"Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past

The slogan "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child" was emblazoned on teacups sold in Singapore during the 1980s, and offers a point of departure for my paper, which seeks to interrogate the complexities expressed in the distancing of the categories of "Good Mother" from "Go...

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Main Author: Tarulevicz, Nicole
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM Press) 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.usm.my/40559/
http://eprints.usm.my/40559/1/Tarulevicz-LifeguardMilk1.pdf
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author Tarulevicz, Nicole
author_facet Tarulevicz, Nicole
author_sort Tarulevicz, Nicole
building USM Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description The slogan "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child" was emblazoned on teacups sold in Singapore during the 1980s, and offers a point of departure for my paper, which seeks to interrogate the complexities expressed in the distancing of the categories of "Good Mother" from "Good Cook" in Singapore. Women, in particular, received a series of contradictory messages about food and food preparation in the period from Singapore's Independence in 1965 to the end of the cold war era. On the one hand, school textbooks in subjects such as Home Economics and Domestic Science were presenting cooking and domestic hygiene as a form of nation building, with the student as proto-housewife. On the other hand, the realities of economic development and increased female participation in the workforce, coupled with the presence of domestic servants, meant that homecooking took a surprisingly marginal place in discourses around femininity. While the student was constructed as the proto-housewife, the reality of housewifery was, as always, classed and raced. It is in this context that products like Lifeguard Milk could advertise that they would "raise your child."
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spelling usm-405592018-05-23T07:55:41Z http://eprints.usm.my/40559/ "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past Tarulevicz, Nicole P1-1091 Philology. Linguistics(General) The slogan "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child" was emblazoned on teacups sold in Singapore during the 1980s, and offers a point of departure for my paper, which seeks to interrogate the complexities expressed in the distancing of the categories of "Good Mother" from "Good Cook" in Singapore. Women, in particular, received a series of contradictory messages about food and food preparation in the period from Singapore's Independence in 1965 to the end of the cold war era. On the one hand, school textbooks in subjects such as Home Economics and Domestic Science were presenting cooking and domestic hygiene as a form of nation building, with the student as proto-housewife. On the other hand, the realities of economic development and increased female participation in the workforce, coupled with the presence of domestic servants, meant that homecooking took a surprisingly marginal place in discourses around femininity. While the student was constructed as the proto-housewife, the reality of housewifery was, as always, classed and raced. It is in this context that products like Lifeguard Milk could advertise that they would "raise your child." Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM Press) 2012 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://eprints.usm.my/40559/1/Tarulevicz-LifeguardMilk1.pdf Tarulevicz, Nicole (2012) "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past. International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (IJAPS), 8 (2). pp. 56-71. ISSN ISSN: 1823-6243 http://ijaps.usm.my/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Tarulevicz-LifeguardMilk1.pdf
spellingShingle P1-1091 Philology. Linguistics(General)
Tarulevicz, Nicole
"Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past
title "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past
title_full "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past
title_fullStr "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past
title_full_unstemmed "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past
title_short "Let Lifeguard Milk Raise Your Child": Gender, Food And Nation In Singapore's Past
title_sort "let lifeguard milk raise your child": gender, food and nation in singapore's past
topic P1-1091 Philology. Linguistics(General)
url http://eprints.usm.my/40559/
http://eprints.usm.my/40559/
http://eprints.usm.my/40559/1/Tarulevicz-LifeguardMilk1.pdf