Hawking In The Creative City

Abstract

The development of creative industries in Asia in recent years has seen the rise of Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore as post-modern centres of innovation. From the new co-produced pan-Asian horror and action film genres, to brands like Samsung and Creative Technology, to the branding of cities through new nationalisms, creative industries are transforming cultural industries by merging the arts with technology and business. Characterised by cluster, convergence, content creation and value-adding, creative industries not only enhance a country's economic wealth and promote international trade through intellectual property and tourism, they also produce new cultures that are more regional and less national and global.

This paper critically examines how a regional queer Asian culture has emerged in Singapore as a result of its creative industry developments. Unlike the sex tourism of gay Bangkok or the social movement of queer Taiwan, queer Singapore is created by cultural and media policies, and gay and lesbian entrepreneurship. In a country that prosecutes homosexuality, queer commerce has flourished. The city-state is now recognised in the mainstream and the subculture as the new regional Mardi Gras centre of Asia. Queer Singapore shows how sexual recognition is constituted, not through the post-Stonewall politics of sexual rights, but through what I will argue as the Foucauldian ethics of identity.

This paper will frame this approach against current studies in creative industries and map the changing field of cultural policy studies. Rather than accounting for the new sexual culture through the appeal to social diversity by benchmarking it as a gay index essential to the soft infrastructure of a creative city, this paper attempts to formulate a critical creative industry framework to understand how an expedient culture has been transformed into a pragmatic resource for determining action. Singapore's pragmatic approach to culture offers such a model to rethink how sexuality can function as a technology of cultural policy.