State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality and Race in Singapore

Nationalisms and Sexualities

Volumn , Issue , 2018, Pages 343-364

  Heng, Geraldine ^a   Devan, Janadas ^a  

^a NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE   (Singapore)

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EID: 85135641804     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780429440359-33     Document Type: Chapter

References (16)

1. “If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards. Levels of competence will decline. Our economy will falter, the administration will suffer, and the society will decline. For how can we avoid lowering performance when for every two graduates (with some exaggeration to make the point), in 25 years’ time there will be one graduate, and for every two uneducated workers, there will be three?” (“Talent for the Future: Prepared Text of the Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew’s Speech at the National Day Rally Last Night,” The Straits Times [Singapore], August 15, 1983).
2. Lest anyone assume that Lee’s articulation of race, class, and gender in the detection of reproductive crisis is unique to Singapore, attention might be drawn to the increasing number of articles in popular U.S. magazines which describe similar discoveries in alarmist, prophetic tones like his—see, e.g., “A Confederacy of Dunces: Are the Best and the Brightest Making Too Few Babies?” in Newsweek (May 22, 1989), and R. J. Hermstein, “IQ and Falling Birthrates” in the Atlantic Monthly (May 1989), the latter glossed by the cover headline: “In this Issue: Why are Smart Women Having Fewer Children?” Lee, in the latter article, is admiringly played up as a stalwart example of farsighted and courageous leadership that dares to take measures to rectify envisaged future disaster. Significantly, he is cast in this favorable light with Arthur Balfour, the prime minister of Britain who moaned in 1905 that “Everything done towards opening careers to the lower classes did something towards the degeneration of the race.” The eugenic nightmare of a representative of British high imperialism is echoed thus across the century—the cadences of alarm, fear, and threat remaining unchanged—by the postcolonial prime minister of (a formerly British) Singapore. Nor is Lee’s reductive faith in the genetic transmission of intelligence a subscription exclusive now to retrograde third world autocrats. Even as a redoubtable Jay Gould stirred himself to counter Lee’s misuse of scientific arguments (“Singapore's Patrimony [and Matrimony]: The Illogic of Eugenics Knows Neither the Boundaries of Time nor Geography,” Natural History, May 1984), U.S. genetic determinists Thomas Bouchard, Jon Karlsson, and the seemingly indefatigable William Shockley, lent themselves to eager support of Lee’s vision: “The Singapore program, says Schockley, ‘is discriminate in a very constructive way. Discrimination is a valuable attribute. Discrimination means the ability to select a better wine from a poorer wine. The word has become degraded. And social engineering? As soon as you've got welfare programs, where you prevent improvident people from having their children starved to death, you are engaged in a form of social engineering. Of genetic engineering even. We have these things going on now, but we’re not looking at what effects they have, and that’s where the humanitarianism is irresponsible’” (see “The Great Debate Over Genes,” Asiaweek, March 2, 1984).
3. Thomas Laqueur’s contention that feminine pleasure (and in particular the female orgasm) was historically read as essential to the economy of female reproductive sexuality suggests that its functional removal from that economy has specifically marked it as superfluous, irrelevant (“Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modem Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], pp. 1-41). The pleasurable and the economic are not only read as separate in Singapore today, but inimical (the trope of the machine allowing no role for pleasure, which by its very concession of unusefulness, nonnecessity and excess disables the fantasies of order and regularity on which a local notion of the economic must depend): indeed, pleasure is tacitly suspected of subverting what would otherwise have been an economic reproductive sexuality, distorting this instead into its opposite, a self-indulgent noneconomy.
4. The Straits Times, publishing 31 of the 101 letters it received immediately following the Prime Minister's speech, defended its decision not to publish the remaining 71 letters thus: “Sifting through the pile, one can detect some misunderstanding of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's message. Most of the correspondents did not address their thoughts to the main issue: The better-educated segment of the population should be encouraged to have more children (than what they are having now) to bring about a more balanced reproduction rate. Instead, they interpreted the speech as one more setback for the less intelligent in our society" (A. S. Yeong, “What the Others Said: An Analysis of Unpublished Letters on the PM's National Day Rally Speech," The Straits Times [Singapore], August 29, 1983). Among the letters published—no doubt because it was thought acute and useful—was an argument to do away with the right of every adult citizen to an equal vote in national elections: “If, at any stage, there is a threat to progress due to increasing numbers of incompetent people, government may even think of introducing a weightage factor for every vote that comes from a ‘qualified' person so that power and administration are kept in the hands of truly competent persons. In a democratic set-up, the principle of ‘one person one vote' is fast becoming a menace to society" (G. Rangarajan, “Maintain a Competent Majority," letter to The Straits Times [Singapore], August 19, 1983).
5. Dr. Toh,” The Straits Times [Singapore], February 13, 1984); the lone opposition-party Member then in Parliament (see “House Throws Out Motion by Jeya on Entry Scheme,” The Straits Times [Singapore], March 14, 1984); the National University of Singapore Students' Union in a petition carrying 3,000 signatures (Hedwig Alfred, “NUS Students' Union Wants to Meet Dr. Tay,” The Straits Times [Singapore], March 14, 1984); and “500 undergraduates, or nearly 40 per cent” of the student population of the Nanyang Technological Institute (“NTI Students Pen Protest Against Priority Plan: A Class System Would Arise, They Say,” The Sunday Times [Singapore], February 19, 1984).
