Singaporean-Indian Women in Waiting (?): Singlehood, the Calculus of Care and Geographies of Being 'Family'

Abstract

The Singaporean state, Singaporean-Indian community, single Indian women and intimate others are connected by a calculus of care that destabilises linear constructions of time and space. The calculus sees care in terms of intensities rather than a zero-sum game, and problematises the biopolitics of family in which marriage seems the only rational end goal. Drawing from in-depth interviews with graduate single Singaporean-Indian women in Singapore, Melbourne and London, the thesis re-centres race and the emotional aspects of care by interrogating how and why these women are portrayed as incomplete, occupying a cusp where they are perceived as waiting for marriage. It uses a feminist ethics of care to foreground the relationality of proximity and distance, thus engaging in a transnational politics of waiting where it is possible for the women to live lives not tied to an end goal of marriage, or experience family only ever as related by blood.