Xinyu Guan

XINYU GUAN, then a graduate student at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, was awarded a grant in August 2020 to aid research on “Singapore’s State-Constructed Housing Estates: The Material Lives of State Power, Citizenship and Subjectivity,” supervised by Dr. Viranjini Munasinghe. Fieldwork in Singapore investigated how state-constructed housing shaped understandings of citizenship in Singapore, particularly with respect to sexuality and migration histories. Through interviews, digital participant observation and archival research, the grantee reflected on how state-constructed housing estates embody different kinds of temporalities, as they are constructed and later demolished, and explored how these temporalities are caught up with life trajectories of the inhabitants, with familial and national timelines of progress. In particular, The project considered how queer and migrant subjects, who are deprioritized for access to state-constructed housing, relate to these intertwined temporalities of the housing estates. Moreover, this research examined how caring and/or antagonistic relationships form within the dense housing estates, in communal spaces and apartment sublets, and how these relationships provoke other ways of thinking about sexuality, migration histories and citizenship in Singapore.