Paper Offerings: Servicing Chinese Ancestral Debt and Compulsory Heterosexuality

This paper theorizes a connection between the Singaporean Chinese religious practice of burning paper offerings and the experience and political project of queerness. This connection is the politics of truth as determined by the logic of debt. By reading the tradition of burning offerings as a mode of servicing debt to ancestors and society, this paper argues that paper offerings reveal a logic of debt that structures social relationships and, necessarily, compulsory heterosexuality. By paying attention to the workings of debt (and credit), guilt, and memory, the paper investigates how subjects incur debts that are repaid via heterosexual performances. A debt-centric analysis reveals new textures for queer praxis within and against the governing structures of filial piety. Queer interventions include a faithful refusal of guilt, active forgetting/creative remembering, and an exploration of methods of accounting under which queer life can flourish.