Sunday, May 16, 2010
On May 15 (Sat), I attended Pink Dot at Hong Lim Park for the first time. For those of you who don't know what Pink Dot is, it's an event where people, regardless of their sexual orientation, wear pink clothes to the park and gather together to make a giant circle to express their commitment to the freedom of LGBT individuals to love who they want to.
I'm really glad that I went for the event. As Yisa said last night, you could feel your cynicism retreating into the background for those two hours you were at the park, and for that moment Singapore seemed like a warmer, kinder, more inclusive place, and you were genuinely happy.
And because I was reminded last night to make my position as a reader of any text and practice clear, I'll have to admit that I'm bisexual (but still leaning closer to the heterosexual side) and so I do have a vested interest in the success of events like Pink Dot. But apart from my position, it's a good thing that Singaporeans are becoming more accepting of non-heteronormative Others as fellow human beings who want to love and be loved just like everybody else.
And as a student who works on gender and sexuality issues, I felt that Pink Dot was an especially meaningful event for me, personally, as a 'supplement' to my research and politics (and I mean this not in the sense of the 'auxiliary' but in the Derridean sense of 'adding on and qualitatively changing what the new thing was added on to'). Scholarly research is important, but Pink Dot helped me to walk out of the ivory tower for an evening and SEE and FEEL and REMEMBER the presence of the ordinary women and men I'm writing about, and writing for, and writing with. And that really puts the heart back into my research and pushes me to make what I do more than just a hundred pages of type-written text to be handed in, graded and then left to moulder in a forgotten corner of the library.
kaoru said at 12:34 AM
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