INTIMATE ARTICULATIONS: ZINES AND QUEER CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

This thesis seeks to elucidate the cultural politics of queer zine-making in Singapore, which has emerged as a nascent creative scene in recent years, reified by the launch of Singapore’s first queer zine event: Queer Zinefest 2018. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with 10 queer-identifying zine-makers and locating my analysis within Stuart Hall’s framework of articulation, I argue that zinesters adopt the zine medium as a method of performing queerness in response to the erasure of LGBTQ+ voices in a society that remains largely heteronormative. Through such queer expressions and performances, queer zinesters articulate multiple and heterogenous struggles of queer identity formation, which facilitates their participation in the broader political project of queer memory work. In doing so, queer zines offer new sets of understandings, practices and discourses through which the material spatiotemporalities of life itself become queered archives of affective resistance that rupture the logics of heteronormativity and illiberal pragmatics. In theorising the queer zines as an emergent discursive formation in Singaporean queer culture, I demonstrate how such formations function as counterhegemonic discourses that refuse an embrace of homonormative representational politics, instead opting for what I call tactics of “selective visibility”, where queer legibilities—and therefore possibilities—can remain defiantly murky, non-linear and open-ended.