Studies in Malaysian and Singapore History: Mubin Sheppard Memorial Essays

Enabling the Singapore Story: Writing a History of Disability

Enabling the Singapore Story: Writing a History of Disability VICTOR ZHUANG KUAN SONG ‘To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man…’ William Shakespeare, Hamlet Abstract The turn of the millennium has seen numerous plans to remake Singapore. Beginning in 1997 with the Singapore 21 Committee and as recently as 2004 with Prime Minster Lee Hsien Loong’s swearing-in speech, there have been calls made for the inclusion of disabled persons in society. Even so, disabled persons are strangely absent from the Singapore Story and academic histories of Singapore. Singapore history can be said to possess an able-ist bias. This study examines the possibility of ‘enabling the Singapore Story’ to write a history of disability. It argues that as a result of the government’s construction of disabled persons as deformed bodies in need of normalization , they have not been considered as proper subjects of history. One way to enable the Singapore Story would be through the use of oral histories. Introduction The turn of the millennium has seen numerous plans to remake Singapore. Beginning in 1997 with the Singapore 21 Committee and as recently as 2004 with Prime Minster Lee Hsien Loong’s swearing-in speech, there have been calls made for the inclusion of disabled persons in society.1 Despite these efforts, disabled persons are strangely absent from the Singapore Story and academic histories of Singapore. As a result, Singapore history possesses an able-ist bias, not only overshadowing but neglecting the disabled in the local historical discourse. 37 1 Ngiam (2002: 154). As a result of the government’s plans to remake Singapore in the new millennium, disability issues have gained prominence as a field of study. Among these, Levan Lim and Thana Thaver’s textbook intended for mainstream school teacher trainees probes and attempts to deconstruct disability as a social construct.2 In social work, Rosaleen Ow has discussed the needs and issues concerning disabled persons and Ngiam Tee Liang has examined the policies and services which the government has implemented in recent years.3 Under the auspices of policy planning, there have also been works published on disability, the most recent being a study of the future of social services for the disabled published by the Institute of Policy Studies in 1991.4 There are also numerous theses published on the subject. Of these the most relevant to my work is a study by Yap Ching Wi. It examines disability as a social construct by the government, showing how policies of welfare in the 1990s played a dominant role in the construction of the disabled as problematic individuals.5 Yet being a sociological study, her thesis fails to acknowledge the historical beginnings of such policies, and has neglected to take into account the rise of advocacy for and by disabled persons in the 1980s. The few ‘historical’ works on institutional histories of organizations for the disabled are not proper academic histories, but rather commemorative volumes produced for internal consumption. These include publications by the Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore (MINDS), Tampines Home and the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped (SAVH).6 These are not vigorous histories that treat the disabled as subjects of history; rather, they are merely concerned with chronological developments of institutions caring for the disabled. Nor has academia in Singapore generally undertaken a proper historical accounting of disability. This contrasts greatly with the historical study of disability elsewhere, which has received much attention from scholars. Mostly influenced by Foucault, these works focused on the regulation of disabled bodies claimed as impaired. They tend to see disability as a social construct and have examined how these categories have been imposed onto disabled persons historically.7 38 2 Lim and Thana (2008). 3 Ow (2004); Ngiam (2002). 4 Yap (1991). 5 Yap (1994). 6 These include Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore (1987), Tampines Home (1990), and Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped (2001). 7 Snyder and Mitchell (2006). This study aims to fill in the gap in local scholarship. I first examine the able-ist bias within the Singapore Story and local academia, despite the rise of a language of inclusiveness, and discuss how Foucault can be used to probe the history of disability. Next I trace the marginalization of disabled bodies in Singapore from the postwar period, arguing that...