April 17, 2023

Associate Professor Shirlena Huang and Dr Kamalini Ramdas (both from NUS Geography) explain how Singapore has become the beacon, within an otherwise Anglo-American dominated Southeast Asia, in ‘Generative spaces of gender and feminist geography in Singapore: entanglements of the personal and political’ (A Journal of Feminist Geography, 2019).

Feminist geography, standing apart from the more general trends of feminism that have not punctuated Asia as they have in the West, has slowly been expanding since its introduction into the undergraduate curriculum since the 1990s. A/P Huang and Dr Ramdas attest that it has now firmly become a part of the mainstream agenda in teaching and research within NUS, the only university in Singapore that offers a full undergraduate and graduate Geography programme.

The article discusses the two primary sites of generative spaces of feminist activism, namely the classroom and the research field. There are two gender modules offered at the undergraduate level at NUS that have always been taught by women, in a geography department that is 75% male-dominated. These gender modules are often the first encounter with feminist discourse for most Singaporeans students, particularly male students, and introduce concepts such as patriarchy, heteronormativity, and their influence on everyday life and gender-based discrimination.

Within the research field, A/P Huang and Dr Ramdas recognize how researching from Singapore affords feminist geographers relative privilege compared with the rest of Southeast Asia. The working language of English in particular enables NUS scholars better access to publish successfully in top international journals, and makes some headway into the otherwise impenetrable Anglo-American dominated field of knowledge production.

Dangers remain in becoming too ensnared with competing on the international circuits of geographical scholarship, rather than focusing on purely indigenous scholarship; the former risks perpetuating western hegemonies, whilst the latter can often be a detriment to career advancement. Positive futures are within reach, however, for feminist geographers based in Singapore to contribute to the broader feminist discourse, researching and publishing theories from and about the Global South in order to finally challenge the dominance of the Global North.

Read the full article here.