Overseas study as zone of suspension: Chinese students re-negotiating youth, gender, and intimacy (original) (raw)

The Gender of Mobility: Chinese Women Students' Self-Making through Transnational Education

Educational travel is a significant vector of transnational mobility today, and the gendered dimension is particularly notable, with a majority of international students from East Asia now being women. In China as elsewhere in this region, young urban women increasingly see themselves as pursuing dreams of wealth, freedom and individual happiness through travel, consumption, career, and a self-scripted life project. Animated by more than just the pursuit of degrees, such students are engaged in projects of self-making through their educational travel. This article, based on in-depth interviews with 15 Chinese women higher education students in Melbourne, reveals that such a mobile self-making project stands in fundamental tension with influential gender discourses within China that associate adult women's social role with the care of others within the family.

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Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations Perspectives from China’s Privileged Young Women Cover Page

Sojourner Intimacies: Chinese International Students Negotiating Dating in Sydney

This thesis is a mini ethnographic archive that explores the marginalities and injustices Chinese international students in Sydney experience in their everyday negotiation of dating and intimacies. Findings discuss a range of issues including clashing inter-generational expectations, peer marginalisation, navigating multicultural Australia, racial depersonalisation in the dating scene, "yellow fever" as a form of hermeneutical injustice, ambiguous sexual consent, domestic violence in de facto relationships (queer and straight), and the impacts/implications of legal status within abusive relationships and the dating pool. This thesis is the first qualitative study to inform the vacuum of knowledge about Chinese international students' intimate social activities in Australia. Meanwhile, it documents an authentic fragment of reality about the Chinese sojourners community that is often opaque to the public eye and mystified in mainstream Australian media discourses. *Please make an direct enquiry for full copy.

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Transnational dream, transnational practice: Tracking women students in Asia's knowledge diasporas Cover Page

From Familial Pressure to Seeking One’s Fortune: Chinese International Students’ Search for Geographical and Social Mobility as a Response to Societal and Familial Pressures

2021

The societal changes seen in China since 1978 have created a sharp generational divide. Those born after the 1980s are mostly singletons raised with high life-expectations, both of themselves and from their families. The singletons want freedom of choice and social mobility, but the stiff competition at Chinese universities makes such ambitions unattainable for many. Study abroad is sometimes seen as an alternative gateway to social mobility. This chapter is based on participant observation of, and interviews with, a group of 40 Chinese students in Norway. The fieldwork took place from 2012 to 2014. The research questions concern (a) what motivates their sojourn, (b) their aspirations for the future and (c) how their migration would facilitate this. The findings are that they seek to construct themselves as global citizens able to travel and work anywhere. A Western degree is seen as enabling this. However, as single children, the burden of caring for their parents is theirs alone a...

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Female Student Migration: A Brief Opportunity for Freedom from Religio-Philosophical Obedience

Religions

Vietnamese Confucian religio-philosophical ideals regulate social order in the family, community, and nation state. As a result, women’s duties to their husbands, fathers, ancestors, and Vietnam powerfully permeate all aspects of gendered life. This study of 20 Vietnamese women explored their experiences as international students in Australia. Primary focus was on how their gendered Confucian histories compelled their migratory journeys, influenced changes to their intimate partner experiences while in Australia, and the reimagining of identity, hopes and dreams on looking forward at their future returns to gendered life in Vietnam. The application of Janus Head phenomenology enabled understanding of how the women’s temporality became influenced by fascinations of future change, mixed with feelings of uncertainty and limbo that arose when forward facing hopes were thwarted by their looking back realities. There was an intense sense of unresolve as time drew closer to the end of thei...

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Migration as feminisation: Chinese women  s experiences of work and family in contemporary Australia Cover Page

Mobile self-fashioning and gendered risk: rethinking Chinese students' motivations for overseas education

Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2017

This article complicates dominant instrumentalist understandings of international student motivation by focusing on Chinese female tertiary students in Australia. Based on longitudinal fieldwork with 56 such students, it analyses motivations described by students and their parents in interviews, showing that these far exceed instrumentalism and engage tactics of both gendered risk management and cosmopolitan self-fashioning. Discussion of the gendered risks in post-socialist China that students seek to mitigate through study abroad illustrates the complexity of students' motivations, and underlines the limitations of western European sociological theories of risk society which assume that gender inequality tends to decrease in late modernity.

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Understanding gendered transnational education mobility: Interview with Fran Martin Cover Page

Migration as feminisation? Chinese women's experiences of work and family in Australia

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2006

Like many Western governments, the Australian government increasingly views migration through the lens of economic efficiency, arguing that skilled professionals achieve the best employment outcomes and therefore constitute the ideal migrant. This paper challenges these claims, showing that skilled migrants do not always successfully transfer their skills to new labour markets. It argues that the government’s ‘success story’ narrative disguises a much more complex reality, in which migrants’ employment outcomes are shaped by broader social and cultural factors, as well as just economic ones. In particular, it shows that men and women typically experience migration differently, and the challenges of re-negotiating work and care in a new setting often lead to a ‘feminisation’ of women’s roles, as they find themselves taking up more traditional gender roles as wives and mothers. Using in-depth interviews with Chinese women and survey data from the Australian government, I show that, in Australia, migrant women often experience downward occupational mobility and a re-orientation away from paid work and towards the domestic sphere.

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