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Singapore's 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-state's developmental efforts are bureaucratic, hierarchical, narrowly economistic, and, most importantly, socially polarizing. This paper demonstrates that Singapore's 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 government's 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-state's 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 government's illiberal politics of pragmatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses, articles published within the issue in context with Singapore as a global city which includes an article by Tim Cresswell, one by Kevin Hannam and one by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift.

The two meanings of ‘domestic’, as both residential dwelling and national territory, collide unusually forcefully in Singapore since its Housing Development Board (HDB) provides most housing in this city-state. While many scholars have interrogated the boundaries between homely/unhomely and foreign/domestic in Singapore by examining gender, ethnic/racial and class politics of HDB, in this paper I argue for the analytical usefulness of considering Singapore housing and citizenship as heteronormative; and, more broadly, for the value of a queer theoretical approach in advancing critical geographies of home. Combining archival research with contemporary observation, I examine discourses of respectable domesticity and proper family across Singapore’s colonial and postcolonial periods in order to understand not just the exclusion of gays and lesbians, but also the ‘queering’ of a range of figures such as the single mother, the migrant worker, the unfilial child, and many others. Since the production of this range of non-heteronormative others is produced by a much more complex set of cultural logics than a focus on the deployment of a sexual binary can capture, the queer theoretical approach I argue for understands heteronormativity not as a universal policing of a heterosexual–homosexual binary, but as the geographically and historically specific coincidence of race, class, gender, nationality and sexual norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 hetero- normativity 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 heteronorma- tivity 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses sexual citizenship in Singapore, particularly societal discrimination of homosexuals. Topics discussed include work of scholars on homosexuality politics in Singapore, critical queer approach to address exclusionary politics of homosexuality and workings of heteronormativity in Singapore, and emergence of the family norm in Singapore, focusing on the impact of the drive for quality population to promote national development.