Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State. By Lynette J. Chua. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 215 pp. $69.50 cloth.

Abstract

Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State. By Lynette J. Chua. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. 215 pp. $69.50 cloth.What can activists do when an authoritarian state wary of anything that can be perceived as a challenge to its power, and a socially conservative society that values stability and nonconfrontation, combine to cut off all readily recognizable avenues to collective organizing and action? One answer, as described in Lynette Chua's book Mobilizing Gay Singapore, is to employ resistance-a unique and creative form of activism that subtly pushes boundaries while appearing, at the same time, to stay within them.Looking at gay activism in Singapore from the early-1990s to 2013, Professor Chua examines how activists created, preserved, and advanced the gay movement by interpreting and subsequently responding to changes-both concrete and implied-in the citystate's social and political conditions. The book blends a concise explanation of Singapore's sociopolitical history with activist interviews to both recount the course of gay activism in Singapore and to develop a model of how activism can be undertaken in an authoritarian state via pragmatic resistance.As a general term, pragmatic resistance is a way of understanding how activists pull on their contextually embedded knowledge and experiences as resources (p. 16) to read political and cultural environments, develop movement tactics, and then revise them as experience is gained and/or as conditions are perceived to change. Within the specific context of Mobilizing Gay Singapore, pragmatic resistance takes the form of activists avoiding direct conflict with the state, ensuring the legality of the movement's public actions, making narrow claims that both appeal to the value of social stability and are careful to not be perceived as broader rights claims, and, finally, appealing to the need to preserve a certain international image of Singapore.The narrative proceeds by presenting a linear and detail-rich history of the gay movement in Singapore. As the book progresses through the movement's distinct stages-its precarious and largely hidden beginnings, its relocation to the relative safety of the internet, and finally to its incremental emergence into the public realm where it has taken increasingly bold steps-attention is paid to describing how the specific tactics of pragmatic resistance change over time while the basic form remains constant. It is in Chapters 3-7 that pragmatic resistance is repeatedly demonstrated and the movement's creativity comes through. Activists circumvent public event registration requirements by publicly advertising private, invitation-only events where one simply responds to the advertisement to obtain an invitation. Singapore citizens effectively undo denied foreign speaker licenses by reading papers written by the rejected persons at events that these same people still attend as audience members and where the floor is opened up for discussion. Media censorship rules that ban nondeviant portrayals of homosexuality are undermined by activists finding ways to place stories in the media that do not appear to publicize gay issues as such (e.g., focusing on a licensing denial for a gay organization), but that subsequently lead to stories and letters to the editor that raise issues about the treatment of gays and ultimately create public awareness. As the movement's confidence grows activists unearth and use obscure parliamentary rules to prompt official state discussions of gay issues and exploit the state's token loosening of public free speech and assembly rules to stage increasingly large public rallies. …