IAC Culture Talks Series 2 Lecture Five: After the Dream: Tracking the Post-Study Lives of Chinese Women Graduates of Australian Universities by Professor Fran Martin (Catch up Online)
This event was held on 16 October 2024
Abstract
Every year since 2008, Australia has been host to over 100,000 Chinese international students annually, with the largest proportion studying at university level. Although a majority of Chinese university students in Australia are women, the gendered dimensions of China’s educational diaspora are little understood. Similarly, little is known about the long-term post-study afterlives of Australia’s Chinese graduates. This talk draws on an ongoing study of the social and subjective experiences of fifty young women from China through the years of their university study in Australia and beyond. The project has been running since 2012 and is currently in its third phase, tracking the post-study experiences of participants who are now moving into the next stage of their lives in both Australia and China. The talk will begin by summarizing some key insights from the middle phase of the study (2015–2020), whose findings were published in Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke U.P. 2022). Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, we will explore the identity transformations that occurred as a result of participants’ experiences of transnational educational mobility. Broadly, the study found that graduates emerged as market subjects with increased suspicion of neo-traditional, family-based gender roles: a willingly mobile female labour force suited in terms of ideological orientation and self-understanding, as well as concrete skills, to work in the engine rooms of global capitalism as financiers, professionals, and high-level technicians. Next, we will consider emerging insights from the current phase of the study to investigate how participants’ hopes and plans at the time of graduation play out in practice several years down the track, as they navigate their late twenties and early thirties. Through discussion of graduates’ unfolding experiences of work, migration, marriage, and gendered family carework in the context of current social and economic conditions in both China and Australia, the talk will shed light on the unique characteristics of the post-1990 generation of transnationally experienced Chinese middle-class women. In particular, in the context of chronic uncertainty affecting many aspects of their lives, we will explore these women’s complex and ambivalent attitudes toward “settling down” in terms of marriage, geography, and existential orientation toward the future.
About the Speaker
Professor Fran Martin’s research focusses on Asia-related cultural studies and sexuality and gender studies in the context of globalization. In 2021, she completed an ARC Future Fellowship project exploring the subjective experiences of young women from China studying in Australia. Its findings were published in 2022 in Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke U.P.), which was selected for one of two Honourable Mentions by the Francis Hsu Book Prize committee (Society for East Asian Anthropology, 2023). Fran’s prior research addresses television, film, literature, and other forms of cultural production across Taiwan, the mainland People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and the worldwide Chinese diaspora. Fran is fluent in Mandarin, having begun learning the language as a child and studying for several years in Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei between 1989-1998. Her earlier books include: Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Selfhood in Asia (with T. Lewis and W. Sun, Duke U.P., 2016); Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke U.P., 2010, nominated as a Finalist, LGBT Studies category, 23rd Lambda Literary Awards, 2011); and Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong U.P., 2003). Fran previously lectured in Cinema Studies at La Trobe University (2000-2003), and is now Professor of Cultural Studies and Head of the Screen and Cultural Studies Program in the School of Culture & Communication, and co-convenor of the Asian Cultural Research Hub, at The University of Melbourne.
