Toxic Military Masculinities and the Politics of Conscript After-Death Remembrance in Singapore

Abstract

This article discusses the relationality between death and masculinity in economically prosperous Singapore. In positioning the Singaporean male conscript, spatially disciplined by the state in both life and death, this article discusses how the reproduction of militarized masculinities through National Service (NS) in Singapore is co-constitutive of geopolitical tensions that contour how the space of the male body is reproduced. In the aftermath of four training-related deaths, this article examines the extent to which the authoritarian state is selective in exercising necropower by denying slain military bodies their existence as bodies-as-space. Granted that bodies-as-space are generative of emotions and affects, the final section of this article discusses how the Singaporean state exercises necropower to enhance life-giving conditions. It does so by deciding which military cadavers are most worthy of communicating affects and emotions for the purposes of preventing future deaths from training and ensuring support for conscription.