Unsettling: Chinese international graduate women navigating compulsory flexibility and gendered chrononormativity

Abstract

Labour markets increasingly demand that workers embody flexibility and motility. The international education industry fosters identification with these values, encouraging graduates to see themselves as part of a mobile professional workforce. Yet in many societies, dominant social scripts idealise stability as a defining characteristic of adulthood, and women, in particular, are expected to embody the settlement and security of domestic life as a core social role. How do international graduate women navigate the competing demands to embody mobility and flexibility versus settlement and stability? This interviews-based study investigates this question by focussing on a group of 34 middle-cla..