Kumar singapore what makes a man a man

Everything will be revealed tongue-in-cheek by cheeky Kumar in a sari, always making you laugh and never needing to be saying sorry. How like that?!!! Well, came and see for yourself how one Queen stands up for 1. How else but with bellies-full of laughter. For only 5 sidesplitting shows at the Esplanade Theatre, come soak up all things indian. From Aryuvedic Cures to Bollywood Scores. Everything will be revealed tongue-in-cheek by cheeky Kumar in a sari, always making you laugh and never nedding to be saying sorry.

Well, come and see for yourself how one Queen stands up for 1. Sure confirm cannot miss. The outrageously funny Kumar sold out his 5-show run at the Esplanade last year before the shows even started and when he finally hit the stage, everyone was squealing with laughter!

Uncontrollable madness! Nothing is sacred as he shares the hilarious yet moving stories of his growing up years with his Dad, how he was discovered in a dress after Boom Boom Room and his many escapades during Basic Military Training.

Sell more tickets faster with Eventfinda. Find out more. Find out more about Eventfinda Ticketing. Hot shot, macho, strong, burly, fierce, garang, solid, grunting, ball-scratching, hunter-gathering provider - of laughs! No one man in Singapore has had such a wide-reaching impact on our society.

He's blazed trails dressed as a female while never ever denying he is truly male. What makes a man a man? Only Kumar can answer that with wicked humour and side-splitting laughs. Did you go to this event? Tell the community what you thought about it by posting your comments here! Advertise with Eventfinda. Email optional Please enter valid email.

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Thank you for downloading. We hope you enjoy this feature! Riding on the funny impact of bapok, however, Kumar exploits the address form to the advantage of his drag performance.

These onomastic resolutions, however, seem problematic for naming the gender of the actor in specific cases. The unique gender complexity at stake is richer than the stereotypical reference of the suggested terms.

The English terms remain an onomastic dysfunction retaining little discursive currency for the targeted social groups. To the local moral vigilantes speaking English, on the other hand, the queerness signified in the suggested terms would be downright offensive Leong, Thus, the English terms remain alienating for local vernacular and English speakers when it comes to touting their social intentions. Using autophotography as a supplementary tool to a series of interviews, Aurora, a 23 year-old male who lives with his parents, has provided visuals of his separate male and transgender identity oscillating between the family spaces Lim, In the living room, Aurora routinely plays conventional male roles while socializing with his parents and relatives, yet in the privacy of his own bedroom, he reverts to his female identity using cosmetics and colorful costumes.

That one expresses and represses the other identity selectively in the different areas of the house illustrates that atypical gender expression is a political contention even in the domestic space. In spite of his turbulent childhood and subsequent rise to celebrity status, it is remarkable that Kumar remains down-to-earth.

In his own words, being a celebrity is also about work…Pure, hard work is what actually got me to where I am today ibid. In , Kumar had a stint as a part-time stand-up comedian and the job came with an opportunity to open for a drag cabaret show at the Boom Boom Room.

In a tongue-in cheek remark, Kumar equates the transition of his career to evolution as he changes from ape to Homo sapiens to homosexual Lim, It is for me very important to dress up, but it is also important to dress down, and that is what many entertainers fail to do.

Like drag queens, when [they] dress up, they want to stay dressed up. So they want to stay on all the time, and that leads to their downfall because it is important to know how the public or your audience wants to look at you. The medical pronouncement creates a view of transgenderism as pathological, a view which resonates well with the discrimination against Chinese, Indian and Malay transgender people recounted inter alia in Ng , Lim , Lim , Noriah Mohamed and Norma Baharom , Tan , Teh , Zainon Shamsudin and Kamila Ghazali In contrast to the scorn for transgender as a social malaise, ordinary males and females enjoy a limitless capacity to self-express.

In one YouTube video-clip, for instance, a female Asian American vibrates her head via heavy breathing while applying mascara to her eyelashes Chen, Despite her behavior, she received positive feedback online with little suspicion of insanity. Consequently, the gender matrix based on the corporeal binaries of masculinity and femininity informs the common sense of the masses.

