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PhD defence | Becoming a ‘domestic worker’ or a ‘trailing spouse’: Migrant women, space, body and belonging in Singapore | Lennie Geerlings
December 17 @ 11:30 - 12:30
Lennie Geerlings’ (KITLV/Leiden University) dissertation, titled Becoming a ‘domestic worker’ or a ‘trailing spouse’: Migrant women, space, body and belonging in Singapore comprises an ethnography of the ways in which female migrants attempt to belong in the ‘global’ city Singapore.
Using intersectional perspective, Lennie explains why, despite their various differences, migrant women in various positionalities engage in similar tactics of belonging, including spatial practices, maintaining a certain style of appearance, controlling their bodies and consumption patterns and social (media) practices. With these tactics, migrant women mostly comply with norms for migrant spatiality, corporeality and behavior.
Lennie analyzes this as a form of defensive agency, which helps women cope with the demands placed on them by societal structures in Singapore and in their countries of origin, protects their precarious positions as female migrants in the global labor market and creates possibilities for belonging.
Lennie’s PhD defense ceremony will be held on Tuesday 17 December at 11:30 h in the Academiegebouw, Leiden University, Rapenburg 73. It will also be possible to follow the defence through a livestream.