Everyday Intimacies and Inter-Ethnic Relationships: Tracing Entanglements of Gender and Race in Multicultural Singapore

Abstract

Through the proposed frame of ‘everyday intimacies’, this article explores the entanglements of race and gender in inter-ethnic relationships. ‘Everyday intimacies’ brings together the minority experiences of everyday racism, the state practices and policies of multiculturalism, and their inflections in intimate relationships of marriage, friendship, and dating. This approach demonstrates not just how the state regulates people’s intimate life through policies of marriage and family, but also how other indirect processes of multicultural governance mediate intimate life. Drawing on biographical narratives of mainly Indian women from in-depth life story interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, the article brings the literature on intimacies in conversation with the scholarship on race and ethnic relations in Singapore. Through a focus on intimacy, the article illustrates how tacit knowledge and embodied effects of everyday racism relate to larger trends of intermarriages, rising singlehood among Indian women and possibilities of co-ethnic friendships and solidarities. In doing so, the article presents novel insight into race and gender relations in Singapore.