Natalie Oswin

Introduction: Mobile City Singapore

Taylor and Francis RMOB_A_467022.sgm 10.1080/17 50101003665002 Mobilities 745-0101 (pri t)/1745-011X (online) Orig nal rticle 2 10 & Francis 50 0 00May 2 D Nat lieOswin n tal e.oswin@mcgill.ca Long before John Friedmann (1986), Saskia Sassen (1991) and others began to articulate scholarly understandings of the ‘global city’, the ambitious postcolonial government of the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore was self-consciously trying to create one. Upon Singapore’s expulsion from newly independent Malaysia after only two years in 1965, the People’s Action Party (PAP) pragmatically dealt with a small population and the absence of a domestic hinterland by seeking out economic partners much further afield. The first official public description of Singapore as a global city occurred in an address explicitly titled ‘Singapore: Global City’ that S. Rajaratnam made to the Singapore Press Club in 1972 in his capacity as Foreign Minister. Considering appraisals of Singapore’s prospects as a nation-state at the time of its separation from Malaysia, he reflected:

The queer time of creative urbanism: family, futurity, and global city Singapore

Singapores rise as a ‘global city’ has attracted much scholarly attention, especially as its government has recently turned to ‘creative city’ strategies. In line with critiques made of other global and creative cities around the world, important critiques have been leveled that the city-states developmental efforts are bureaucratic, hierarchical, narrowly economistic, and, most importantly, socially polarizing. This paper demonstrates that Singapores global/creative city project is also heteronormative and, further, that this heteronormative logic is tied in fundamental ways to broad forms of social polarization. The drive to attract ‘foreign talent’ to the city-state as a key prong in attaining future economic growth has resulted in significant changes in sexual citizenship over the last decade. Efforts to shake off an authoritarian image and foster a creative economy have led to the liberalization of the governments approach to public expressions of homosexuality. Yet discriminatory legislation and policy that excludes gays and lesbians from full citizenship has been maintained. Further, Singapore maintains a bifurcated migration regime that invites ‘foreign talent’ and their families to become part of the national family through naturalization, while ‘foreign workers’ have no route to future citizenship and are prohibited from bringing dependents with them, as well as from marrying and/or having children locally. Through a coercive politics of constrained im/mobility, this alien surplus labour force is set on an alternative developmental path that precludes intimacy, love, and familial connection. Building on recent work on the notion of ‘queer time’, this paper calls attention to the ways in which the city-states developmental aims are underpinned by an exclusionary notion of reproductive futurity, and argues that a queer theoretical approach adds much to critical efforts to undermine the Singapore governments illiberal politics of pragmatism.

Sexual Tensions in Modernizing Singapore: The Postcolonial and the Intimate

During a 2007 reform of Singapores Penal Code, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong rejected calls by gay and lesbian activists for the removal of a colonial-era statute that prohibits ‘gross indecency’ between two men. This paper critically responds to the perpetuation of this illiberal sexual politics by exploring heteronormativity in the city-state as a colonial trace. It takes a postcolonial queer approach that combines insights from work on the globalization of sexuality, histories of colonialism, and postcolonial development geographies to interrogate the sedimentation of heteronormativity in Singapore over its late-colonial and early-postcolonial periods. Emphasis is placed on the role of colonized elites in transforming an entrepot of single male migrant workers into a nation of nuclear families. By attending to the contingent materialities of colonial governance through an examination of the intimate politics advanced by local colonial actors, the legacy of heteronormativity in Singapore is revealed to be about much more than heterosexuality and homosexuality. As such, it is argued that an approach that goes beyond sexuality per se to disrupt the progress narrative on which heteronormativity in Singapore relies might therefore be a useful way to challenge the narrow imagination of intimate possibilities.

Queer time in global city Singapore: Neoliberal futures and the ‘freedom to love’

In the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, efforts to shake off an authoritarian image and foster a creative economy have led to significant changes in sexual citizenship since the early 2000s. Most remarked upon has been the government’s new liberalized approach to public expressions of homosexuality while it simultaneously upholds legislation and policies that discriminate against gays and lesbians. Critical scholarly and activist responses to this state of affairs abound, with many pressing for the ‘freedom to love’ for sexual minorities. In this article, I extend this emergent queer critique by arguing for the need to move laterally away from a single-issue, sexual identity-based project in order to launch other lines of critique and highlight additional avenues for political struggle. I situate this ostensible contest between heterosexuality and homosexuality as just one facet of a much larger story about the ways in which heteronormativity works through teleological narratives of progress and social reproduction in Singapore. Specifically, I highlight the family’s function as a regulative governing fiction in the city-state, setting out the ways in which the ‘proper family’ has been carefully cultivated throughout Singapore’s colonial and postcolonial history to produce both a stable population of ‘quality’ citizens as well as multiple ‘queered’ others who fall outside the very particular heterosexual family norm upon which Singapore’s developmental aims have come to rest.

Book review forum

Ladelle McWhorter Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 440 pp.,

Society and Space, here and now

27.95 paperback,

Review – Natalie Oswin

75.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-253-22063-9). Ladelle McWhorter begins Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-Ameri...

