One domestic worker’s story

By Jolene Tan | 20 July 2010, 09:14

In February I wrote about the gross maltreatment and dehumanisation of domestic workers in Singapore. It’s received a comment from MaidinSing, one such worker who blogs to raise awareness of the way in which migrant labour is exploited in Singapore….

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Women in prison: Inspectorate report

By Jolene Tan | 16 July 2010, 20:21

Last week the Inspectorate of Prisons released a thematic report on women’s prisons.Prisons are mostly populated by people who have been socially excluded in any number of ways, but there are, as you might expect, gendered aspects to these experiences….

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First, do no harm

By Jolene Tan | 17 June 2010, 21:01

[Note: I’ve changed the wording of this post because children with clitorises may not necessarily be girls. In the interests of transparency, I’ve indicated my earlier error with the strikethrough tag. My apologies for the earlier sloppiness. It seems to…

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O brave new world

By Jolene Tan | 7 June 2010, 23:52

Brace yourselves: you’ll need a strong stomach for this one.Here is a story (via Womanist Musings) of girls in the Sodavas and Girvas villages of Rajasthan, many of whom are kidnapped in infancy and brought there. When aged 6-10, they…

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“A little place where I live safe”

By Jolene Tan | 27 February 2010, 23:24

Human Rights Watch have released a report on the use by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) of Detained Fast Track (DFT), an accelerated procedure for asylum cases, for the cases of women whose circumstances raise complex gender-related issues. Many of…

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Diplomats and migrant domestic workers

By Jolene Tan | 25 February 2010, 21:26

There’ve been some stories in the news this week about the abuse of migrant domestic workers by diplomats. From The Times:Diplomats at several London embassies have been accused of using migrant domestic workers as “modern-day slaves”, depriving them of food…

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Misreading Lolita

By Jolene Tan | 24 February 2010, 21:07

I posted an earlier version of this as a Facebook note last September, when Polanski was arrested, but given the award he’s just won and a renewed spate of celebrity support for him, I thought I might revisit it.I am…

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Race to the bottom

By Jolene Tan | 17 February 2010, 00:35

Much has been said about the racism in mainstream Western beauty standards. As Latoya Peterson puts it: the message for white women is “try harder”, but the message for women of colour is “never”. The legacies of colonialism and the…

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Important questions from Gita Sahgal

By Jolene Tan | 7 February 2010, 23:47

The detention of Moazzam Begg and others in Guantanamo Bay was and is a violation of their human rights, which Amnesty International is right to criticise.Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Cage Prisoners, are not defenders of human rights, and are…

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Same garbage, different continents

By Jolene Tan | 7 February 2010, 17:22

Over at Racialicious, Thea Lim discusses an American website, “Classy Asian Ladies”, which fetishises Asian women (“Asian” is used in the American rather than the British sense, referring to the Asian continent more generally rather than specifically South Asia). Drawing…

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A False Necessity: Singapore’s Maid Trade

By Jolene Tan | 2 February 2010, 17:34

In my gleamingly modern home town of Singapore, trading in women has been refined to a stomach-churningly efficient art. The women in question are foreign domestic workers (FDWs), locally known as “maids”, who travel from poorer countries - principally but…

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