Gender and Colonial Cities Workshop. University of Sydney

This paper explores gender in British colonial Singapore in the mid to late nineteenth century by examining the nuns of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, as well as girls born in the Year of the Tiger abandoned at the convent gates. Drawing on gender as social construction and performance, I argue that the nuns were ambiguously gendered within Singapore society, whilst the ‘tiger girls’ bore the consequences of performing their gender ‘wrong’. Placing them within the wider context of a town differentiated by race, I also draw on concepts of how gender is raced, to examine the intersection of race and gender. In doing so, I demonstrate that the experiences of these two ‘niche groups’ can enrich the understanding of gender and the colonial town of Singapore.