Programme and Abstracts 4 Oct 2011 - WKWSCI Home - Nanyang ...

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Conference on Film and Cinema in Singapore (6‐7 October 2011) Jointly organised by Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS: PLEASURE FACTORY (2007) ORADOL KAEWPRASERT Faculty of Communication Arts, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, Thailand oradol@gmail.com This paper aims to analyse a film Pleasure Factory (2007). The film is a co‐production of Singapore and Hong Kong‐Netherlands companies. Pleasure Factory depicts subjects that traditionally hidden in Asian Society, such as prostitutions and female's sexual pleasure. Beside the internationally co‐production, the film employs actors from different countries for instance the Taiwanese actress, Yang Kuei‐mei and the Laotian‐Australian actor, Bangkok based, Ananda Everingham. New face actors that were casted from Geylang, Singapore's red light district and around Singapore. The film is analyzed as how Transnational Cinemas aspects allow the subject that Nana A. T. Rebhan of Germany's art and culture Channel Arte calls "a convincing portrait of a never‐before‐seen red‐light district" to be made and screened in the authoritarian Singapore. The film was also selected for the Uncertain Regard competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and other international film festival around the worlds and acclaimed by the number of European critics. The elements of the film that pleased these international critics are also discussed. Unavoidably, the representation of sexuality by the film will also be explored. Oradol Kaewprasert had been working at Department of Broadcasting, Faculty of Communication Arts, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC) before pursuing her PhD from Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, UK sponsored by UTCC. Before joining UTCC she had worked for Bangkok Broadcasting & TV and Safe the Children, Thailand. She has her BA (Mass Communication) from Kasetsart University, Thailand and MA (Film and TV studies), Griffith University, Australia. Her papers had been presented in Canada, Singapore, The UK, and Thailand. Her paper, “Tropical Malady, Liminal Film Liminal Sexuality” is published in New Asian Imaginations by Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. After earning her PhD, she is now back to her department at UTCC. She is also a director of ASEAN Mass Communication Studies and Research Center which is part of the faculty.
Conference on Film and Cinema in Singapore (6‐7 October 2011) Jointly organised by Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore FOUCAULT V. SINGAPORE: BIOPOLITICS AND GEOPOLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY QUEER FILMS JUN ZUBILLAGA‐POW School of Arts and Humanities, King’s College London, UK jun.zubillaga‐pow@kcl.ac.uk Less noticeable than other productions from within the local film industry, the sub‐genre of a Singaporean Queer Cinema has yet to receive sufficient critical appraisal in contemporary scholarship. If the inclusion of gay and lesbian themes and characters has appeared obvious to film viewers, then an inherent dimension of queer geopolitics, among other discourses, would have remained opaque to the uncritical spectacle. Hereafter, it is Judith Butler who has earlier overthrown the notion of sexuality and its corporeal performativity as being aligned with social synchrony, yet contemporary academics and politicians continue to stigmatise homosexuality with such essentialist inferences. Here, I argue against the stereotypical processes of identifying homosexuals as interacting only with bodies of the same type and deriving their sexual desires solely from objects, corporeal or otherwise. Using theoretical, political and cinematic resources, I aim to debunk two inherently homophobic ideas that (i) the body and its behaviour, in both the social and sexual aspects, occupy distinctive categories each occupying differentiable discursive spaces, and that (ii) spaces are being resistant to critical re‐territorialisation, or opposed to any reclamation of heteronormative sites, either real or imaginary. Correspondingly, the trajectory of this paper exposes the underlying conventions of pragmatism upheld by a conservative Singaporean homosexual community as antagonistic to the generic Queer theorising in contemporary academic writings. These arguments will first be substantiated by empirical evidences obtained from the October 2007 parliamentary debates, which dealt with the repealing or retention of Section 377A of the Singapore Penal Code. The inevitable stalemate of the public/private dichotomy is transcended by the Foucauldian concept of the heterotopia, which will be used categorically as a geopolitical method of analysing six Singaporean queer films as directed by Eric Khoo, Boo Junfeng, Loo Zihan, Royston Tan and Lincoln Chia and released between 2005 and 2010. Jun Zubillaga‐Pow is a PhD candidate in Music Research on a National Arts Council Overseas bursary. He graduated with a Bachelor of Music (Hons) at the University of Birmingham, and obtained his Masters (with Distinction) in Critical Methodologies, working on Modern French Theory and musical reception. He is currently the co‐editor of two Singapore‐related books on Music History and Queer C riticism and has completed a monograph on the history of art music in post‐Independence Singapore.
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