The cultural logics of mothering practices : a study of educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the mothering practices of highly educated women from the Chinese families in Singapore and Hong Kong. It aims to “understand” (i.e., verstehen) the choices and constraints that these mothers with professional qualifications face in their work-family interactions. The key research question is how do educated Chinese mothers locate and interpret their mothering practices in the context of distinct social constraints and expectations. This study contributes to work-family literatures by enriching the discussion on Chinese societies in Asia context. In comparing the socio-political conditions of Singapore and Hong Kong, this research provides a reflexive discussion on women experiences in mothering and their diverse agency practices to respond to the dominant set of cultural repertoires of being “a responsible mother.” This study also highlights the aspects of social media platforms and the availability of outsourcing through the labour market that have extended the social spaces for the mothers to reinvent their mothering practices in globalizing context.

With reference to Bourdieu’s conceptual tools and Morgan (2001)’s three economies of family life, this study reveals the agency’s capacity to filter, locate and make choices in the everyday mothering practices to produce family quality time, to engage in the caring work for family wellbeing, to construct their own time and personal growth. This social process entails sophisticated elements of moral, political and emotional economies.

Inspired by Smith (1989, 1990), the methodological design of this qualitative research with feminist lens to embrace women’s own narratives as sources of knowledge and to learn their voices to renegotiate and reinvent their role and bodily engagement along the family dynamics. This qualitative research, with the ethnographic elements, invited 32 educated Chinese mothers to contribute with their experiences in the semi-structured interviews, online ethnography on the Singapore Mum Bloggers (SMBs), solicited diaries and questionnaires.

In the analysis section, it compares the socio-political and cultural context of Singapore and Hong Kong and finds that there are indeed diverse agency practices among the mothers of the two regions. In fact, their respective cultural logics could not be generalized into a common pattern distinctively with their embodied habitus to filter the order of things, and the different dimension of flexible improvisation found. Moreover, it is argued that these diverse agency practices are by large conforming to the dominant set of social expectations on the mother’s role in the family quality time, in children’s school work and school-related activities. This agency capacity, as discussed in the final part, does not necessary constitute or imply resistance force against the social structure.