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

Abstract

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.