This article examines the modern kitchen as a technological artefact and a mechanism through which the postcolonial Singaporean state and agents of household consumerism such as advertisers, retailers, home economists, and social scientists constructed the image of a modern Singaporean woman. By revealing how the female consumer-cum-homemaker became a symbol of material success and middle-class status in Fordist Singapore, the article highlights two types of domestication: the subordination of women to the patriarchal imperatives of family and nation, and the transformation of hard successes in the economy into soft comforts in the kitchen. This article suggests that although the state had narrowed the gap between popular expectations for improved living standards and its ability to fulfil them, it also unwittingly enmeshed definitions of femininity, womanhood, and female citizenship in a series of contradictions and tensions that had implications for contemporary Singaporean society.

The policing of homosexuality in Singapore through legislation and public policy are imbued with colonial legacies that have enshrined heteronormative values within its public sphere. However, communities within new online spaces in Singapore disrupt the heteronormative surveillance efforts deployed by the state within public, family and political landscapes. Through an analysis of a local online forum dedicated to cruising this article unpacks how local gay men resist, negotiate and deploy surveillance techniques to navigate these heteronormative structures and cruise safely in Singapore. This article demonstrates how online spaces have become part of an everyday resistance that characterize modern-day efforts to decolonize sexuality in Singapore.

In popular thinking, debt evokes notions of vulnerability and bondage, while irregular migration for sex work conjures up the hazards of human trafficking and modern slavery. These perceptions inform ‘safe migration’ policies aimed at ordering and regulating migration and combating informality to increase migrants’ safety and well-being; the assumption being that illegality puts migrants at risk of abuse. This article challenges these assumptions with an ethnographic study of brokerage practices in the quasi-family networks that facilitate the irregular and circular migration of Vietnamese sex workers to Singapore. In these networks, brokers sell a migration package on credit to their clients, the migrant sex workers, who repay it through sexual labour. This package includes all the services necessary for the women to migrate temporarily and work safely in Singapore. Most crucially, it serves as an entrée into the broker's business and social network, as a way of forming an enduring relationship. Without denying the power of debt to create inequality, obligation and exploitation, this article shows that debt can also be a profitable, non-coercive and reciprocal device for brokers and sex workers alike, a vector of ‘safety’ which limits some of the risks they encounter in a repressive and uncertain host environment. This finding stems from a novel framework in economic anthropology, the ‘socio-economy of debt’ (Guérin, 2018), which complicates moral views of debt through an empirical examination of the materiality, power dynamics and social and moral meanings of debt arrangements and relationships. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

In Singapore, the concept of family as one made up of a legally married couple with the husband as 'head of the household' is widely adopted and accepted. This idea of family is naturalized in nationalist constructions of the Singaporean family stemming not just from the state, but from various moral institutions in multicultural Singapore. As family policies and services are designed and provided based on this state-approved definition of family, non-mainstream families such as female-headed households often find themselves confronting various obstacles in their navigation within public systems and institutions. Using empirical data collected from in-depth interviews with Singaporean divorced and never-married mothers, this paper provides insights into how divorced and never-married mothers lead, organize and practise family under the condition of patriarchy. What challenges do they face in an unfavourable policy environment? How do they overcome these? What hopes and aspirations do they have for their particular families? While the government defends its policy approaches towards non-mainstream families, the paper provides sociological reasons as to why they should be supported. The research findings have implications for policy review and the management of diversity in population and family demographics as the nation comes of age.