Challenging hegemonic femininities? The discourse of trailing spouses in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper aims to give a voice to those women who often suffer considerably under the transitions associated with their relocation to a new and often foreign country, namely so-called trailing spouses. The term trailing spouses refers to women who have followed their partners on an overseas work assignment, which often meant giving up their own professional careers and leaving their “old lives” behind. We use the concept of hegemonic femininity (Schippers 2007) to explore the discourse of these women and to gain a better understanding of how they experience their recent relocation and its often life-changing consequences. While the notion of hegemonic masculinity (as coined by Connell 1987, 1995, and revised by Connell & Messerschmidt 2005) has received a lot of attention in recent scholarship, the notion of hegemonic femininity remains largely under-developed (Schippers 2007). This paper aims to address this gap by conducting an empirical study on the discourse of trailing spouses, thereby responding to Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) call to analyse hegemonic femininities at the local, regional, and global level, and to explore how they are interlinked with each other. Drawing on 20 interviews conducted with trailing spouses in Hong Kong, we identify and describe some of the cultural discourses that frequently occur in the accounts of these women, and which provide insights into the gender hegemonies that exist in this community. Among the most prominent cultural discourses that these women regularly (re)produced throughout the interviews are the discourse of motherhood, which is often contrasted with the discourse of professionality; the discourse of change and adaptation, which is often linked to the discourse of regret, and the discourse of masculine hegemony, which is often related to the discourse of femininity. Throughout the interviews, these women often challenged and rejected hegemonic femininities on the local level but largely accepted and reinforced them on the regional and global level. We argue that the specific femininities which are considered to be hegemonic are highly context-dependent, and, unlike masculinities, the hegemony of femininities is a matter of internal degree – i.e. certain femininities take hegemonic status compared to other femininities but do not, unlike hegemonic masculinities, take a dominant position in the gender order. Rather, hegemonic femininities are subordinate and often defined in relation to and thus legitimised by masculinities.