Understanding citizenship of foreign brides in Singapore : negotiating the intersections of class, gender and ethnicity

• Main Author: Chan, Amanda Shimin
• Other Authors: Ye Junjia
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Sociology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/73701
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

There has been an increasing scale of international marriages in Singapore, especially between women from developing Asian countries and Singaporean men. By seeking to understand the vulnerabilities of these foreign brides through the notion of substantive citizenship, this paper demonstrates how the lack of access of foreign brides to various basic rights differentially includes them in disparate segments of the community. A differentiated access to basic rights is understood in terms of the foreign bride’s socioeconomic class, gender and nationality. Citizenship and government policies were analyzed to illustrate how graduated sovereignty can be applied in understanding how the differential treatment of foreign brides is legitimized through national development plans. The paper concludes with according autonomy to foreign brides by unveiling the means through which they hinge on their gendered, classed and nationalized positions to negotiate a sense of belonging to the nation-state despite being labeled as the “Other”.