Maid-in-Singapore: representing and consuming foreign domestic workers in Singapore cinema

The Maid, a Singapore-made horror film featuring a foreign domestic worker as its protagonist, was released in 2005 to very favourable reviews in the local press. The critical audience generally used the film to praise the development of the local film industry while ignoring the social commentary of the foreign domestic worker experience in Singapore. This paper aims to address this lack of commentary on the issues and circumstances surrounding foreign domestic service in The Maid. Doing so reveals a multilayered representation of order in Singapore based firmly on ethnicity and class, where the images of foreign maids are dramatised, reconstructed and consumed in various discursive forms by various social agents.