Between Family Responsibilities and Individual Desires: Gendered Negotiations of Post‐Graduation Migration Among Chinese Female International Students

ABSTRACT

While international students' post‐graduation migration decisions have received growing scholarly attention, existing research often reduces them to binary outcomes and explains them mainly in terms of economic rationality, overlooking the gendered and socially embedded nature of these processes. Drawing on the Gendered Geographies of Power framework, this study examines how Chinese female international students navigate migration decisions at the intersection of the expanded agency enabled by transnational mobility and enduring gendered obligations. Based on interviews with 48 graduates from European and North American universities, the study identifies five distinct trajectories: Determined Returnees, Reluctant Returnees, Nonconformist Stayers, Ambivalent Stayers, and Opportunity‐oriented Cosmopolitans. These patterns reveal that migration is not a discrete choice but a process of gendered meaning‐making driven by the negotiation of gender norms across multiple geographic scales—from the body and family to the nation‐state. The findings highlight a critical tension between cognitive agency and corporeal agency: while overseas education provides a reflexive space to reshape gendered self‐understandings, actual migration outcomes remain strongly conditioned by dynamics at the family scale. Specifically, against the backdrop of China's One‐Child Policy and limited public eldercare, women's mobility becomes increasingly tethered to affective filial obligations and intergenerational care responsibilities. The study contributes to international student migration literature by conceptualizing migration as a socially embedded process of meaning‐making rather than a static rational calculation. It highlights the emotional tensions involved in these negotiations and reveals a hybrid gender order in contemporary China, in which women's increased educational attainment coexists with enduring patriarchal expectations in family life.