Excess in the Queue: Waiting, Public Housing, and Ambivalence in Singapore

In this paper, I explore how the long waiting period for a public flat in Singapore offers fertile ground for examining excess. I first consider how learning to wait shapes my interlocutors – and, by extension, their families – into a particular kind of pliant social unit. I show how the logics cultivated through prolonged waiting extend into other arenas of life, including interactions with the unhoused. Yet while such imitation suggests successful approximation, cultivating an outward subjectivity aligned with a statist project can also produce a quasi-cynical recognition that what one does to remain in step may diverge from what one thinks about the effort. I argue that excess can be generated from within projects of growth and social reproduction: efforts to synchronise with normative temporal and social demands can generate surplus feelings that lead to an ambivalent relationship with the very projects they simultaneously sustain.