Support for Deserving Families: Inventing the Anti-welfare Familialist State in Singapore

The (ideological) aversion many states in Asia have toward universal welfare has led to the development of various solutions that depend on the valorization of the familial. This tends toward limiting state expenditure on public goods. The unevenness and inequalities produced and reproduced by the state’s reliance on particular family forms—with its specific connotations around class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—also result in particular hierarchies and principles of division within the society. This paper challenges the assumption embedded in much current scholarship that it is “culture” that determines what states can and cannot do in the realm of public provisions. Instead, it interrogates how states produce and reproduce particular visions of the family through their approach toward welfare, and how this more broadly shapes and reproduces social inequalities in state–society relations.