So Christmas is over. What to do for Hogmanay? This year we are spoilt for choice for parties to go to (more like the agony of choice), especially for PLUs.
For starters there’s Mambo’s I ‘Heart’ NYE special at Zouk. Entry is RM48 for ladies and RM58 for guys or buy a bottle for RM382++ to admit three girlfriends. Over at Asian Heritage Row, Heritage Mansion‘s party, ‘Gorgeous NY‘ will feature a lesbian celebrity DJ from Australian. It’s interesting that the ‘lesbian’ part is what Heritage is plugging, but ok, it attracted my attention at least. Maybe they think they can ride on the glam and fame of Samantha Ronson. And if that isn’t L enough for you forplu.com are throwing a party just for the ladies over at Oblique called Playgirl (where have I heard that theme before?). And last but not least there is the party at Club 69, KL’s only dedicated dyke bar, which will host the nominees party for the now infamous Face Book group, Little Black Book. With over 30 nominees, you will definitely be spoiled for choice there.
I guess it all comes down to personal preference. What tickles your fancy? What makes you go gaga, get up and dance, want to take your clothes off, shave your head, burn your bra? The Little Black has shown some diversity in the preferences of the ladies in Singapore and Malaysia. I have seen first hand and heard about the scene in Singapore, that it is more of an ‘andro’ scene than in KL. And you can see that from the Singapore nominees. The KL girls, on the other hand, seem to have a penchant for the femmes. I wonder why that is?
I recall when I first moved to KL I found the lesbian community a lot more diverse than I had experienced it in the UK i.e. the girls I met were not all wearing checked lumber jack shirts and wearing boots and in fact they were quite the opposite. Of course there is a whole range of dykes in KL, from the stone hard butch to the lady’s lady femme, but that’s the point. The diversity and flexibility in the roles played by lesbians here appeared quite liberating.
I used to tell people that I felt more free to express my sexuality here than in the UK. But I think now that this has less to do with having more freedom but that here in Malaysia, that dialogue surrounding the issue is so limited that many people don’t even know what being gay is or what gay people possibly look like or what they do. So the act of a woman hugging another woman or holding hands, rarely gets a head turn.
Plus because ideas of sexual identity and sexuality are so limited that people tend to conform to heterosexual stereotypes very naturally. The consequence of this is that the LGBT community is very much in hiding and people in it try their hardest to conceal their identities.
On the flip side of this in the West, many people use their sexuality to speak out against the institutions and powers that try to enforce the hetero normative idea of sexuality and gender roles. For a young woman to cut her hair short in a ‘dykey’ fashion or to wear ‘men’s’ clothes, is often a political statement and an indication that an individual identifies her or himself with a particular cultural group. Besides using their bodies, groups also identify themselves by what they watch on TV, by what they read and by what music they listen to. In the US and the UK, for example, the lesbian community is very easy to spot and the people in it, equally conform to the so called stereotypes of being a lesbian usually as a kind of camaraderie or show of solidarity, sometimes out of pressure. In Malaysia, because of this extreme lack of dialogue on sexuality, it is almost impossible to make a statement by being different i.e. it is not political to be gay here. Consequently, unlike everywhere else in the world, being gay is not a counter culture here. It is very much a mere reflection of the mainstream status quo.
So when I look at the two recent projects here which centre around the idea of what a lesbian can/does look like, the Little Black Book and the Katagender ‘Tomboy’ photo project and I see that the two show quite different ideas of an ‘ideal’ or desirable lesbian identity, it only reminds me how disparate the community is and how confused it is. Are we tomboys or are we femmes and what do those words, in fact, mean?
In the film ‘Article 8′ that Thilaga and I made, a comment was made by Lainie Yeoh about the sticky situation of representation. I would like to agree. How can we claim to represent everyone, especially, when we are not even bothering to learn about each other. What does it mean to be a lesbian? What are the various definitions; gay, bi, bi-curious and what do they mean, in this society and in the next one? Identity is never fixed and either conforming to the norm or conforming to any alternative idea of a perceived group identity is quite a dangerous thing.
It’s really easy to believe that who we are and who and what we know, in essence our own world views, is the only view or the best view, but in truth it’s so limited. My initial thoughts about the community here was that it was modern. I now feel quite the opposite. On the one hand, through a lack of courage to embrace who we are and on the other hand, through a desire to rigidly define who we are, we are inadvertently limiting ourselves and this serves no purpose but to make it easier for people outside the community to criticise and attack us.
well said.