ABSTRACT
Following three texts provide a representative range of Singaporean and transnational perspectives on the complex and fraught position of foreign domestic workers in the city-state. Wena Poon's short story "Development", told from the third person limited narration of the British photographer MacGregor, satirizes First World understandings of the labour abuses that occur in the domestic worker industry. Haresh Sharma's play Model Citizens is a multilingual drama that balances its strong Singaporean woman characters with a complex portrait of an Indonesian domestic worker, Melly who seeks to marry a Singaporean and stay in the country. Finally, one of the most critically acclaimed Singaporean movies in recent years—Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo—unsettles the everyday transactions of domestic labour through its insistence on the messy, embodied nature of this work. Moments of aporia, of misunderstanding, misrecognition, and corporeality are all moments in these texts which attempt to confront and parse the inhumanity of the conditions and treatment of foreign domestic labour in Singapore.
