Recycling working daughters? Hong Kong older women’s divergent lives and subjectivities

The research examines the experiences and identities of a particular generation of older women, who were born between 1939 and 1962. This particular generation of women had been working daughters and household financial pillars in the 1950s and 1970s. After marriage, their role as unwaged “homemakers” became integral to their identities, though some subtly resist their domestic roles, and the caregiver role persists even when they enter late adulthood. As focus on Hong Kong economy shifted from a manufacturing economy to a financial and service economy, some of these women faced forced job changes. This research explores how older women develop divergent subjectivities in relation to the changing material-discursive-structural forces of Hong Kong society, and how their evaluation of their life experiences and their present everyday practices produce fluid and complex subjectivities.