Book review: Tucker, A. Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 256 pp. £55/63.30 cloth, £24.99/28.80 paper. ISBN 978 1 4051 8303 1 cloth, 978 1 4051 8302 4 paper

The first issue of Society and Space was published in 1983, “at a time,” founding editor Michael Dear wrote in an introductory editorial, “of increasing social and intellectual ferment.” On the former, he elaborated that, “[t]he pervasive atmosphere of crisis and cutbacks encourages a philosophical and economic conservatism,” and on the latter, that, “we are witnessing the beginning of a search for a new social theory which may act as a powerful force for advancement and integration in the social sciences” (Dear, 1983: 1). The journal’s aim at its launch was to bring social theory into human geography, and to bring spatial perspectives into the social sciences and humanities. It promised to publish work that would push boundaries, cross disciplinary divides, blend theory with empirics, and offer critical, political insights. At the same time, it was “categorically not a journal devoted to a specific viewpoint” (Dear, 1983: 1). Today, efforts at interdisciplinary, critical, political, and empirically grounded social theorizing persist, as does a climate of crisis, cutbacks, conservatism, and social and intellectual ferment. Society and Space persists too, and its present mandate resonates with its initial one. But similarity is not sameness. I do not know what Dear was specifically referring to when he wrote of ‘social ferment’ in 1983. Some of the things that cross my mind on reading this phrase are struggles over racism and xenophobia, labor conditions and fair and equal wages, immigration regulations and restrictions, reproductive rights, international trade balances and terms, Indigenous sovereignties, sexual and gender identity politics, housing availability and affordability, private versus public provisioning of goods and services, ‘free speech’ and ‘hate speech’, and discriminatory policing and incarceration practices. All these issues were topics of public and media scrutiny in multiple contexts around the globe then, as they are today. But the three and a half more decades of capitalist exploitation, militarism, patriarchy, imperialism, environmental degradation, settler colonialism, racism, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism that we now have under our belts have profoundly changed our world. Conservatism and inequality are, in short, more intensive and extensive in the present day.

Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space

is also very easy to illustrate the discursive connection between nudity, sex and immorality using popular culture. For example, in New Zealand, there is a popular ice cream television advertisement which features a man in tight Speedo bathing togs (Tip Top – Simplifying Summer – Togs or Undies? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v1⁄4h-Lx2i hpGbc) and the narrator poses the question, ‘How far away from the beach do togs become undies?’ It’s worth watching this rather banal, and silly, television advertisement because the text Cities and Sexualities lends itself to further, place-specific, popular culture illustrations, which will, I’m sure, extend students’ geographical imaginations. Finally, I went looking for content on non-western sexualities and postcolonial cities that would help develop my thinking about indigenous and Māori sexualities. The scholarship may be difficult to find, but newspapers and popular press are excellent sources which highlight these postcolonial geographies. Recently, New Zealand media ran hot when Carmen Rupe – a prominent Aotearoa queer community icon – died on 15December 2011 in Sydney at the age of 75. Known as the New Zealand’s most loved tranny, and also as a transgender goddess, she was famous for being a show girl in Kings Cross, Sydney, and hence Australia’s first ever Māori drag performer. She was a sex worker, an entrepreneur and once ran for Mayoral office. In 2007, Carmen published a short chapter in the book Sexuality and the Stories of Indigenous People, edited by Jessica Hutchings and Clive Aspin [and see publications about, and by, Georgina Beyer (Beyer and Casey 1999) – a Māori transsexual, who held public offices of Mayor then Member of NZ Parliament]. In Aotearoa, I am acutely aware of ethnicity and sexuality as mutually defining subjectivities. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Cities and Sexualities. It has prompted me, like Hubbard, to spiral off inmany directions. It is an important text for students and researchers.

The modern model family at home in Singapore: a queer geography

properties. The examples as presented did not always shed much light on other kinds of geographies – the geographies of social movements, of exclusion, of workers’ struggles, of the American state, of nationalism, and so forth. For geographers interested in ‘dissident geographies’ (see Blunt and Wills, 2000), the study of public space offers considerable scope for imaginative forms of critical inquiry. Public spaces are places where protest is most visible and sometimes takes on wider (national and international) meaning and significance. Recently we have been reminded of the importance of this in the marking of the 20th anniversary of the student and worker protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. If such wider dimensions of protest are not given sufficient attention in this book, Staeheli and Mitchell nonetheless encourage us to think about public space in a more prosaic yet at the same time rigorous manner. One can walk around parks, visit public squares, contemplate public monuments, hang out on street corners and in malls, and watch public worlds unfold. The drama and accessibility of the public realm make the theme of public space an exciting one for geographers and, one might add, an ideal topic for student fieldwork. The latter sections of the book contain a useful discussion of methods, including a list of interview questions, and a postscript entitled ‘interventions’. There the authors discuss whether and in what form to make their research more ‘relevant’ to different constituencies and communities. There are lots of helpful photographic illustrations, a few maps, and a list of key US court cases. Apart from some dense writing in places, as well as some issues with the publisher’s inconsistent use of font size, the book should be accessible to undergraduate and graduate students alike. It does not serve as a standalone text; not even for a course on, for example, ‘public space’ or ‘public protest and the city’. Instead, instructors will want to use it as required or supplementary reading for specialist lectures on these and related topics. Students outside the USA will find some of the ideas a little obscure and the examples unfamiliar. Nevertheless, this book will prove to be a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in linking fieldwork on diverse public spaces to wider concepts of power, property relations, and public protest.