Militarized granularity: sand’s making of men and masculinity in Singapore

Abstract

Land reclamation is the process of transforming mined sand from rivers, estuaries, the seabed and even islands into new land parcels. This article examines Singapore’s insatiable appetite for sand and discusses the relationality between a singular grain of sand’s capacity to militarize and gender the Southeast Asian island-state. With opaque sand supply chains, Singapore can project its sovereignty as a militarized nation-state through the neo-colonialist like extraction of sand from other countries to widen its territorial frontiers. In placing the spotlight on extensive land-reclamation works to expand Tekong Island, Singapore’s largest outlier into a military base, I explain how sand serves the role of creating a militarized boundary object. While sand’s coarseness configures military masculinity, sand’s smoothness serves the additional function of maintaining civilian support for militarism by way of ‘packaging’ masculinity. The granular cartographies of trauma arising from Singapore’s territorial expansions wrought upon Southeast Asia’s rural poor require urgent recuperation.