Embodying a hybridity of male and female persona, a transgender goes against the restrictions of the binary gender matrix. Indeed, confined within the restrictive framework of the binary gender matrix, a perplex transgender would find little motivation to align with the common gender logic of the masses.

His long, black and silky hair is his trademark on stage. An image of Kumar in drag, complete with sparkling diadem, striking earrings and diamond necklace, is available on SAUCEink.

The binary gender logic is further observable in the four types of gender behavior - masculine men, masculine women, feminine women, and feminine men Carver, Grosz, Such paradoxical gender-representation is similar to that of the American drag comedian, Bianca del Rio, the winner of the RuPaul Drag Race cf. Rivers, , and Nong Toom, the beautiful boxer Sew, In this drag queen with a hoarse voice, who does not quite conform to axiomatic gender binaries, a new gender subcategory, transcending the four subcategories of common gender logic, emerges.

Their drag acts appropriate a special type of gender femaling Ekins, , which sets them apart from contemporaries such as Jack Neo and Dennis Chew. Current efforts to theorize transgenderism may benefit from the family resemblance model to re conceptualize it along a male-female gender polarity cf.

Goertz, ; Gerring, By illustrating that the hoarse voice feature may become a significant criterion in the drag design, this discussion expands the breath of conceptualization on gender in general and transgenderism in particular. In turn, the gender subcategorizations may expand to include a classificatory system for transgenderism, which manifests a hybridity of identity by preserving the male voice within the female persona as a new addition to the gender matrix.

An emic gender approach to drag performance would incorporate the original voice of the male performer. Preserving the male voice as an identifiable baseline within this matrix positions the emic drag actor on par with the Malay male transsexuals in a study by Teh The interviewees of the latter study reveal that there is a possibility for queer Malay male undergraduates return to heterosexual normativity and assimilate back into mainstream society when they are in their forties, or fifties.

Similarly, Kumar makes it clear in his autobiography that his drag identity is task-based, not least because he dresses down after the performance. Dressing down is important for many drag actors, such as Jack Neo and Glen Goei to pursue their directing careers, and Denis Chew to resume his job as a disc jockey for a radio station. The drag persona may be task-based because the actor dresses down to blend in with looming heterosexual normalcy.

Kumar dresses down as a host for a television program that provides an overview of specific jobs such as a pest controller, high-rise window cleaner, firefighter and crane operator. At the micro level, the plight of Leona Lo, harassed with the ridicule term in public, highlights the fact that males who go against dominant heterosexual society face sociolinguistic coercion.

At the macro level, pro-family policies are constant reminders to any transgender of the social discriminations they suffer. For instance, the pro-family public housing scheme in Singapore offers subsidies that offset the price of the properties for married heterosexual couples. Another scheme, which focuses on procreation as the priority in Singapore is the graduate mother scheme that offers tax incentives, reduced hospital charges and school registration priority for the children of graduate mothers Leong, Finally the Penal Code section A, which provides a legal means to punish acts of gross indecency between males in public or private with up to 2 years imprisonment, constitutes a concrete deterrent to any male attempting to go against the heterosexual norm Hor, Dennis Chew, in his portrayal of Auntie Lucy, speaks in a pitchy feminine voice and thereby constitutes an etic approach to drag that he comfortably displays on the television and silver screen.

Feminine tonalities generate attractive speech tones, which may be an intention to uphold an unspoken desire cf. In the same vein of etic drag, Los Angeles drag celebrities, RuPaul, Kimchi, and Naomi Small also communicate with a soft-feminized tone in their voices Rodriguez, The hybridity constituted by the male voice with a feminized appearance actually works to the advantage of drag performers because it generates a comical gender effect — bizarreness Sew, ; a.

The selected video clip 8 consists of frames comprising prototypical photo shots in accordance with the atomization approach for yielding a series of base units cf. Kong, , Bateman, An advantage of fragmenting the video clip into base units is to accommodate multiple analytical viewpoints Sew, a.

