ABSTRACT
The public toilet sits at the centre of twenty-first-century queer politics. In the US and UK, anxiety over gender identities has led to the rallying for inclusionary toilet designs. In Singapore, however, news about the public toilet has to do with sexual misconduct, from cases of homosexual men apprehended for toilet sex to voyeurism cases on university campus. Sexual misconduct in the public toilet is a violation of modesty and threat to Singapore’s moral health, requiring a wide-ranging clean-up from the installation of locks to the upholding of Section 377A. Through an analysis of the Keep Singapore Clean campaign and representations of the toilet in Alfian’s “Cubicle” and Joel Tan’s The Way We Go, this chapter argues that the public toilet is a site of sexual regulation, designed to discipline non-(hetero-)normative sexual conduct and cultivate toiletry habits that ensure social goodness and public health. While the cleanliness campaign exposes the nation’s obsession with a brand of moral goodness tied to sexual surveillance, the literary texts focus on its repercussions as experienced by the female queer citizen child. The study of the public toilet reveals the spatial particularity of the brand of sexual regulation in Singapore, one that is contingent on the appropriation of sanitation practices in order to keep the nation clean and chaste.
