Ultimately, nationalism forments little more than perpetual division and exclusion – this is on display all around the world at the moment. Rather than trying to recuperate the nation and showing how one “belongs” to it, I think there’s much more to be gained by building community and forging solidarity with others like us – even if they might not, at first glance, seem like us.
Dr Pavan Mano, Lecturer in Global Cultures
19 March 2025
Governance of sexuality used to bolster nationalism, says new book
A new book by Dr Pavan Mano, Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities, examines the link between nationalism and sexuality in independent postcolonial Singapore.
Straight Nation: Heteronormativity and other exigencies of postcolonial nationalism draws on the increasing presence of nationalism as a political rationality once again. Through his research, Dr Mano shows how nationalism works hand-in-glove with sexuality as a political force invested in generating threats to maintain a status quo.
In modern day Singapore, this is manifested through the privileging of heterosexual norms as markers of “model Singaporeans”, something which has consequences for more people than just sexual minorities. Thorough analysis of texts and cultural artefacts, Dr Mano poses that the link between sexuality and nation is vital in producing queered figures who are displaced from the national imaginary.
Marriage and reproduction rights are carefully controlled in Singapore through a range of laws including housing, employment, and immigration laws. Dr Mano argues that paying attention to how these rights are distributed shows the racialized dimensions of nationalism that emerge through the governance of sexuality. While Euro-American white “expats” are encouraged to settle and build families, Southeast or South Asian “migrant workers” are forbidden from doing so under threat of deportation.
The book is a product of Dr Mano’s larger research interests in currents of nationalism and how they produce groups of people who can be classified as ‘outsiders’ in different contexts. In his other work, he has discussed how, in different moments, different people can be positioned as ‘enemies’ or ‘bad citizens’, interrogating the kinds of allegiances that the nation-state can demand of us and why they should be rejected.
Dr Mano also suggests that existing critical scholarship on nations and nationalism tends to focus on its racial dimensions, but other elements are also at play – such as sexuality.
In this story
Lecturer in Global Cultures