Tara Jittalan

Thesis Title: Women and Food in Contemporary Singaporean Literature 

Supervisor: Professor Pablo Mukherjee    

Doctoral Research: My project explores food’s centrality in illuminating women’s inner lives and behavioural patterns within Singapore’s patriarchal society. I aim to investigate the extent that food acts as a multifunctional tool capable of communicating, traversing racial boundaries, subverting gender norms, and gaining autonomy. Far from limiting women’s opportunities and mobility in its association with the domestic sphere, food appears a powerful device for negotiation within male-dominated power structures. The authors I work on include Balli Kaur Jaswal, Catherine Lim, Vyvyane Loh, and Alfian Sa’at.

With this thesis, I hope to contribute to the fields of critical food studies, the study of gender in literature, and contemporary Singaporean literary studies while also opening up the possibility of further research on food and gender in the broader sphere of Anglophone Southeast Asian literature. 

Research Interests: Anglophone world literature, contemporary literature, postcolonial literature, literary food studies, the study of gender in literature