Family is as Family Does: Contesting the Discourse of Family in Su-Chen Christine Lim’s The Man Who Wore His Wife’s Sarong: Stories of the Unsung, Unsaid and Uncelebrated in Singapore

Family, within a Singaporean context, is uncomplicatedly defined by a nucleus core of a heterosexual monogamous couple. This understanding, notable for how it operates a regulatory fiction as part of the national apparatus, persists in spite of extensive literature exposing this understanding of the nuclear, monogamous family as fallacious. To queer this understanding of family, this chapter considers literary renderings of familial forms that comply with this dominant image of the conjugal Family, but recast the meanings of family by turning this image on its head. Queering, understood thus, is not an exploration of homosexual families presented in Singaporean literature, since doing so would reconfirm and constrain a binary of homosexuality/heterosexuality (Oswin in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35(2): 256–268, 2010). Rather, this chapter draws on literary portrayals of complex interactions within the family and variations of family practices for its instinctive qualification as “familial” to challenge and question this invoked Family. These examples of family which do cohere to the state’s model, but are failed examples of doing family, expose the flaws of these limited interpretations, complicating the articulation of families and opening up a space from which to understand the frames of interpretation that thus far has been uncomplicatedly allowed to determine what family is.