SILENCE OF THE LIVEABLE CITY: THE REPRESSION OF THE SEX TRADE IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

In Singapore’s claim to be a model liveable city and in the perpetuation of the ideology of its liveability, certain aspects of 'otherness' deemed as anomalous to this ideology have come to be made absent and excluded by the liveable city of Singapore, so as to maintain a pristine image of liveability. These aspects of 'otherness' are urban realities happening in the liveable city of Singapore but they are excluded and denied a place in the liveable city, as their existence threatens to mar the pristine image of liveability that Singapore wishes to portray of itself. The exclusion of these aspects of 'otherness' is argued to be a repression, a silence of these aspects by the liveable city. Inherent in the rhetoric of the liveable city, a paradox suffices. Although the blatant spatialization of these aspects of 'otherness' are expunged by the liveable city, the same aspects of 'otherness' that are disguised by the image of liveability and its activities, are allowed to proliferate and be consumed as a commodity in the liveable city. An example of this is the spatialization of vice. Associative with gambling and debt, vice is commodified as an experience of entertainment that is marketed by the agencies of entertainment in Singapore, but the same aspect of vice would be persecuted elsewhere. This phenomenon is also observed in the aspect of 'otherness' that is the sex trade, which is the primary concern of this discourse. Through the analysis of the treatment of the liveable city of Singapore towards two manifestations of the sex trade, one can come to understand the silence of the sex trade, and its repression by the liveable city.