A new generation of ‘incorporated wife’? making sense of international students’ spouses in the US

Abstract

Responding to the feminist call to reconfigure the outlook of transnational moving, this article explores the gendered experiences of the international students’ spouses behind the booming international education industry in the United States (US). With 20 in-depth interviews, we examined how immigration and university policies feminize the spouses of international students and how they navigate this feminized role. We show that the categorization of spouses as ‘dependents’, by the Department of Homeland Security of the US, justifies and normalizes the discriminating policies towards the spouses, which introduce and perpetuate the gendered binaries of student/spouse, initiator/follower, independent/dependent, and public/private, during which the spouses are repositioned to the feminized half. That said, spouses demonstrate agentic contestations during this process. Particularly, we show that female and male spouses adopt different strategies to transcend the femininity conferred by this role: female spouses’ contestation is more alliance-based while male spouses tend to follow an individualist approach.

Keywords:

• International Students
• Spouses of International Students
• Gender
• US
• Migration

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Center for the Study of Diversity at the University of Delaware for its generous support. We are grateful for excellent feedback on previous drafts presented at the International Studies Association 2018 Annual Meeting (San Francisco, USA) and Center for the Study of Diversity at the University of Delaware. Comments from Kara Ellerby, Kassra Oskooii, James Jones, and Michelle Shumate were especially helpful. Last but not least, we are grateful for the suggestions from three anonymous reviewers as well as the editorial team of Gender, Place and Culture, Margaret Walton-Roberts and Dane Salcedo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Small Research Grant 2017, Center for the Study of Diversity, University of Delaware.

Notes on contributors

Xinhui Jiang

Xinhui Jiang is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of China Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She received her doctorate in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Delaware. Her research interests lie in the field of gender and politics, local governance, and Chinese politics.

Busra Soylemez-Karakoc

Busra Soylemez-Karakoc is a Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on the relationships between financial globalization, financial crises, domestic politics, and international factors within developing countries, and in doing so, it intersects with comparative political economy, international political economy, and political theory.

Maryam Hussain

Maryam Hussain is a Health Psychology Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of California Merced. She earned her PhD in educational psychology with a dual focus on developmental psychology/statistics & measurement at the University of Houston. Her research agenda focuses on the importance of social support structures for psychological and physical health in ethnic minorities who endure adverse social environments.