The detailed analysis undertaken in the atomization approach does not warrant a lengthy video as the research operandi. Segmenting the video clip, Happily Ever Laughter yields fourteen visual frames; each one provides a visual grid for scrutinizing the semiotic hybrid. The transformations from one visual grid to another form the dynamic component in the video-viewing experience, because the transitioning phases between grids introduce repetitive visual progressions viewers recognize cf.

Baldry, Experienced as unique by the local audience, the delivery of the message happened through comedy that utilizes a dynamic visual-audio experience, combining various semiotic modes including language, dress, bodily gestures and loud voices. Similar mythic consciousness is observable in the Malays of Kelantan who share a collective memory of semi-mythical icons - Cik Siti Wan Kembang and Puteri Saadong.

That the audience watches Kumar until the end is a sign of collaborative dialectics between like-minded social actors cf. Visibly, Kumar challenges the binary gender logic by transgressing the existing gender norms with cross-dressing Butler, Fans of Kumar who are aware of his sociopolitical subjectivity are prepared for the dialectics generated in his drag comedy. In this particular performance, Kumar wears a sleeveless white dress.

The strapless dress has a knee-length skirt designed with a playful cascading form. The revealing design gives a full view of his white-stocking clad legs and the shiny pink shoes accentuate his lanky legs. A queer stance is anything at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant Milani, ; see also Halperin, Gaining weight is a negative behavior for women in popular culture, equivalent to laziness, a lack of discipline and unwillingness to conform Holmberg, A skinny body wins half the battle for Kumar, allowing him to focus on perfecting his verbal delivery.

Grbich because the audience constantly reinterprets the meaning of his onstage gestures and bodily movements. The co-speech gestures work well to successively highlight the storyline, thus facilitating the delivery of the drag comedy.

From holding the microphone with his left hand to raising his right hand as signal for the start of a gag about driving a posh car and moving his hand in circles to signify a rotating wheel chair, Kumar continues to mesmerize the audience with physical expressions and words.

Kumar exposes his right palm to the audience as a sign of honesty while saying that senior citizens are the beneficiaries of the project. Kumar mimics cluelessness by repeating the same interrogation as his right palm moves upwards, and he immediately responds with a second hyperbolic claim that an old man might break into a house to steal porridge as a second reason for denying the construction of a nursing home.

In the final frame, Kumar imitates the action of breaking the window with his right fist. In many ways as indicated in Table 3 Kumar is tapping into the Multiple Intelligences MI of the audience, namely the linguistic, visual, spatial and rhythmic intelligences in order to get his argumentative messages across as visual-affective rhetoric Gardner, Table 3.

The up-down bodily movements increase the vividness of haggardly operating the wheel chair. The visual-affective rhetoric reinforces the belief that age is a weak bodily existence. The gestures establish two parties, namely the authority in power and a community. The actions create a visual-affective-rhetoric awareness of the subject and object identified in the act.

The length of the building is in iconic relation to the hand movement. Symbolically, this hand movement indexes the populous reference. With fingers in a grip lock, Kumar pokes his right thumb downwards before flinging his palm to the far right, creating a jerky rejection gesture as the visual-affective rhetoric expresses the rude treatment the elderly outcast are implied to have suffered.

What are the residents of Toh Yi Drive afraid of? Kumar shows a series of lifting actions with his right hand as visual-affective rhetoric in synchronizing the flow of thought according to his enunciations. Too many old people, what, increase in crime rate ah? The old man come to your house, break your window, steal your porridge… eh? Firstly, Kumar raises a question, is this how we treat our senior citizens?

The question reflects a debate that Singapore has been having for many years. Paradoxically, this self-repetition generates a pragmatics of persuasive speech that enthralls the flow of thought Tannen, The open question raised may possibly invoke self-reflection since a visual-affective rhetoric is never a fixed or complete strategy, but operates as an open contestation and negotiation cf.

Martin, Conceptually, there may be a disparate classification of sentence-meaning as the outcome of speaker meaning. Words come to mean what they do in virtue of the fact that we mean various things by them. We confer meaning on them by meaning something by them.