Phillips, Robert. Virtual Activism: Sexuality, the Internet, and a Social Movement in Singapore, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020, 168 pages

Phillips begins by setting out his theoretical perspective, which brings together the two broad concepts of illiberal pragmatism and homonormativity. Illiberal pragmatism is a term coined by the cultural theorist Audrey Yue to describe the particular style of government in Singapore “where interventions and implementations are potentially always neo-liberal and non-liberal, rational and irrational” and thus always carry a certain ambivalence about them (Yue, 2007, 150–151). Consequently, LGBT activism in Singapore is based less “on the Western post-Stonewall emancipation discourse of rights, but through the illiberal pragmatics of survival” (ibid., 151). Phillips largely agrees with this and combines it productively with Lisa Duggan’s concept of neoliberal homonormativity (2003). It is defined as “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Duggan, 2003, 50). However, Phillips points out that the “unevenness of 1990s neoliberalism and the resulting lack of ideological homogeneity produced neither ideal citizens nor a monolithic neoliberal subject” (10). Thus, whilst from the outset, Phillips acknowledges that the discourses that emerge from his research are “neoliberal, homonormative and assimilationist LGBT discourses produced through transnational capitalism and global capital flows that have arrived in Singapore via the Internet” (20) he adds that that this “logic of strategic engagement [is] the only logic possible when operating under illiberal pragmatism” (21). The analysis begins by examining dominant representations of LGBT Singaporeans in mainstream media from 1993 to 2008. State-controlled media in particular is identified as a strategy that the state uses “to sway public opinion on contentious issues including homosexuality … through the promotion of heterosexuality and the demonization of homosexuality” where homosexuality was framed as disruptive to the larger project of nation-building that centred on values of social harmony and the importance of the heterosexual nuclear family (24). Phillips also highlights how, on occasion, inconsistencies in the portrayal of the LGBT community emerge. For example, despite the fact that “sex between consenting adult men is illegal, and the legal code proscribes the “promotion” of homosexuality, a state-run newspaper [The Straits Times] nonetheless named a book detailing the lives of LGBT individuals as the number one non-fiction book of 2006” (39). Phillips reconciles this by returning to the logics of illiberal pragmatism and suggesting that it was because the book in question “positively reinforce[d] the nation-building mandate of the Singaporean government” by gesturing towards the importance of social harmony and the community (40). Phillips then provides a detailed account of how the Internet provided LGBT Singaporeans with a way “to reimagine themselves as part of the national narrative” (42). He argues that where LGBT Singaporeans are concerned, their positive portrayal “has been left out or intentionally removed from the narrative assembled by the nation’s founders” (43). The Internet, according to Phillips, provided a way for them to (partially) mitigate that as well as organize more effectively as a community. It served as a conduit for information, creating a “virtual public sphere” that “empowered many LGBT Singaporeans to shift interactions from the private (or semi-private) areas of cyberspace and into the larger physical and public sphere” (49–50). One such example Phillips gives is the organization of In the Pink. This was a picnic at the Singapore Botanical Gardens for the LGBT community and allies to simply hang out together; but its organization was largely made possible only because it could be conceptualized and disseminated through online sites. Phillips does not simply conceive of the Internet as a distinct, discrete, space separate from the …