Chinese Racialization and Technologies of Mothering: Continuities in Straight and Queer Reproduction in Singapore

In this article, I bring together a set of three disjunctive scenes in Singapore relating to Chinese mothers, straight and lesbian. First, what has been called “the AWARE saga” in 2009; second, graduate mothers in the 1980s; and third, lesbian mothering in contemporary time. In this triangulation, my analysis focuses on educated Chinese women and mothers across historical contexts as paradigmatic formations of a protected class encouraged to reproduce themselves and pass on their hereditary material, historically by the technocratic Singaporean state in the 1980s, which afforded Chinese mothers various forms of protection, and in contemporary times via neoliberal circuits of capital that enable the agential, transnationally mobile Singaporean lesbian to access artificial reproductive technologies to have children. I show how the strategic manipulation of these women’s embodiment and abilities across these historical contexts demonstrates forms of racial capacitation that afford security, on the one hand, and susceptibility to biopolitical control, on the other, through the capaciousness of their bodies, which are figured as endlessly available for reinvigoration (for neoliberalism). Thinking convivially about the relations between straight and lesbian mothers might enable a possibility for politics that cuts across the sexuality divide. By supplementing fraught binary identity politics with an affective politics of sexuality, I seek a broader critique of the biopolitical workings of the state and the capitalist economy. In the final analysis, I outline how this broader critique might inform the development of minority studies in Singapore, articulating both a horizon for the political and a relation to the personal.