January 3, 2019

Chewing gum is a nuisance for cleaners, but can it be used as a tool of infrastructural sabotage?

On the 3rd of January, 1992 chewing gum was banned in Singapore. The ban followed enforcement of restrictions regarding street hawking, fines on littering and spitting, as well as the elimination of farms, policies which were part of the nation’s attempts at cementing an image of order and cleanliness to draw tourists and multinational developers. NUS historian Associate Professor Gregory Clancey argues in his article, “Hygiene in a Landlord State: Health, Cleanliness and Chewing Gum in Late Twentieth Century Singapore,”  (Society for the Promotion of Science and Technology Studies, 2018) that justifications of health are often tied to this push for cleanliness, and public health initiatives of the 1960s to early 1990s in turn shaped how space is configured in Singapore.

A/P Clancey looks at the ban on chewing gum within the context of the government’s political control over health and cleanliness, where it is one example of how policies on hygiene and cleanliness come to implicate infrastructure. Chewing gum had been used as a convenient form of vandalism, with vandals jamming gum into lift buttons and placing it over the sensors of MRT train doors. The ease of technological and infrastructural sabotage that came with the availability of chewing gum made it an unexpected impediment to development, and the ban clearly had wider implications beyond hygiene concerns. Chewing gum, A/P Clancey asserts, had become more than a nuisance – it was a growing threat to civil and mechanical engineering, posing as an accessible tool for low-level sabotage.

Read the article here.