Foreign Bodies: Horror and Intimacy in Singapore's Migrant Labor Regimes

Abstract

Abstract Singapore depends upon foreign bodies to maintain its hypermodern, sleek exterior. For many Singaporeans, a live-in foreign domestic worker (FDW) marks a milestone in achieving a certain kind of bourgeois lifestyle, but the incorporation of a stranger into the household gives rise to certain fears. Intimate labor evokes unexpected feelings, and anxieties about the boundaries of class, nation, gender. In tabloid articles, message boards, and everyday conversation, employers discuss the problem of witchcraft practiced by FDWs—stories such as the incorporation of bodily fluids into employers’ food, the unwanted generation of affection or warm feelings toward those who according to labor contracts should be employees, the surreptitious switching of FDWs’ facial features with those of the employer's children, or other concerns over boundaries and their violation. This article argues that the horror revealed by such stories is one that challenges Singaporean claims to ethnic and economic supremacy in the region, as it points to a return of a perceived threat from an allochronous rural world. Each presents a particular challenge to a sealed, prosperous, “first world” Singaporean self-imagining, a porosity that calls for magical and magico-bureaucratic interventions to set right.