The Biopolitics of Inclusion: Disability and Capacity in the Singapore Nation

The inclusion of disabled people in Singapore has gained speed and publicity since the mid 2000s, as the state sought to build a more inclusive society. This has been manifested in various cultural texts, from carnivals like the Purple Parade, inclusive community spaces such as the Enabling Village, politicians reaffirming the need to build a more inclusive society, and public education campaigns such as See the True Me. In my work, I examine this biopolitics of inclusion through a reading of these texts, and analyze its underpinning logics and implications on our understanding of disability both in Singapore and transnationally. I argue that increasingly in Singapore, and in other nation-states, the effect of inclusion is the production of a new figure of disability, or what I call the included. In this work, I sketch out the contours of the included, who are actively embraced by a state that demands inclusion of all it deems disabled, speaking with disability studies that has focused on exposing the exclusion of disabled people. In exposing the logics in which the figure of the included works, I argue that only those bodies that can be capacitated are included within mainstream society. In other words, it is through capacity that disability can be folded into life.