Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West

In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women's motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

Author: Fran Martin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 02/22/2022
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.76d
ISBN13: 9781478017615
ISBN10: 1478017619
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Gender Studies
- Education | Student Life & Student Affairs
- History | Asia | China

About the Author
Fran Martin is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, author of Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary, and coauthor of Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia, both also published by Duke University Press.