Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis thesis examines the bureaucratic mechanisms through which housing is accessed in Singapore and the consequent impact on romantic, reproductive temporalities, and labour. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the primary focus of this thesis is normative relationships and a system that incentivises particular life pathways. However, it also delves into the fragile precarity of normative life courses when set against fateful futures, and in so doing, explores the human ballast that sustains the operation of Singapore’s highly praised public housing policies. By scrutinising the forms of straining and striving required to secure a public flat in Singapore, this thesis is interested in how the ineffable is drawn into the realm of human kinship as a technique that produces relationship-making idioms of inevitability. This thesis asks: Why do states use lotteries or ballots to distribute public goods to its citizens? How do grant applicant, balloting and flat building cycles structure relational and romantic life in Singapore? How does one learn to be Singaporean through the Build To Order (BTO)? What are the devices people use to manage the uncertainties of the ballot or to stretch their lives across temporal sutures? In brief, in Singapore, 80% of the population lives in Public Housing Flats. The easiest and most affordable path to a public housing flat is through the Build To Order (BTO) system. However, BTO flats are only accessible via a state-run ballot and are subject to strict eligibility conditions. For example, to enter the ballot for a flat before the age of 35, one must first form a conventional family nucleus (i.e., through heterosexual marriage). Furthermore, to retain ownership of the flat, one must continue to maintain a heteronormative arrangement for a period of five to ten years. In Chapter 1 ('Capricious Ballet; Magical State'), I present an ethnographic account of a single balloting cycle. I argue that the adventitiousness of the ballot transfers magical qualities to the Singaporean state. Chapter 2 ('Kinning through Fate and Chance’) demonstrates how families might use BTO outcomes to interpret the fateful appropriateness of a coupling. Through this, I contend that fate and chance should have a more prominent place in kinship literature. Chapter 3 ('BTO Romance') is centrally concerned with how couples rearrange romantic projects to hedge against the financial risks of relationship breakdown and pre-empt the uncertainties of balloting. I suggest that the financial risk to the state is absorbed and re-transmitted into the life fibres of personal romantic projects. In Chapter 4 (‘Attritional Waiting’) I coin the term “attritional waiting” to describe the effects of the long wait for a BTO flat in Singapore; one which makes a populace patient, but which also stretches into un-ideal times with ricocheting effects. Through focusing on those excluded by the BTO – queer couples, single women, and the homeless – Chapter 5 (‘Exclusions’) considers how resistances to the BTO speak to a different register of temporality and a much more self-conscious sociality.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2024
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Wang, Xin Yuan
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Mody, Perveez
Subjects
dc:subject × 6Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.110530
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/371294