UC Berkeley

A Malayan banyan sapling, cut from the parent tree at The Substation, an independent arts center in Singapore, and confined to a public housing flat, persists in an attenuated state. Etiolated conduct names this persistence as resistance that emerges under constraint. The term bridges J.L. Austin’s description of “etiolated” performatives – utterances rendered hollow or void – with the horticultural practice of etiolation, where plants deprived of light are deliberately distended, suspended in calibrated conditions of making-live and not quite letting-die. This pairing engages with both a more-than-human performativity and a performativity of the more-than-human. I read Austin alongside Michel Foucault’s counter-conduct, drawing both through a critique of liberal personhood (Saba Mahmood, Chen Kuan-Hsing, Pheng Cheah) and the more-than-human turn (Anna Tsing, Rebecca Schneider, Karen Barad). I begin by extending speech-act theory toward the ecological and infrastructural forces conditioning political life, moving from figure to ground, and conclude with withdrawal and worlding beyond human live-ness. Three vectors of restriction propagate across the dissertation: sexuality, social reproduction, and political dissent. The first chapter establishes the limits of pragmatic resistance rooted in a politics of recognition through the 2022 repeal of Section 377A, the law criminalizing consensual sex between men, alongside the constitutional reinforcement of a heteronormative order. Subsequent chapters develop close readings of Jason Wee’s camouflaged choreographies, Otto Fong’s 'Cetacea' (1993/1994) and Boo Junfeng’s 'Tanjong Rhu' (2009) on cruising along reclaimed shorelines, Seelan Palay’s '32 Years: The Interrogation of a Mirror' (2017–2018) on solitary-solidarity in political detention, and Charles Lim’s 'All Lines Flow Out' (2011) on waterways and fugitivity, alongside archival documents, testimonials, and field research. I argue that under etiolated conditions, art’s indirection performs a politicization of aesthetics rather than an aestheticization of politics, gathering force through durational deprivation rather than spectacular confrontation, generating lateral intimacies with pioneer vegetation, carceral architecture, and drainage infrastructure – a sensuous underside that escapes accounting. Singapore’s post-natural environment offers a glimpse of governance to come; resistance under these conditions carries anticipatory potential for a world where liberal frameworks organized around visibility, rights, and recognition are being eroded.