Enterprising self and bohemian nomad: Emerging subjectivities in Chinese education mobilities

Abstract

This article approaches the question of how experiences of mobility mediate subjectivities through a case study of middle-class Chinese women’s education mobilities. Drawing from longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with 56 young women who moved from China to Australia for university, the article focuses on two of their stories to illustrate how education mobility mediated their negotiation of available understandings of gendered personhood and competing life value regimes. It demonstrates that for these middle-class women, transnational education mobility may on the one hand reinforce identification with an ideal of enterprising selfhood that is prominent in both global and Chinese public cultures, or on the other hand, facilitate identification with a countervailing model of ‘bohemian’ mobility that has hitherto mainly been observed among more privileged subjects. It also analyses how mobility shaped the women’s negotiations of the linear feminine life scripts that are normative in post-socialist Chinese society versus more flexible, individualized models of gendered biography. The article thus illustrates the gendered aspects of Chinese women’s experiences of education mobility, and the subjective effects that flow from them.