Asian Women Identity And Migration

This book explores the influence which education and migration experiences have on women of Indian origin in Australia and the United Kingdom when (re)negotiating their identities. The intersections of migration and transnationalism are critically examined through multiple theoretical lenses across three thematic domains encompassing socio-historical discourses, postcolonial theory, theories on intersectionality and interceptionality, emotional reflexivity and affects. In doing so, the book highlights the ambiguities around gendered access and equity to education, migration experiences, the acculturation process, dilemmas surrounding transnationality and negotiation of identities, belonging and struggles inherent in simultaneously maintaining ties with home and new social fields. Chapters highlight the practical, methodological, and substantive aspects of affective dimensions and voice with a critical understanding of different tensions, challenges, complexities and conflicts underlining the stories. The book raises the question of voice and agency in advocating emotion-based writing in recalibrating conditions representing gendered subjective multivocality of women in breaking silences. Presenting non-Western perspectives through fragmented and often marginalised accounts within transnational and global spaces, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Sociology, Gender Studies, Migration, Transnational and Diaspora studies, Sociology of Education, Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Cultural Geographies.

This book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitanism. It considers the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational migration and the role of the media in everyday life, offering detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book provides an empirically grounded and theoretically insightful investigation into this evolving phenomenon.

This volume challenges the dominant discourse that perceives Asian women as either "mail-order" brides or overseas workers. Providing the first sustained critique of the artificial analytical division between brides and workers, the book demonstrates women's transition from brides to workers and from workers to brides. Focusing on how women workers use marriage as a strategy to gain citizenship and how migrants for marriage become workers, the authors present these modern Asian women in their multidimensional roles as wives, workers, mothers, and citizens.

This volume challenges the perception of Asian women as either mail-order brides or overseas workers. There are a wide range of case studies, all showing the multiplicity of roles women maintain, and emphasizing the point that marriage, work and migration are inextricably linked.

Focusing on Asian women's experience of immigration, the contributions in this book collectively highlight the gendered dimension of migration, the different experiences of men to women and the subsequent consequences for women within the constraints of the root culture and the strategies deployed to make life more bearable in the host country. The central theme discussed is the fact that immigrant women are unable to completely break away from the chains of traditional patriarchal norms, imposed by either their host country or root culture. Immigrant women's identity is, therefore, far more fluid and regulated by both social and state insitutions they encounter.

South Asian women have frequently been conceptualized in colonial, academic and postcolonial studies, but their very categorization is deeply problematic. This book, informed by theory and enriched by in-depth fieldwork, overturns these unhelpful categorizations and alongside broader issues of self and nation assesses how South Asian identities are ‘performed'. What are the blind spots and erasures in existing studies of both race and gender? In what ways do South Asian women struggle with Orientalist constructions? How do South Asian women engage with ‘indo-chic?' What dilemmas face the South Asian female scholar? With a combination of the most recent feminist perspectives on gender and the South Asian diaspora, questions of knowledge, power, space, body, aesthetics and politics are made central to this book. Building upon a range of experiences and reflecting on the actual conditions of the production of knowledge, South Asian Women in the Disapora represents a challenging contribution to any consideration of gender, race, culture and power.

"This volume is an attempt to enhance not only academic research on transnational domestic workers, but also inform governments, nongovernmental organisations, and civil society groups in their efforts to derive appropriate policies and make recommendations to address the problem related to Asian transnational domestic workers."--BOOK JACKET.

Comprises nine papers which cover: the theoretical framework; an overview of female labour migration within and from Asia; migration of domestic workers to Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan; the specific migratory situation deriving from intermarriage; and the protection available to migrant women as a human rights issue.