Towards a Feminist Refiguring of Vulnerability: Deep Securitization and Becoming in Singapore

This thesis critically examines the role that the motif of vulnerability plays as a 'thick signifier' naturalizing the phenomenon of deep securitization in Singapore. Existing research on the politics of vulnerability in Singapore has failed to account for the gendered logics that undergird this interplay of vulnerability and deep securitization, as well as the significance of the motif of vulnerability at the level of collective meaning-making. To address these gaps, this thesis forwards two interrelated arguments. For one, by interpreting deep securitization as a reflection of Singapore's endless - but always unsuccessful - pursuit of invulnerability, this thesis draws on the theoretical framework of subject formation to posit that the experience of vulnerability as existential uncertainty is a formative one, resting at the heart of the nation-state's process of becoming. In other words, even as deep securitization appears to be the only legitimate response to these experiences of vulnerability, it must also continually fail for the nation-state to remain perpetually vulnerable, to become over and over. More than a study of what vulnerability has come to signify in the case of Singapore, this thesis directly takes up the call from feminist scholars to attend to vulnerability differently in our politics. It grapples with normative questions about what it means to be vulnerable and how we could otherwise respond to it, outside of denying or disavowing it, which has led to the naturalization of deep securitization in Singapore. To that end, this thesis draws on the work of feminist theorists and Hannah Arendt and argues for the need to refigure vulnerability as ambiguous and a source of radical potential, to dislodge the ordering work that the motif of vulnerability has long performed, but also envision alternative ways of living and being and generate a more emancipatory mode of politics.