Audrey Yue, Kamsing Tina Chau
This article develops the concept of the digitally intimate everyday to examine how young women in Singapore negotiate intimacy, subjectivity, and gendered life transitions within a highly digitised, policy-driven society. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic interviews with thirty women aged 18–24, the study situates everyday digital practices within Singapore’s postcolonial digital ecosystem and heteronormative life scripts organised around employment, marriage, and reproduction. Bringing together the sociology of intimacy, media ecology, and feminist affect studies, the article conceptualises digital intimacy as a materially embodied and ambivalent site of self-making rather than merely a realm of individual choice or technological affordance. The analysis identifies three dynamics shaping young women’s digitally mediated lives. First, participants engage in boundary drawing and networked privacy through the strategic use of multiple platforms and accounts to manage trust, disclosure, and vulnerability. Second, everyday digital creativity—including photo-sharing, meme circulation, emojis, stickers, and casual content production—functions as an affective register through which intimacy, care, humour, and belonging are expressed in indirect yet meaningful ways. Third, these practices intersect with, and at times unsettle, normative life scripts surrounding marriage, sexuality, and adulthood, even as many participants continue to aspire to state-sanctioned milestones such as home ownership and family formation. By foregrounding affect, embodiment, and ambivalence, the article extends existing scholarship on digital intimacy in Singapore beyond policy and ideology to lived experience. It argues that digital intimacy enables agency and reproduces constraint, offering young women tools to negotiate insecurity, desire, and aspiration amid neoliberal precarity and gendered expectations.