Sylvia Ang

Monash University (Australia) · School of Social Sciences

This article argues that the intersection of ethnicity, class and gender foregrounds the contestation of Chinese-ness in a context of migration in Singapore. I argue that the presence of co-ethnic mainland Chinese migrant women has heightened Chinese-Singaporean women’s anxieties. In lieu of ‘convenient markers’ of language and ethnicity, Chinese-S...

Migrants from mainland China now make up nearly a million of Singapore’s total population of 5.4 million, an influx unprecedented since the nineteenth century. This has compelled both locals and migrants to (re)think their Chinese-ness. Simultaneously, the state produces its hegemonic version of Chinese-ness with Mandarin as an important signifier....

Studies of racism tend to rely on a presumed dichotomy between whites and ‘Others,’ whether Black or Asian. Even as many scholars have established that whiteness is manufactured, ethnographic studies of racism still have not escaped the color paradigm, basing their studies on the enactment of racism by white people on Others. Using the case study o...

While work on gender and migration has grown significantly, it has mostly addressed the experiences of female migrants; the experiences of male migrants are still understudied. Even less attention has been paid to male migrants and their heterosexuality. This paper is interested in Chinese masculinities, which in the migration literature have been...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted countries all over the world, not only in relation to public health responses, but on multiple other societal levels. The pandemic has uncovered structural inequalities within and across societies and highlighted how race remains a powerful lens through which public policy responses are constructed and pursued. Th...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted countries all over the world, not only in relation to public health responses, but on multiple other societal levels. The pandemic has uncovered structural inequalities within and across societies and highlighted how race remains a powerful lens through which public policy responses are constructed and pursued. Th...

Studies of racism against migrants have recently attempted to move away from the presumed dichotomy between whites and “Others”, yet the focus is still on white people racialising others: whether Black, Asian or Muslim. Attending only to white versus Others homogenizes select groups of non-whites including Asians. Racialization and racism by Asians...

The literature on 'middling transnationals' is growing although studies on Asian middling migrants are still relatively lacking. Current understandings on middling migrants are also frequently fixed on migrants' mid-level skills and their middle-class status. Drawing on interviews with Nepali migrants living in Melbourne, Australia and mainland Chi...

Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concern...

Studies of racism against migrants have recently attempted to move away from the presumed dichotomy between whites and “Others”, yet the focus is still on white people racialising others: whether Black, Asian or Muslim. Attending only to white versus Others homogenizes select groups of non-whites including Asians. Racialization and racism by Asians...

This paper explores public discourses of race and nation in Australia and Singapore, focusing on their historical and contemporary relationship with China and the Chinese. Both countries are governed by a multicultural ideology but are experiencing evolving tensions rooted in their (post)colonial and settler histories, dominated by respective Anglo...

This paper highlights the politics of mobility through investigating Singaporean-Chinese imaginaries of mobility which are tied to the racialization of mainland Chinese migrants in Singapore. Host societies imbue (im)mobility with meanings; in the case of Singapore, mobility is imagined as transience and even immorality. The myth of migrants’ trans...

While male migrants are an understudied group, even less attention has been paid to their heterosexual practices. This chapter locates such practices by examining online personal ads posted by higher-wage mainland Chinese migrant men in Singapore. This chapter empirically contributes to migration and masculinity studies by examining the understudie...

2013至2018年间，笔者在新加坡进行田野，通过60多名21至59岁的受访对象，研究新加坡华人和刚到新加坡的中国移民的社会想象，期间对低收入中国劳工的男性气质产生兴趣，并进行深入了解。结果表明，在新加坡的中国男工在寻求有偿服务以外的亲密关系时会遇到困境。这一困境通过男性气质和节俭的话语所传达，并在与新加坡男性的对比中得以延伸。 我在线上和线下的调研经历还显示，我的受访者，由于缺乏与当地人，特别是与当地女性的接触，渴望与当地女性见面，尽管他们知道我的意图与他们的不一致。事实上，对于许多的受访者来说，我是第一个也是唯一一个与他们深入交谈的新加坡女性。这清楚地反映了受访者在新加坡社会中的边缘化状态。

DESPITE THERE BEING a growing body of research focusing on male migration – especially low-wage migrant men – it still shows a certain bias in which work (and economics) is seen as central to the men’s lives. Yet migrant men are not just workers, but also fathers, husbands, lovers, boyfriends. A small field of research is now emerging, among it my...