Becoming Ellen Toh: The politics of visibility in invitation to treat: The Eleanor Wong trilogy

Abstract

This chapter evaluates how Eleanor Wong’s trilogy of plays appropriates legal discourse towards examining the sanctions placed on human relationships. The legal right to marry gives those it covers access to visibility in the eyes of the State and all the benefi ts such legal status might offer, something denied to those (specifi cally homosexuals) whose partnership is not recognised by the State. To this end, Wong’s trilogy of plays exemplifi es lesbian identity in Singapore as a "contradictory, complicit and contingent negotiation of the local and the global" (Tang, 2012. Queer Singapore: Illiberal citizenship and mediated cultures, pp. 83-96, 84.). Supplementing the ocular ethic introduced by Casper and Moore, Ade argues that Wong’s plays attempt to "reveal, resituate and recuperate" (Casper and Moore, 2009, Missing bodies: The politics of visibility, p. 15) missing or invisible bodies, specifi cally gay and lesbian bodies, in a way that eschews the reifi ed notion of the person as a basis for justifying equal access to visibility, in favour of what Roberto Esposito identifi es as a practice of "the impersonal" that values "multiplicity and contamination over identity and discrimination" (Roberto Esposito, 2012. Third person:Politics of life and philosophy of the impersonal, p. 145). Wong’s plays expose the ways in which public discourses celebrate and exhibit certain bodies, while rendering others invisible (Casper and Moore, 2009. Missing bodies: The politics of visibility, p. 3), enacted through a self-refl exive playing or performing of one’s sexuality on stage.