PLAYING SOLITAIRE: QUEERING THE SPATIO-TEMPORALITIES OF SINGLEHOOD AMONG ADULT SINGAPOREANS

Abstract

Set within the socio-cultural milieu of Singapore, this thesis seeks to examine how single individuals across genders, sexualities and age groups experience space-time. By deploying qualitative research methods including interviews and ‘deep hanging out’, I generate empirical data that queer/problematise single living on intimate and temporal fronts. I analyse my data vis-a-vis a customised assemblage of queer (Halberstam’s queer art of failure) and Deleuzean (e.g. lines of flight, rhizomes and assemblages) concepts. Accordingly, I demonstrate how the ‘failure’ to couple (appropriately) serves as lines of flight from intimate-temporal regimes (i.e. amato-capitalist repro-chrono-norms) sedimented by Singapore’s paternalistic state and conservative moral majority. In instances when/whereby a deterritorialising flight might not be plausible, I show that singles are still capable of (re)assembling/(re)mapping elements within their space-time and/or intimate lives as they deem fit. Overall, this thesis offers novel insights to the literature on the geographies of singlehood as well as queer studies.