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.

Keywords:

• Enterprising self
• education mobilities
• gender
• China
• neoliberalism
• affect
• alternative mobilities

Notes

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Other research in the sociology of education illustrates how enterprising or ‘agile’ selfhood and other forms of ‘neoliberal’ subjectivity are fostered through elite secondary schooling (e.g. O'Flynn and Petersen 2007) and higher education policy (e.g. Gillies 2011).

2 Participants are referred to with pseudonyms. Small hometowns are given pseudonyms to minimise the risk of identification.

3 This term implies a desire to self-strengthen, external-oriented self-comparison with others, inward-focussed uncompromising drivenness and perfectionism, and a type of self-pride that spurns help from others.

4 Given the deep consonances between then, I see the global enterprising self-model and the Chinese striving individual model as functionally equivalent in this case. For discussion of the conceptual distinction between the two based on the impossibility of political engagement and the absence of classic liberalism in China, see Yan (2013).

5 Terms in italics in participant quotes were spoken in English; roman text quotes have been translated by the author from the original Mandarin.