Films as repertoires: art as social movement in Singapore

Abstract

Despite being a controlled state, Singapore civil society engages in moderate forms of dissent through subtle and controlled activism. Audrey Yue’s scholarship highlights this dynamic through her analysis of how the LGBT community in Singapore leveraged the state’s cultural liberalisation in the 1990s to foster activism within creative industries, ultimately leading to the repeal of Section 377A of the Penal Code. In this project, I extend Yue’s findings on activism in Singapore with reference to my analysis of migrant labour advocacy. I argue that dissent, in the form of creative activism, is still possible in Singapore if it is filtered through creative channels such as film. This, I argue, makes the visual arts an effective repertoire in the boundaried social movements in Singapore. To show these dynamic functions, I apply Yue’s notion of ‘illiberal pragmatism’ to examine the political opportunity structures that enable migrant labour advocacy to flourish through film in Singapore.