Being family, doing family : inquiring the discourse of family in Singapore literature

This dissertation is driven by the impulse to better understand families. To do so, I read the representations and negotiation of ‘family’ in selected Singaporean fiction, with the aim of considering what precisely is defined and understood as family. Family is everywhere, and the meaning of the word seems prima facie. My interest is precisely prompted by this axiom of family, and how it forms a dominant ideology that superposes and determines lived experiences of families despite its incommensurability. I adopt a framework of queering the discourse of marriage and family in Singapore, looking to “definitions and understandings of the term “family” as topics of inquiry in their own right and part of the process of analysis” (Morgan 93) What I mean by queering is not for an exploration of homosexual families presented in Singapore Literature, since doing so would reconfirm and constraint a binary of homosexuality/heterosexuality. Rather, I draw upon queering as Natalie Oswin does in her analysis of the critical geography of home in Singaporean housing, analyzing the heteronormative logic governing Singaporean home spaces and the attendant “properly familial Singaporean subjects” (261) which extends beyond the policing of a heterosexual-homosexual binary to perpetuate “prevailing notions of respectable domesticity and proper family” (257). To do so, I read literary renderings of familial and marital forms that comply with the dominant image of the conjugal Family but recast the meanings of family by turning these images on its head to explore the complexity of the nuclear unit.Master of Art