'Heart' and 'Wing', Nation and Diaspora: Gendered discourses in Singapore's regionalisation process

In this article the authors offer an analysis of Singapore's state-vaunted 'go-regional' policy as a case study to illustrate the argument that not only are the 'nation-state' and 'diaspora' structurally interdependent and embedded in the discursive frame of each other, but also that the way they interlock is shaped by particular gender ideologies and relations. In the same way as the state articulates nationalism by appealing to men and women as gendered subjects, the appropriation of transnational space as part of the regionalisation drive serves to extend and elaborate 'genderic modes of discourse'. Beyond state discourse, the authors examine individual and family strategies in straddling the gap between 'nation' and 'diaspora', between being at 'home' and 'away'. In arguing that the 'go-regional' policy is a pervasively masculine construction, the authors give specific attention to the way gender divisions of labour are transnationalised and further entrenched, the gendering of diasporic workplaces, and the construction of women-in-diaspora as 'moral wives'. The arguments are grounded mainly in research material garnered from in-depth interviews with Singaporean economic migrants (and non-migrants) to China.     

In Defence of the Secular? Islamisation,Christians and (New) Politics in Urbane Malaysia

Besides the clarion call for a “new politics” by opposition political parties, a significant catalyst that arguably swayed Christian electoral choices in the landmark Malaysian general elections of March 2008 was the counsel by religious leaders to safeguard “the secular state”. This action was prompted by recent high profile controversial legal cases that were perceived to be a serious erosion of the freedom of religion clause guaranteed in the secularist Federal Constitution. In this essay, I not only examine the recent antecedents of this course of action but also delve into the more distant past in order to draw out how the apparently impervious categories of “religion” and “the secular” have been implicated in the structuring of social and political imaginaries in Malaysia.     

Global / globalizing cities

Along with the rise in research on globalization, the concept of globalization has become a subject to a more critical scrutiny. While majority agree that it represents a serious challenge to the state-centrist assumptions of most previous social science, doubts about its newness, inevitability and epoch-making qualities are also being raised. Others argue that the globalization literature neglects issues of social regulation by the nation-state, while some critics view it as a discourse drawn upon to legitimize particular political and economic agendas. Debates focus on metropolitan manifestations and impacts. Moving from this background, the paper presents three sociospatial urban configurations that have emerged in the literature. Alongside attempts at identifying globalizing cities and transnational urban networks as new theoretical subjects, another significant vein in the literature focuses on the complex forces of globalization and the production of new urban spaces in these cities. In addition, economic conceptions of globalization is now being pushed beyond adding sociocultural or sociopolitical dimensions and argue instead for the need to theorize globalization as a discursive formation. The global city as a discursive category conjures up imaginary concepts of high modernity, megadevelopment, 21st century urbanity. However, it is noted that the way forward is to focus on the distinctive ways in which urban actors engage in specific processes of economic and social reflexivity. There exists an urgent task for theorizations of the global city, which weave together historical, economic, cultural, sociopolitical and discursive dimensions.     

Still ‘breadwinners’ and ‘providers’: Singaporean husbands,money and masculinity in transnational marriages

As international marriages continue to be on the rise around the world, and in East and Southeast Asia in particular, there is an increasing need for more focused studies on the phenomenon. While the extant literature has paid attention to the complex dynamics of marital intimacies through a ‘gender-sensitive’ lens, the experiences of men are still largely under-examined. This article considers the gendered and classed subjectivities of Singaporean husbands who have married Vietnamese wives and focuses on ‘money’ as a key vehicle through which the men are able to construct masculinities in the spaces of transnational marriage and family. We argue that these non-migrant men engage with transnational processes and practices strategically in order to reclaim respectable and honourable masculine status. In doing so, they dislodge themselves from the idiom of ‘failed masculinity’ commonly ascribed to men who seek foreign spouses, but at the same time reproduce dominant models of masculinity predicated on ‘breadwinning’ and ‘providing’. This article draws on the narratives of 20 Singaporean Chinese men from a range of social backgrounds to demonstrate the endurance of money and economic potency in the performance of masculinities.     

Gender,migration, mobility and transnationalism

In reviewing the expanding body of work on the linkages between gender, mobility, migration and transnationalism in Gender, Place and Culture over the last decade, this article highlights three significant contributions. First, through critical engagement with transnationalism studies, the journal has produced a sophisticated and variegated strand of work on gender politics and multiple forms of migration and mobility. In this article, we focus primarily on mobility in terms of human movement across national borders, rural–urban migration, as well as the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ that inform the embodied experiences of being here and there simultaneously as iterated in transnationalism studies [L. Basch, N.G. Schiller, and C.S. Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London: Routledge, 1994]. A second area of strength lies in the coalescence of work providing insights into the connections between social reproduction in a globalising world and intimate forms of global mobility and migration. A third highlight relates to the mutually constitutive relationship between the construction of masculinities and masculinist ideologies, on the one hand, and migration, mobility and transnationalism, on the other. The article concludes with a discussion of two more embryonic areas which merit further development in the journal: the first concerns the social and geographical (im)mobilities implied in cross-border reproductive care1^1. CBRC is what Payne (2013 Payne, J.2013. “Reproduction in Transition: Cross-Border Egg Donation, Biodesirability and New Reproductive Subjectivities on the European Fertility Market.” Gender, Place and Culture, doi:10.1080/0966369X.2013.832656. [Google Scholar]) attributes to the rapid development and spread of assisted reproductive technologies that have given rise to a global market for human eggs, sperm and surrogates. and the global mobility and assemblage of body parts, while the second relates to the distinctive role that feminist geographers interested in migrations and mobilities can play in working collaboratively and transnationally across different worlds.     

‘I'd do it for love or for money’: Vietnamese women in Taiwan and the social construction of female migrant sexuality

Drawing on an ethnographic research in Vietnam and Taiwan, this article seeks to contribute to the global scholarship on migration and sexuality. It reveals interesting contradictions between the seemingly homogeneous stereotypes of Vietnamese women's sexuality, on the one hand, and the multiplicity and fluidity of actual sexual practices in real-life contexts, on the other hand. First, the presence of a number of chaste migrant women in our study challenges the common stereotype of female migrants as hypersexual and promiscuous menaces on the loose. Second, we question the emphasis on women's material greed and instrumentalism in normative discourses about Vietnamese women's engagement in extramarital relationship. While for some women in our research, sexual liaisons outside marriage are indeed orchestrated for financial gains, for others, extramarital sex is principally sought as a form of self-actualisation or an exploration of sexual pleasure and freedom that is absent from their marriage. The article emphasises the highly contextual nature of sexual norms and practices as well as the intersectionality of race, class and gender in the social construction of female sexuality in the context of transnational labour migration.