The Politics of Reclaiming Identity: Representing the Mak Nyahs in Bukak Api

Ng, Andrew Hock Soon

doi:10.1057/9780230373310_8

LGBT Transnational Identity and the Media 2012

DOI: 10.1057/9780230373310_8

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The Politics of Reclaiming Identity: Representing the Mak Nyahs in Bukak Api

Andrew Hock Soon Ng¹

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“…Plotting them against us in terms of gender difference is certainly not an experience unique to Singapore drag queens. The construction of the Mak Yah (Malay transsexuals) as a social group is couched in such binary logic (Ng, 2012). Similarly, the cross-gender group bissu, shamans of the Bugis community in Sulawesi, are described as calalai, a Bugis term denoting false woman (Davies, 2010) 5 .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Watching a Singapore Drag Comedian: A Semiotic Analysis of Kumar in a YouTube Video

Sew¹

2017

archipel

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Watching a Singapore Drag Comedian: A Semiotic Analysis of Kumar in a YouTube Video

Sew¹

2017

archipel

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Visualizing the Invisible: Social Constructions of Straight Identified Men Who Have Sex With Transsexuals and Feminized Gay Men On/Off Malaysian Film

Lim

2015

Studies in Gender and Sexuality

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Our introduction is to a panel that considers two films, The Tale and Leaving Neverland. Both films feature adult protagonists reclaiming memories of their disavowed childhood sexual abuse, and both were released amid #MeToo and a proliferation of other films, TV shows, and memoirs depicting seduction trauma in the context of a family romance plotline. Together, they suggest features of a universally taboo story (of childhood sexual abuse), compounded by psychoanalysis's primal taboo: incestuous desire. It is argued that though psychoanalysis recognizes the reality of sexual abuse, it nonetheless seems to discount, as did Freud, its ubiquity, and, too, may leave underexplored the incidence of pedophiliac fantasy. Further, and ironically in light of psychoanalysis's history, it underestimates the survivor's investment in her romantic fantasy, and its identification itself with her aggressor's "grooming," as a force that denies the real of her trauma. Both films depict the ongoing therapeutic action of après-coup, in the quest to (re) tell truth between memory-desire, omnipotence-agency, truth-fiction, and reparation-(imaginative) apology.Grappling with how to explain his turn to the contradictory form of the autobiographical novel to make sense of his life, which would mean to lay bare his trauma, the author Alexander Chee (2018, p. 212) writes, "Plot was also a way of facing what I couldn't or wouldn't remember . . . I would need a way to descend [into the past] and return safely. Turning myself into a character, inventing a plot, turning that past into fiction, I hoped, could solve for all of this." Chee's comments find resonance with what would seem the ironic choice made by Jennifer Fox, a documentarian, who turned to feature film to tell a fictionalized account of real events. That film, The Tale, is based upon an unnamed tale she'd written at age 13, described as a love story, but that harbors within it a story of sexual abuse, and links, through its title, to timeless fairy tales. As critic Rachel Syme (2018) observes, "The fictional translation allows Fox to control her very delicate story, but also to explore the gaps within; she never attempts to fill the lacunae where things make sense with evidence or with justification."What's more, Fox doesn't only turn to fiction to tell her story, she-through a voiceover of the protagonist, who shares the director's name, breaking the fourth wall-tells the viewer that the story they are about to see "is true (pause) as far as I know." By means of this directorial sleight of hand, or of reality, a parallel process between Fox's experience and that of the viewer is set in motion. The viewer, as was Fox, is drawn into questioning what is real and what they imagine, into deciphering ambiguities and gaps between historical and psychic reality, and into memory's messy malleability and the way in which it subverts narrative coherence and agential sovereignty.

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The Politics of Reclaiming Identity: Representing the Mak Nyahs in Bukak Api

Cited by 2 publications

References 6 publications

Watching a Singapore Drag Comedian: A Semiotic Analysis of Kumar in a YouTube Video

Watching a Singapore Drag Comedian: A Semiotic Analysis of Kumar in a YouTube Video

Visualizing the Invisible: Social Constructions of Straight Identified Men Who Have Sex With Transsexuals and Feminized Gay Men On/Off Malaysian Film

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