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Dr Quah Ee Ling

Ee_LingDr Quah Ee Ling (she/her) is a School-member of the Institute and Senior Lecturer & Convenor, Culture and Society, School of Humanities and Communication Arts. She is a fire dragon feminist and Singaporean of Chinese-Hokkien and Indonesian-Peranakan heritage. The correct order of her name is surname first followed by given name. She is a queer migrant woman academic acknowledging her privileges, complicity and responsibilities residing and working on never ceded land of First Nations peoples in settler colonial Australian society. Ee Ling developed her own strand of feminism - fire dragon feminism to blow flames at injustices and build solidarities for a more just and equitable world. She has very little patience for racism, queerphobia, patriarchy and misogyny. Ee Ling is passionate about decolonising the curriculum and university.

Ee Ling's research draws from decolonial, transnational, intersectional and queer feminist perspectives. She is developing her third book project on Fire Dragon Feminism. Ee Ling is working with Assoc Prof Sukhmani Khorana (UNSW), Assoc Prof Nida Denson (WSU) and Dr Teddy Nagaddya (WSU) on an Australian Research Council Linkage project – Place-based Employment and Enterprise of Newly Arrived Young Woman. Ee Ling has recently completed a project on Southeast Asian Queer Migration and her chapter is published in a collection on Queer Southeast Asia (Routledge 2022). She has also just concluded a community engagement project - Understanding diversity service workers' knowledge and skills gap in servicing culturally diverse LGBTQ+ communities, and the report could be found on the website of community partner, Advance Diversity Services..

Ee Ling is the author of Transnational Divorce: Understanding Intimacies and Inequalities from Singapore (Routledge 2020) and Perspectives on Marital Dissolution: Divorce Biographies in Singapore (Springer 2015). Her research on heteronormativity, intersectionality, gender & sexuality, queer studies, race, migration, transnational studies, emotions and intimacies have also appeared in Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, Gender, Work and Organisation, Journal of Family Issues, Emotion, Space and Society, Journal of Sociology, Australian Feminist Studies and Marriage & Family Review.

Qualifications

  • 2012, PhD (Sociology), University of Sydney
  • 2002, Master of Social Science (Applied Sociology), National University of Singapore
  • 1998, Bachelor of Arts (Chinese Language and Chinese Studies), National University of Singapore

Areas of Research

  • Transnational, intersectional, decolonial feminist perspectives
  • Heteronormativity and non-normative families (divorced, transnational, queer families)
  • Race, racism and anti-racism
  • Migration
  • Decolonising the University
  • Genders and Sexualities (masculinities, queer Southeast Asian and queer Chinese studies)
  • Inequalities and Social Justice
  • State and Social Policy

Selected Publications

Quah, SEL & Tang, S 2022, ‘Exploring Southeast Asian Queer Migrant Biographies: Queer Utopia, Capacitations and Debilitations’, in S Tang and HY Wijaya (eds.), Queer Southeast Asia: Itineraries, Stop-Overs and Delays, Routledge, London, New York.

Quah, SEL & Ridgway, A 2021, ‘The woman writer’s body: multiplicity, neoliberalism and feminist resistance’, Gender, Work & Organisation, vol 29, no. 1, pp 44-57.  http://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12743.

Quah, SEL 2020, ‘Navigating emotions at the site of racism: feminist rage, queer pessimism and fire dragon feminism’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol 35, no. 105, pp 203-216.  https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1830703.

Quah, SEL 2020, Transnational Divorce: Understanding Intimacies and Inequalities from Singapore, Routledge, London, New York.

Quah, SEL 2020, ‘The working of heteronormativity: transnational remarriage as pragmatic strategy’, Journal of Family Issues, vol. 41, no. 7, pp 937-956. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X20917777.

Quah, SEL 2019, ‘Transnational divorces in Singapore: experiences of low-income divorced marriage migrant women’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol.46, no. 14, pp 3040-3058. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2019.1585023.

Quah, SEL 2018, ‘Cross-cultural families in Singapore: transnational marriages and divorces’, in WJ Yeung and S Hu (eds.), Family and Population Changes in Singapore: A unique case in the global family change, Routledge, London, New York.

Quah, SEL 2018, ‘Emotional reflexivity and emotion work in transnational divorce biographies’, Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 29, pp 48-54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.09.001.

Tang, S & Quah, SEL 2017, ‘Heteronormativity and sexuality politics in Singapore: the female-headed households of divorced and lesbian mothers’, Journal of Sociology, vol. 54, no. 4, pp 647-664. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783317742530.

Quah, SEL 2015, Perspectives on Marital Dissolution: Divorce Biographies in Singapore, Springer, Singapore, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London.

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