Narratives of identity struggles by ex-professional expatriate women in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper explores a largely overlooked aspect of gender and professional identities by analysing interview narratives with women who relocated oversees as a result of their partner’s work assignment. While a lot has been written on how professional women construct and negotiate various gender and professional identities in their everyday working lives (e.g. Mullany 2007, Holmes 2006, Schnurr 2008), research on women who had to give up (or temporarily ‘put on hold’) their successful careers to follow their husbands’ careers is scarce. For these women moving oversees meant making a new star and to a certain extent re-inventing themselves in a new context. Drawing on 30 audio-recorded interviews with ex-professional women who relocated to Hong Kong, and using a constructivist approach, we explore some of the discursive processes through which these expatriate women try to re-invent their identity and define themselves. This process is complicated by the specific socio-cultural context of Hong Kong and the cultural and language obstacles that many of these women face. In addition, many of the traditional roles that are typically assigned to women (such as homemaker and mother) are not always available to them because many of the activities associated with these roles are performed by domestic workers who typically take care of the household and childcare. These expatriate ex-professional women are thus faced with the challenges of carving out a space and positioning themselves in between the (sometimes competing) discourses of ‘feeling strange not working’ and ‘feeling a little useless at times’ on the one hand, and ‘enjoying a privileged expatriate lifestyle’ on the other hand. They manage to successfully maneuver through this tension by sometimes drawing on explicitly gendered stereotypes while at other times vehemently resisting them. They achieve this by employing a range of discursive strategies, including different kinds of humor and laughter, as well as elements of a professional register.