Session Name: Demographic Dilemma's: Negotiating Marriage, Reproduction, and Parenting in Shrinking China
2 - Transforming Patriarchy across Borders: Chinese Women Student Migrants in Singapore
Monday, July 29, 2024
16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract This paper examines how transnationally mobile educated Chinese women are contributing to transforming patriarchy in China. In China as in countries across Asia, women outperform men in education. Chinese women study abroad at higher rates than their male peers, both to distance themselves from patriarchal mores and to compensate for gender discrimination in graduate admissions and employment. Based on ethnographic interviews and observations conducted in Singapore, a hub for Chinese student migration, this paper argues that Chinese women student migrants combine self-development, filiality, and resistance to patriarchal norms to pursue full subjecthood conventionally reserved for men—encompassing recognition for individual accomplishment, independence, and filial contribution. By navigating marriage pressures and economically contributing to their natal families, traditionally a son’s duty, these diligent daughters shift patricentric family dynamics toward more bilateral arrangements, eroding the patriarchal structures that undergird male-centered power even as many gender norms remain intact. As women marry later and have fewer children, with growing numbers refusing marriage altogether, their pursuit of mobility across borders represents a threat to the integrity of the masculinist state, which requires women to reproduce the body of the nation. Some of these women self-consciously identify as queer but many more occupy queer subject positions, refusing to reproduce the conventional patrilineal order. This paper compares the experiences of Chinese diligent daughters with those of their counterparts in Japan and Korea and examines how transnational feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements inform their consciousness and practice.
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