Female individualization?: Transnational mobility and media consumption of Asian women

Abstract

This article draws attention to the rise and the problematic of female individualization among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women in the current context of transnational mobility and media consumption. The claim that education encourages work freedom, economic power and the enlargement of choice can be illusory for educated women in these countries, where gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions persist and continue to structure labour market outcomes and lifestyles. Despite the paradoxical outcomes and anxieties as to where women actually stand in a move towards individualization, multiple ways of imagining such a possibility are widely open in mediated cultural domains, with proliferating resources for the mobilization of self. The women's desire to move is constituted by the contradictory socioeconomic relations, as well as by the cultural-symbolic forms by which everyday life is lived out, re-thought and re-articulated in its intersection with the emergence of precarious individualized identities. © 2010 SAGE Publications.