6. The Minister of State for Education at the time, Dr. Tay Eng Soon, repeatedly characterized the country’s top schools (a description earned on the basis of examination results and the traditional reputation of the institutions) as schools that were merely “popular” as a consequence of public misconception (see “Equal Standard, Equal Chances” and Hedwig Alfred, “More Good News for Non-Grad Mums: All Primary Schools Are of Fairly Equal Standard—Dr. Tay” The Sunday Times [Singapore], March 4, 1984). In the midst of public anxiety, resentment, and anger over the proposed changes, the Minister admitted, in an interview with The Straits Times, that for all the fuss and trouble, only 200 children were eligible for the new privileges that year (June Tan, “Non-Graduates Will Also Benefit,” The Straits Times [Singapore], January 24, 1984). Despite Tay’s firm assurance in January 1984 that the new policy would be a permanent one, public opinion nevertheless triumphed, and the demise of the scheme was announced in March 1985: “Education Minister Dr. Tony Tan has decided that Singapore can do without the controversial priority scheme which favored the children of graduate mothers but made a whole lot of people angry” (see “Graduate Mum Scheme to Go,” The Straits Times [Singapore], March 26, 1985).
7. Tsang So-Yin, “The National Service for Women,” The Straits Times (Singapore), August 17, 1983. Sunday columnist Irene Hoe tartly responded: “if childbirth is indeed national service, the women in the S[ingapore] C[ouncil of] W[omen’s] O[rganizations]
8. should be the first to volunteer—before they seek to draft other women” (“The National Service for Women: If Childbirth Is That, These Women Leaders Should Set an Example,” The Sunday Times [Singapore], August 21, 1983). For the homology between military service and maternal service in cultural representation, see Nancy Huston, “The Matrix of Wan Mothers and Heroes,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 119-36.
9. Alice Jardine finds “a climate of sustained paranoia” to exist whenever “the regulation of the mother's body [serves] as ground for a monolithic, nationalistic ideology” (“Opaque Texts and Transparent Contexts: The Political Difference of Julia Kristeva,” in Nancy K. Miller, ed., Poetics of Gender [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], p. 108). Laurie Langbauer suggests that “the mother's confinement during delivery” in the nineteenth century represents an attempted immobilization of a certain fear of feminine regenerative uncontrollability—the physical transfixing of the woman being itself an admission of her “controlling power” of reproduction (“Women in White, Men in Feminism,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 2, 2 [1989], p. 223).
10. “Mr. Lee told an audience of university students that polygamy allowed the mentally and physically vibrant to reproduce. He said that in the old society, successful men had more than one wife. Citing the example of former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka as a man who had a wife and a mistress and children by both, he said the more Tanakas there were in Japan, the more dynamic its society would be” (Kong Sook Chin, “Woman MP Questions Notion of Polygamy,” The Sunday Times [Singapore], December 28, 1986).
11. In a forum conducted by the Sunday Times, two women, who went by the pseudonymous names of “Veronica” and “Mrs. Chan,” produced the following dialogue: “Mrs. Chan: ‘No woman would support polygamy.’ Veronica: ‘But there are women like me who would love to have children even though we’re unmarried.' Mrs. Chan: ‘Yes, a lot of women would like that. Our laws should not penalize such women. Those who are professional and financially self-supporting are quite capable of bringing up their children alone. We should encourage single motherhood, allow such interested women to have artificial insemination.’ Veronica: ‘It needn’t be by artificial means.’ (Laughter)” (Tan Lian Choo, “Marriage and the Single Girl: The Sunday Times Roundtable,” The Sunday Times [Singapore], July 20, 1986).
12. Neil Gilbert, “who heads the Family Welfare Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley,” is quoted as saying piously: “If people aren’t willing to make commitments. you wonder what kind of society you will have down the line.”
13. Professor Tu Wei Ming of Harvard University, the government’s most prominent Confucian “expert,” has offered the view that “democratic institutions are institutions that, if not diametrically opposed to, are at least in basic conflict with natural organizations such as family Some very deep-rooted Confucian-humanistic values are values that need to be fundamentally transformed to be totally compatible with democratic institutions.” The newspapers that published the text of Professor Tu’s talk glossed it thus: “Democratic institutions are opposed to basic Confucianist ideas like the primacy of the family, an omnipresent government, and a preference for a community of trust rather than an adversarial relationship” (emphasis ours). See “When Confucianism Grapples with Democracy,” The Sunday Times [Singapore], November 27, 1988.
14. See N. Balakrishnan, “Pledge of Allegiance: Core Values Touted as an Antidote to Westernisation,” Far Eastern Economic Review [Hong Kong], February 9, 1989. 24. Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 213-14.
15. For instance, in The Gates of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980 (New York: Viking, 1981), Jonathan Spence quotes a writer who blamed “Chinese faith in the family for having destroyed all possibilities of true patriotism” (340), and cites Lu Xun’s contempt for Confucian scholars, the fictionist asserting in a story that these Confucianists had survived through the centuries because they “had never laid down their lives to preserve a government” (122).
16. Recently, speaking on the problem of escalating emigration from Singapore, First Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong introduced a plaintive inflection of the trope of state as family: “No country is perfect just as no family is perfect. But we do not leave our family because we find it imperfect or our parents difficult” (“The Emigration Problem,” The Straits Times [Singapore], October 6, 1989).