Psychoanalyzing fleeting emotive migrant encounters: A case from Singapore

In existing scholarship on migrant encounters, there is a tendency to dismiss fleeting encounters between random strangers in public spaces as superficial, or to treat such encounters as insipid and ambivalent events. Little attention has been given to fleeting encounters that are antagonistic and emotively charged. This paper focuses on one such encounter that took place in a public bus in Singapore in 2012, involving intensely emotive verbal exchanges between a female migrant from China and an elderly local Chinese-Singaporean woman. Interpreting this encounter as a form of situational stratification, the paper draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis to decode the symbolic logics underlying the heated verbal exchange, thereby revealing how migrant diversities in the Southeast Asian city-state are textured by the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, race/ethnicity. The paper argues that psychoanalysis deserves more attention as an under-utilized perspective for reading fleeting encounters.