Unsettling: Chinese international graduate women navigating compulsory flexibility and gendered chrononormativity
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2025-01-01
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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
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Informa UK Limited
Melbourne Authors
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School of Culture and Communication
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Journal Article
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Martin, F. (2025). Unsettling: Chinese international graduate women navigating compulsory flexibility and gendered chrononormativity. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 51 (11), pp.2854-2872. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2479568.
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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 mobile professional workforce. Yet in many societies, dominant social scripts idealise 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 interviews-based study 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 20s 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 and settlement versus flexibility and mobility. This study contributes to youth migration scholarship by highlighting the interplay of global trends with Chinese national specificities; illustrating how the ideal of adult stability and settlement is deeply gendered; and demonstrating the high emotional toll of mobile flexible lives.