Baytan and Ng

- Queering- creation of particular spaces to create new things  one way to

look at queering is the idea of creating various spaces
o Spaces within the city
o Representations of spaces within the city
o Cyberspace/new ways of understanding sexuality
- Creation of spaces in the imaginative literary and historical plane in itself is a
subtly but powerfully contested terrain
o Refers to the spaces that have been created within the collective
memory or history of people
 Collective memory – conventionally known because of
particular texts that have survived
 When you include something, you also exclude others
 Legitimization of identity and positions
 Representation
- The case of Baytan and Ng
o Creation of spaces within the imaginative body of mainstream
literature
o Baytan: Filipino-Chinese identity (where the Bekky at?)
o Ng: The space of Singaporean literature and history
- Ronald Baytan
o Task of the writer: to reinsert himself or herself
o Male love narratives as a way of reconnecting with mythical China and
the community of queer Chinese
o Male love narratives as marginalized from Filipino-Chinese
community
o Baytan’s composition subject-position as an enabler for such
identities to emerge
o Some tropes and themes:
 Temporal nature of desire and human relationships
 Emphasis on the body
 The corporeality of transience
 Why would these be Baytan’s concerns as a contemporary
(urban) Filipino-Chinese poet?
 Because of duty and desire
- Ng Yi-Sheng
o SQ21: Singapore Queers 21st Century or SQ (Code of Singapore
airlines), SQ21 is the flight code of Singapore airlines to new york
 Anthology of coming out stories in Sinapore
o A certain kind of playfulness
o Compression as a key feature in Ng’s poetry
 Singapore’s modernity as essentially an experience of
compression
o Ng utilizes precisely this cosmopolitanism for this kind of play
o The same thing that oppresses also empowers  Foucault
- Concluding points
o The imaginative plane is a highly contested terrain
o Representation matters
o Cosmopolitanism is one such enabler