Sida Chu

Specters of the City: Transcripting Modern Singapore

Honors Thesis in History and Theater

Awarded High Honors in both History and Theater Departments, along with the Butler Prize for best thesis in African, Asian, or Latin American History and the GLASS Prize for best research and writing in queer studies.

This thesis challenges the “repressive hypothesis” that dominates historical accounts of gender and sexuality in Singapore. Centering on Bugis Street, it reconstructs the vibrant, visible worlds of gender variance that flourished in the city’s urban spaces from the mid-19th century through the mid-1980s. Drawing on multilingual archives across Singapore, the UK, U.S., China, Hong Kong, and Japan, visual materials, fictional representations, and over 700 pages of oral history interviews with transgender elders, this thesis employs critical fabulation to recover gender variant social realities that have been systematically elided from official memory. Against the dominant scripts of cultural conservatism and social marginalization, it demonstrates that gender variance was not hidden but foundational to Singapore’s colonial and modern histories and central to the making of its national identity. Countering the script of intellectual subalternity, the thesis concludes by introducing “detrans” as a methodological intervention that refuses Western transgender epistemologies and the neoliberal academy’s extractive relationship with marginalized pasts. Instead, following Foucauldian archaeology, it calls for attention to historical specificity and treatment of material ways of being on their own terms. The thesis moves across social, cultural, and intellectual history while drawing upon transnational studies of law, medicine, armed conflicts, and economics. Above all, however, it is an attempt at writing a people’s history of Singapore.

Department of History and Department of Theater, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT.

Advisor: Jennifer Tucker