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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Organizing For Domestic Worker Rights In Singapore: The Limits Of Transnationalism, Lenore T. Lyons
Organizing For Domestic Worker Rights In Singapore: The Limits Of Transnationalism, Lenore T. Lyons
Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)
Extract: This article examines the limits of transnational feminist activism through a case study of domestic worker rights in Singapore. This work builds on my decade-long research on the feminist movement in Singapore and my activist involvement in the Singaporean women’s organisation, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE). I argue that the Singaporean state inhibits attempts by local feminist organizations to engage transnationally (either through links with international NGOs, or by confronting the forces of globalization locally). Singaporean activists have creatively responded to these challenges, but their actions remain constrained by the imperatives of the nation-state.
Sexing The Nation: Normative Heterosexuality And The ‘Good’ Singaporean Citizen, Lenore T. Lyons
Sexing The Nation: Normative Heterosexuality And The ‘Good’ Singaporean Citizen, Lenore T. Lyons
Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)
Extract: What does it mean to sex a nation? In the discourses surrounding nationalism, nations frequently take up gendered positions – as ‘motherlands’ or ‘fatherlands’, with their leaders as the ‘mothers’ or the ‘fathers of the nation’. In the family of the nation, gendered subjectivity is built around heterosexual reproductive relations in which men and women perform their ‘natural roles’ within families2. Where the language of nationalism reveals the gender of the homeland as female (Britannia, Mother India), the nation-as-woman is built on a particular image of woman as chaste, dutiful, daughterly or maternal” (Parker et al. 1992: 6). And …