Transnational dream, transnational practice: tracking women students in Asia’s knowledge diasporas
Fran MARTIN
Abstract Since the mid-1980s, there has been a worldwide increase in women travelling on their own to seek educational and career-advancement opportunities, rather than as legal appendages of husbands. In northeast Asia this trend is particularly marked, and the increasing representation of women among the ranks of northeast Asian international students in Western nations can be seen as part of this trend. This essay engages with Youna Kim’s book, Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters, and considers Kim’s answers to the question: What are the subjective and material experiences of geo-cultural mobility for the current hyper-mobile generation of young northeast Asian women?
Keywords: Gender, mobility, international students, Asia, Youna Kim
Author’s biography
Fran Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is currently undertaking a study of the everyday lives of women students from the People’s Republic of China in Australian higher education, andis author of Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2010) and Situating Sexualities: Queer Narratives in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong University Press, 2003), among other works. She translated Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2003).