Paper short abstract:

Marginalized artists in Singapore, while living with the stigma of queerness and/or mental illness, build political coalitions out of the affective—and opaque—material of their lives. This paper investigates how inequalities are expressed and experienced creatively and ethically in the everyday.

Paper long abstract:

In Singapore, there is a sense of anonymity, loss, exclusion and rupture associated with being queer and mentally ill. Artists, while living with the stigma of queerness and mental illness, build political coalitions out of the affective—and opaque—material of their lives. Queer art creates a space for transgressive world-making where expressions of urban marginality are allowed but under certain socio-legal regimes. As with queerness, there is a hide-and-seek theme in the storytelling of depression. To avoid hypervisibility and stigma, many marginalized artists engage in a dialectic of opacity and express this thought: I want to be seen but I also don’t want to expose myself. This is a new language that is (1) in line with their ways of dealing with everyday policing; and (2) a clear discourse of the field site itself. How might queer world-making in the arts look like? How is the work of art healing? My paper argues that world-making through queer art is (1) a form of storytelling; and (2) a means of plugging holes, of harnessing the potentiality to remake one’s society. World-making can be seen as a pleasurable act as it is the vicissitude of the many effects of modernity where one does not have a transcendent such as the welfare state and/or wherein one lives in a democracy under jeopardy. The pleasures of world-making occur and are experienced in an event when one tries to ascertain a kind of ethics in the world that does not provide it.