybody understands that it's not such a clever thing to do. Governing does not mean just being pleasant.
[...]
You will not write an article—and that's it. One-to-one on TV. You make your point and I'll refute you… Or if you like, take a sharp knife, metaphorically, and I'll take a sharp knife of similar size; let's meet. Once this is understood, it's amazing how reasonable the argument can become (quoted in Wrage, 22 December 1995).
In a bizarre manoeuvre to humanise the man after conveying his litany of terrifying metaphors, The Straits Times described how
[w]hen he spoke about his roles as father and grandfather, he adopted an avuncular air, and often flashed a warm smile and a kindly eye. / But when he dwelt on Dr Lim's article and issues on governing, he showed the force of his personality, the strength of his intellect and the wealth of his 41-year political experience (Ng, 3 February 1995).
Some years later, in an interview with reporters from The Straits Times who were compiling a book on the man and his ideas, Lee continued to display this violent streak:
Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister… she would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac… Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle-dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society (Han, Fernandez and Tan, 1998, p. 126).
... Writing about Lee's eternal/paternal dominance over the nation's history and contemporary self-understandings, Souchou Yao argues that the Father's refusal to die - in his promise to rise from the grave - will stunt the growth of an already immature citizenry...
These almost hysterical pronouncements - monumentally ironic - put the state in an embarrassingly negative light: the gender stereotypes were reversed!... [there is a potential to] proactively criticis[e] the state in a gently "spousal" way to make a strongly argued point without incurring the state's full-blown violence...
Catherine Lim was able to expose the unconscionable violence of a patriarchal state without being destroyed by it, raise sympathy for the underdog, and mobilise forces of resistance against an authoritarianism through which such high-handed threats of violence were possible. Her potentially castrating actions also set the stage for a state that defined itself in the hyper-masculine terms of rationality and self-control to behave—ironically—in a melodramatic, overly-emotional and even hysterical fashion that would have readily been associated with a debased femininity...
Catherine Lim's affair with the state in 1994 was a "three-steps forward, two-steps-back dance"- but the net movement was still forward."
