FREE LOVE" : AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF YOUNG WOMEN IN SINGAPORE"

Abstract

This thesis focuses on how knowledge as power shapes young women's sexuality and self-identity, and consequently transforms their intimate relationships. Sell' is formed through discursive acts and in interaction with others, and this thesis explores how knowledge, power and agency converge when discourses of sex exercise their influence on individuals. Despite the rising strength of alternative discourses championed by the 'ideology of the new single girl', 'promiscuous' women are seen as deviant. These women may then further perpetuate the hegemonic discourse or resist it. However, resistance is still couched within patriachial gender 'relations of ruling' (Smith 1990) and individuals are not free to transform it into a system of their own making. The disciplinary mechanism employed to ensure conformity with social expectations is the discursive term 'slut'. This term infiltrates every aspect of women's lives and forms a powerful disciplinary tool, yet such 'control' remains taken-for-granted, and even accepted, in our everyday lives. This thesis chooses to focus on the overarching power of the disciplinary mechanism of the 'slut', and how it serves to obstruct the democracy and "autonomy of self' that Giddens predicts in the development of intimate relationships in high modernity. In doing so, this thesis hopes to shed some light on continuing tensions between danger and pleasure, reason and unreason, temptation and constraint as experienced by many young Singaporean women in their intimate relationships.