Global cities, transnational flows and gender dimensions: the view from Singapore

This paper challenges the systematic, though often unacknowledged, gendered nature of much of current globalisation discourse and argues for the need to give attention to the gendered dimensions of the transnational flows of people into global cities and, relatedly, the gendering of metropolitan space in the process. The paper focuses on Singapore, an aspiring global city, to investigate how global city spaces are transgressed by transnational migrants who may challenge, inflect or reaffirm the gendered spatial boundaries with which the city is scripted. In particular, it focuses on three groups of women – expatriate wives, wives of Singaporean men working overseas, and foreign domestic workers – to unmask the gendering at work as well as the gendered implications of transnationalism in Singapore’s state‐led drive to global city status; and to demonstrate that the production of the global city cannot be decoupled from ideas and assumptions about what constitutes the desirable Asian family and women’s work within the household. For expatriate wives, often reduced to dependent spouse status by immigration laws, community work becomes the third space in which they renegotiate and extend the scope of their identities as mothers, wives and homemakers. Wives of Singaporean men working overseas, however, appear to accept more readily their socially expected role as the cultural defenders and carriers of their families and the nation. And it is clear that the transnational movement of foreign domestic workers rests on gender‐stereotyped assumptions about women’s role in the labour market vis‐a`‐vis the household economy. The paper concludes by suggesting three interrelated starting points to address the need to incorporate gendered understandings in the burgeoning research on globalising cities: first, for women to be reinstated in analyses of transnational flows; second, for a stronger focus to be given to the social relations within households, families and communities and their differential impacts on transmigrants; and third, for more work to be done on female transmigrants in terms of local and transnational activisms.