Constituting Citizenship Through the Emotions: Singaporean Transmigrants in London

Drawing on a qualitative study of Singaporean transmigrants in London, this article examines the way that citizenship is constituted and contested through the emotions. I draw attention to, first, the emotional representations associated with citizenship, particularly the politics of belonging in relation to citizenship-making projects and with regards to the emotional valences of racialized belonging. Second, I explore the emotional subjectivities underpinning social behavior and constituting the social relations of citizenship. I focus on the ordinarily experienced emotions in everyday settings that play an important role in shaping citizenship but have hitherto been neglected in the citizenship literature. An emotionally inflected analysis of citizenship, or what I term emotional citizenship, helps illuminate social relations and structures producing the politics of citizenship.