November 7, 2017

If you are single, feel proud and celebrate Singles’ Day on November 11th.

In Singapore single women face great social pressure to get married from the family as well as the state. The pressure to marry stems from a ‘family biopolitics’ to produce the right kind of family. The state, on the other hand, through its various campaigns and policies, is able to entrench the heteronormative family and marriage firmly within the city-state’s social landscape. Single women, viewed as an aberration in the eyes of the Singapore Indian community, are no different in the eyes of the state. They are all seen as single women shirking their national duty to marry and procreate.

In her study, Women in waiting? Singlehood, Marriage, and Family in Singapore, Dr Kamalini Ramdas (Lecturer, Department of Geography), critically examines the discourses of family, marriage, and ‘singlehood’ by interviewing 29 single Singaporean women. Dr Ramdas researches the experiences of graduate single Indian Singaporean women based in Singapore, Melbourne, and London, and demonstrates how single women are constructed as ‘women in waiting’ – waiting to find the right man, to marry, and to have children, and how singlehood is constituted as a struggle between state, community, family and the individual across space and time.

The paper contributes to the critique of intimacy confined within the practice of marriage. It shows how it is possible to live lives and imagine life possibilities which do not necessarily end in marriage. Yet the hegemony of marriage is also perpetuated as the women worry about the possibility of not having children of their own.

Read the full article here.