Migrating identities: gender, whiteness and Britishness in post-colonial Hong Kong
- 12 February 2008
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Gender, Place & Culture
- Vol. 15 (1), 45-60
- https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690701817519
Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which notions of nationality, whiteness and gender are drawn upon by British expatriate women in the construction and performance of their identities in post-colonial Hong Kong. A British colony since the mid-nineteenth century, Hong Kong was returned to China in the 1997 handover to become a ‘Special Administrative Region’. Now, as the administrative workings of empire are receding, so too are the expectations about race and nationality which went with them. For the white British, the opportunities to reconfigure discourses and subjectivities of whiteness are there, although the findings of this research reveals the unevenness of take-up. The paper draws on a broad feminist post-structuralist approach to reveal the ways in which four different British women migrants position themselves in the changing landscape. The approach shows important patterns of difference and diversity between the women in the performances of gendered Britishness and whiteness, and in the extent to which these are used to redefine or challenge the memory of relations established through imperialism.Keywords
This publication has 31 references indexed in Scilit:
- Place, Space and Time: Contextualizing Workplace SubjectivitiesOrganization Studies, 2006
- ‘Playing’ Doctors and Nurses? Competing Discourses of Gender, Power and Identity in the British National Health ServiceSociological Review, 2003
- Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial IndiaThe Journal of British Studies, 2001
- The Incredible Vagueness of being British/EnglishInternational Affairs, 2000
- Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1999
- Placing the MigrantAnnals of the American Association of Geographers, 1999
- How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re)formation of Racialized CapitalismJournal of Historical Sociology, 1998
- Constructions of ‘whiteness’ in the geographical imaginationArea, 1998
- Stereotypes and Ambivalence: The construction of domestic workers in Vancouver, British ColumbiaGender, Place & Culture, 1997
- Becoming a ‘Girl’: post‐structuralist suggestions for educational researchGender and Education, 1993