Recycling Working Daughters? Hong Kong Older Women’s Divergent Lives and Subjectivities

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

The proposed research will explore the experiences and identities of a particular generation of older women, who were born between 1940 and 1955 (aged 61-76 in year 2016). This particular generation of women had been working daughters and household financial pillars (Salaff 1995) in the 1960s and 1970s. After marriage, their role as unwaged “homemakers” became integral to their identities (Lee 2002; Chan 2008), though some subtly resist their domestic roles (Ho 2007; Chan 2012), and the caregiver role persists even when they enter late adulthood (Liu, Cheng and McGhee 2001). As focus on Hong Kong economy shifted from a manufacturing economy to a financial and service economy, these women have been facing underemployment and unemployment since 1990s (Choi 2011) and (forced) retirement recently. Although research had studied how this group performed as working daughters in the past (Salaff 1995; Choi 1998; 2011), as well as the present situation of older women in general (Woo et al 2008), no research has explored how older women develop divergent subjectivities in relation to the changing material-discursive-structural forces of Hong Kong society, and how their evaluation of their life experiences and their present everyday practices produce fluidand complex subjectivities.

Funding Source: RGC - General Research Fund (GRF)
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date01/01/1831/12/20

Keywords

  • women
  • qualitative research
  • life history
  • subjectivity
  • agential realism

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