Remedial Kids: playful academic lectures for the culturally curious

Remedial Kids is a social community for the culturally curious. We host playful academic lectures at cosy bars across Singapore.

Note: Ticket includes 1 happy hour beer/wine or 2 sodas

Session #5

This talk examines the rise of the punk scene in early 1990s Singapore within the context of the nation’s socio-political environment. It considers how the state’s paternalistic governance, characterised by curtailments on creative expression and popular culture, created a hostile atmosphere for subcultural movements.
Drawing from primary sources, interviews and archival research, the talk investigates the state’s soft-authoritarian approach to governing which includes interventions against western-liberalist influence on youth culture. Additionally, it explores how the state’s emphasis on economic advancement and social conformity, provided a distinctive context for the emergence of punk as a means of defiance and identity construction.

Punk in Singapore emerged to insolently challenge the idea of "Singaporeanness"—a state-devised national identity—and the dominant Asian values despite the constraints faced. This research highlights how the punk community carved out a space of cultural resistance against the nation’s materialistic and consumerist tendencies. Through an examination of punk’s development in Singapore, this talk aims to illustrate the movement’s role as an essential form of cultural discordancy and its contribution to the broader discourse on subcultures in Southeast Asia.

About the speaker: Ginette Chittick emerged from Singapore's underground music scene as a key member of the nascent early 1990s punk scene and is a member of Astreal, a pioneering shoegaze band and a DJ . Starting her graphic exploration with grimy photostating machines, dot matrix printers, typewriters and cut-up-&-paste techniques, Ginette delved into the themes of sexual identity, Riot Grrrl, punk rock ideology and feminism in one huge slugfest of personal narratives. Trained originally as a web and graphic designer, Ginette’s practice has evolved into an interdisciplinary exploration spanning music, fashion, art, textiles, and photography. Her work often examines love, memory, and lived experience, blurring the boundaries between these gossamer worlds.

She is currently reading her PhD at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London and her focus areas are subculture studies, specifically punk in Singapore, and graphics.

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