Sojourner intimacies: Chinese international students negotiating dating in Sydney

Abstract

Despite being a large community of sojourners making up 30% of the total international student population in Australia (End of Year Summary of International Student Enrolment Data, 2017), Chinese international students’ everyday social experience is severely under-studied. This thesis is a mini ethnographic archive informed by nineteen qualitative interviews and autoethnographic analysis about the marginalities and injustices Chinese international students face in their everyday negotiation of dating and intimacies. Findings discuss a range of issues including clashing intergenerational 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 stands as 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. Despite structural disempowerment, this thesis demonstrates why Chinese sojourners are not trapped in a passive victimhood, they are individual life planners developing the best survival strategies they can manage with the limited resources they have.