Sexual Tensions in Modernizing Singapore: The Postcolonial and the Intimate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During a 2007 reform of Singapore's 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".