Who’s Afraid of Catherine Lim? The State in Patriarchal Singapore KENNETH PAUL TAN* National University of Singapore Catherine Lim, born in 1942, is an award-winning Singaporean novelist, short-story writer and poet, with 18 books to her name, published in France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and the US. Her literary works are often witty and at times supernatural portrayals of women, culture and love in traditional Chinese society. But this petite lady, often dressed in elegant cheongsams, is also famous – many would say infamous – as a political commentator and strong advocate of political liberalisation in patriarchal and paternalistic Singapore. In 1994, Lim wrote two political commentary pieces for the state-directed local broadsheet The Straits Times. Her intervention in the public sphere produced a new public vocabulary for thinking about Singapore’s political condition, and continues to inform how prospects for political liberalisation are described today. The two pieces were widely discussed among Singaporeans in 1994, and the second in particular drew a strong reaction from the state that foreign journalist Kieran Cooke (24 February 1995) described as more appropriate to ‘‘a government teetering on the edge of collapse than . . . one of the world’s most enduring political machines’’. The state’s grossly disproportionate reaction was, this article will argue, vividly illustrative of how Lim’s actions had touched a nerve in state-society relations in Singapore, revealing how such relations were, and continue to be, structured in terms of gender and the unconscious. This article will begin by discussing how images of the Singapore woman are constructed and legitimised in the public sphere. It will then demonstrate how these gender images have corresponded to the Singapore state’s ‘‘masculine’’ image and society’s ‘‘emasculated’’, ‘‘infantilised’’, and ‘‘feminised’’ images. Through a close reading of the spectacular interactions in 1994 between Catherine Lim and the state, this article will identify a strategy for political engagement that can be radically transformative without provoking the full violence of the state. Such a *Correspondence Address: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Oei Tiong Ham Building, Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259772. Email: spptank@nus.edu.sg Asian Studies Review March 2009, Vol. 33, pp. 43–62 ISSN 1035-7823 print/ISSN 1467-8403 online/09/010043-20 Ó 2009 Asian Studies Association of Australia DOI: 10.1080/10357820802706290 Downloaded By: [2007-2008-2009 National University Of Singapore] At: 03:45 14 March 2009