Public Talk by Prof Fran Martin: Unsettling: The Emotional Tolls of Mobile Flexibility for Chinese International Graduate Women

Abstract

Labour markets increasingly demand that workers embody flexibility and motility. The international education industry fosters identification with these values, encouraging graduates to see themselves as part of a willingly mobile professional workforce. Yet in many societies, dominant social scripts idealize stability as a defining characteristic of adulthood, and women, in particular, are expected to embody the settlement and security of domestic life as a core social role. How do international graduate women navigate the competing demands to embody mobility and flexibility versus settlement and stability? This paper investigates this question by focussing on 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 and are now navigating their post-study lives in China, Australia, and beyond. Their reflections reveal intense ambivalence about “settling down.” It is argued that this reveals an underlying gendered and generational tension between values of stability versus flexibility. This study contributes to youth migration scholarship by highlighting the interplay of global trends with national specificities in the Chinese exemplar; illustrating how the ideal of adult stability and settlement is deeply gendered; and demonstrating the sometimes high emotional toll of mobile flexible lives.



Biography

Fran Martin is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and co-convenor of the Asian Cultural Research Hub. Her best known research focuses on gender and educational mobilities, as well as television, film, literature, Internet culture and other forms of cultural production in the contemporary transnational Chinese cultural sphere, with a specialization in cultures of gender and queer sexuality. She is currently working on a multi-phase longitudinal ethnography on the social and subjective experiences of young women graduates from China who have studied and lived in Australia (http://www.mobileselves.org). Her recent books include Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke U.P., 2022), Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke U.P., 2022), and Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia (with Tania Lewis and Wanning Sun, Duke U.P., 2016).