Global City Futures
Desire and Development in Singapore
Natalie Oswin
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Imprint: University of Georgia Press
Published: 04/2019
Pages: 158
Subject: Social Science
Print ISBN: 9780820355023
eBook ISBN: 9780820355009
DESCRIPTION
Global City Futures offers a queer analysis of urban and
national development in Singapore, the Southeast Asian city-state
commonly cast as a leading “global city.” Much discourse on
Singapore focuses on its extraordinary socioeconomic development
and on the fact that many city and national governors around the
world see it as a developmental model. But counternarratives
complicate this success story, pointing out rising income
inequalities, the lack of a social safety net, an unjust migrant
labor regime, significant restrictions on civil liberties, and
more.
With Global City Futures Natalie Oswin contributes to such
critical perspectives by centering recent debates over the place of
homosexuality in the city-state. She extends out from these debates
to consider the ways in which the race, class, and gender biases
that are already well critiqued in the literature on Singapore (and
on other cities around the world) are tied in key ways to efforts
to make the city-state into not just a heterosexual space that
excludes “queer” subjects but a heteronormative one that “queers”
many more than LGBT people. Oswin thus argues for the importance of
taking the politics of sexuality and intimacy much more seriously
within both Singapore studies and the wider field of urban
studies.
RELATED TITLES
