Date : 2024-03-22

Wednesday Gender Seminar - March 27

Enacting Mundanity: How Digital Technologies Shape Gendered Transnational Eldercare

Speaker: Ms. HUANG Jiying (MPhil student, Gender Studies Programme, Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Moderator: Prof. HAN Ling (Assistant Professor, Gender Studies Programme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Abstract:

Scholarship on care has demonstrated the pronounced gendered nature of care and tends to conceptualize humans as sole agents, comprising caregivers and care recipients. Recent research, however, calls for an equal focus on materiality, as its incorporation defines what care itself is. In the context of transnational family practices, the pervasive integration of digital technologies has prompted scholars to acknowledge new care without physical proximity. Bringing technology to the forefront, the study examines what kind of new care it is; how it is shaped by digital technology, and how technology co-created people's gender identity in shaping gendered care. Through in-depth interviews with 39 Chinese transnational families, this study unveils that digital technologies afford the specific content of care through the practice of "enacting mundanity". Video calls emerge as a central practice in constructing mundanity, contingent upon the collaborative engagement of both care parties and the technology itself. In addition, a new intergenerational emotion emerges in the relation between care parties and technology. Masculinity and femininity of offspring acquire their meaning through embeddedness in working technologies to fulfil the emotion expectation.

Speaker's Biography:

Jiying Huang is an MPhil student in the Gender Studies Programme, affiliated with the Sociology department at CUHK. She is also a part-time research assistant at the Gender Research Centre of the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies. Her research interests focus on the material connections between gender and technology, particularly how gender is co-created alongside the use and non-use of digital technologies.

Registration link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13685772