Events

Jointly organized by the Department of Communications and New Media and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Kris Hyesoo Lee, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Labour markets today increasingly demand that workers embody flexibility and motility. As a producer of human capital to feed this system, the international education industry fosters students’ identification with these values, encouraging graduates to see themselves as part of an “agile”, willingly mobile professional workforce. Yet running counter to these imperatives, in many societies, dominant social scripts idealize stability as a defining characteristic of adult identity and life. This is particularly the case for women, who are often expected to embody the security and settlement of domestic life and family relationships as a core social role. How do international graduate women navigate the competing demands to embody mobility and flexibility, on the one hand, and settlement and stability, on the other? This interviews-based study investigates this question by exploring the range of meanings attributed to “settling down” by a group of 34 middle-class, professionally trained women from China who had travelled to Australia for university study in their late teens and twenties. Several years later, as they enter their late twenties and early thirties, the issue of settling down has emerged as a strong preoccupation for these graduates, who are currently living in cities across Australia, China, the UK and New Zealand. Uncertainties swirl around competing definitions and valuations of the concept, in addition to more basic questions about how or even whether settling can ultimately be achieved under current conditions of pervasive uncertainty. Overall, their reflections reveal intense ambivalence. I propose that the vexed question of settling down highlights an underlying gendered and generational tension between values of stability versus flexibility in these young mobile women’s lives. That is, the very unsettledness of the settlement question reveals much about the rapidly shifting, multiple and contradictory norms of femininity and adulthood that these women are navigating.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Fran Martin, FAHA is Professor of Cultural Studies and co-convenor of the Asian Cultural Research Hub at The University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the transformations that globalization is wreaking in media, gender, sexuality and cultural identity across the transnational Chinese-speaking world. Fran is engaged in a multi-phase longitudinal study of the social and subjective experiences of fifty plus young women from China through the years of their university study in Australia and after. Fran’s research also addresses television, film, literature, digital cultures and other forms of cultural production across Taiwan, the mainland People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and the worldwide Chinese diaspora. Her research monographs include Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke U.P., 2022), Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Selfhood in Asia (with T. Lewis and W. Sun, Duke U.P., 2016), Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke U.P., 2010), and Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong U.P., 2003).