Cross-Dress for Success: Performing Ivan Heng and Chowee Leow’s "An Occasional Orchid" and Stella Kon’s "Emily of Emerald Hill" on the Singapore Stage

• Kenneth Chan ^[1]
  1. [1] National University of Singapore

     National University of Singapore

     Singapur

     
• Localización: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, ISSN 0732-7730, ISSN-e 1936-1645, Vol. 23, Nº. 1, 2004 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Where in the World Is Transnational Feminism?), págs. 29-43
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay focuses on the Singapore performances of Ivan Heng and Chowee Leow’s An Occasional Orchid and Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill to query, first, the role of cross-dressing in the staging of the plays as a kind of feminist intervention and, second, the context of these performances as a conservative state’s engagement with globalization and artistic liberalization. The author’s interview with Heng, foregrounding the Britain-Singapore linkage, substantiates the essay’s analysis of Heng’s performances and illuminates in a different register the contradictions between liberatory and commodifying impulses and processes that trouble Heng’s praxis as cross-dressing performer.