‘I Didn’t Realise There Are So Many of Them’: Ethnic Chinese Women in Civic Life in Australia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the under-studied gender dimensions of immigrants’ civic life by focusing on the role of ethnic Chinese women in community-led volunteering in Victoria, Australia. It integrates population-based cross-sectional data from the 2016 Australian Census and qualitative data gathered from ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2019. Census data identifies a more salient presence of ethnic Chinese women than ethnic Chinese men in civic life. Our interviews demonstrate that these women’s civic participation remains patterned and constrained by heteronormative gender norms which extend beyond the private sphere and the workplace to civic life. These empirical findings challenge both the overly optimistic presumption that equates civic presence of migrant women with civic empowerment or emancipation and the overly pessimistic presumption of them as inactive or marginalised civic actors. Taking a relational approach, the article argues that civic engagement among women from ethnic and migrant backgrounds should be studied in relation to, rather than isolated from, divergent gendered experiences in the labour market and domestic sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• migrant women
• civic engagement
• migrant communities
• civic life
• volunteering
• ethnic Chinese
• Australia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all who contributed to and participated in the interviews. We would also like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments that have strengthened the article.

Disclosure Statement

The authors report no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

^1. While we note the importance of highlighting gender beyond a strict cisnormative binary, ‘woman/women’ and ‘man/men’ were the preferred terms used by the research participants. In some instances, ‘female’ and ‘male’ are used in reference to Census data; these terms are not used to indicate that gender is a binary biological given (Fausto-Sterling, 2012). The 2016 Census is the first Australian Census to incorporate an ‘other’ response option in addition to ‘male’ and ‘female’ as a means of capturing statistics on sex and gender diversity.

^2. All translations are by the first author (Pan) unless otherwise noted.

^3. Terrassa is not one of the interview participants and the quotes are sourced from the media.

^4. Jianmei is not one of the interview participants and the quotes are sourced from the media.

^5. Kate is not one of the interview participants and the quotes are sourced from the media.

Additional information

Funding

This article did not receive any external funding.