Ordinary mobility: the gendered and classed negotiation of subjectivity by millennial Chinese women on the move in transnational education and leisure

Abstract

The increasing number of Chinese middle-class women moving across national borders for education and leisure often axiomatically directs attention to the fluidity and empowerment of this privileged group. Mobile women challenge China’s patriarchal expectations of being confined to the home and the nation. However, gender and mobility are more than fluidity: as Doren Massey (1994) has argued, space is an ever-shifting social geometry of power, meaning, and signification. How do mobile Chinese middle-class women negotiate with the complex web of empowerment and discipline, freedom and order? I conducted semi-structured interviews with 41 millennial urban middle-class women who have travelled transnationally for education and leisure. These women were born between 1982 and 2000 and their parents’ professions include government officials, entrepreneurs and professors. Transnational mobility is a lens refracting how women, within the larger context of China, deal with socio-historical changes and make sense of their lives through the cultural experience of mobility. This draws on feminist work on habitus: how habitus, organised by the axis of class and its intersection with gender and generation, operates in and constitutes the variegated meaning, politics, and practices of mobility. Mobility is decoupled from a romanticised “extraordinary” narrative in opposition to the ordinariness of daily life. I capture the specificity and multiplicity of mobility in three sites: as liberal and disciplined daughters in displacement, as responsible citizens in the immobile pandemic era, and as individualised and precarious labour in their re-grounding back home. This thesis offers a theorisation of gendered mobility as a reflexive and structured regime. Chinese women ‘on the move’ go through ambivalence, contradiction, and negotiation in (im)mobility, bumpily moving towards hope in the face of the hetero-patriarchal system and crisis in the pandemic era.