The Talking of Objects: Migratory Experiences and Subjectivities of British Chinese Women in Contemporary Britain

The British Chinese have been one of the longest standing ethnic minorities in Britain, however, they have largely been “invisible” in the public and academic discourse. In light of this, the voices of British Chinese women have been lesser heard and while there is some research conducted on the
experiences of the British Chinese, the intersection between ethnicity and gender has been less considered. The identities of British Chinese women swing between stereotypes of being
“submissive”, “sexualised” or “exotic”, each one in turn distorts the lived experiences of British Chinese women. To productively address the lack of representation of British Chinese women, this study adopted visual ethnography and material culture as a strategy to bring forward their personal, intimate and creative voices. Through the approaches found in visual ethnography and material culture, the women were given a context where they are at the forefront of expressing their subjectivities to articulate the cultural experience of British Chineseness from their perspective.

Drawing on the emergent "material turn” in migration studies, this study situated the subjectivities of British Chinese women as migrants and settlers through their personal objects. Through this approach, women from different backgrounds and generations were invited to articulate their feelings and experiences through the context of their personal, material objects. The stories of these objects became the inspiration for their art making and their artwork was curated into an online exhibition , which was one output of the thesis. This creative form of data collection 1 views visibility and material culture as acts of social resistance to make visible the lesser heard voices of British Chinese women.

Centred on facilitating the visibility of the women and representation, Materially Embodied Visions was developed as a conceptual framework to distill the interdependent relationship between people, objects, and art making in this study. The experimental and participatory nature of this approach enabled the women a greater range of self expression to situate their identities within a wider public context. The objects and artworks from the two generations uncovered a generational difference in how the women used objects and art making to articulate their agency and selfhood. For the first generation, these migrant women were more concerned with creating a stable and secure future and therefore acquiring new material objects (and therefore to achieve migratory stability) was more significant than to publicly preserve old objects from their past. The vantage point of the first generation Chinese women was orientated towards the future and their migratory aspiration was imagined through the acquisition of new material objects, rather than preserving the old. In this sense, art making was extremely important for these women as it allowed them the freedom to articulate their dreams and aspirations about the future and their desire to acquire migratory stability
through new material goods.

In contrast, physical objects from the past were highly significant for the second generation women. As women with Chinese ancestry born into British society, the women shared a commonality; they all experienced a sense of isolation from one another and did not easily see their experiences represented in society. To address this lack of social representation, material objects became a way for these women to articulate the many questions, complexities and nuanced experiences of being British Chinese women. In the art workshops, the women shared stories with each other as they used objects to articulate questions of belonging within the present, past and future. The art workshop functioned as a social space which brought together second generation women to share experiences and this space became a point of community building. The approaches found in visual ethnography and material culture captured a portrait of British Chinese women across two generations as they contested histories, articulated present day inequalities, and projected their aspirations into hopeful futures.

The research seeks to address the following questions: Can a gendered perspective give visibility to British Chinese women and interrogate the wider study of the British Chinese? Can a material culture perspective shed new light on the understanding of Chinese migration in Britain? Can artistic
practices such as visual ethnographic methods and curating, which are sited outside traditional migration studies, offer an innovative way of research and form an integral part of academic exploration? How can this experimental approach contribute to the existing understanding of Chinese migration in Britain at large? In particular, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the study of British Chinese and towards the study of transnational migration in general. It gives voice and empowers the underrepresentation of British Chinese women by unpacking the complex relationship between materiality, gendered identities and representation in migrant worlds. In addition, an important finding of this study is the development of visual ethnographic methods as an innovative approach that has the potential to enrich the existing research of migration studies.