A new generation of ‘incorporated wife’? making sense of international students’ spouses in the US

Abstract

Responding to the feminist call to reconfigure the outlook of transnational moving, this article explores the gendered experiences of the international students’ spouses behind the booming international education industry in the United States (US). With 20 in-depth interviews, we examined how immigration and university policies feminize the spouses of international students and how they navigate this feminized role. We show that the categorization of spouses as ‘dependents’, by the Department of Homeland Security of the US, justifies and normalizes the discriminating policies towards the spouses, which introduce and perpetuate the gendered binaries of student/spouse, initiator/follower, independent/dependent, and public/private, during which the spouses are repositioned to the feminized half. That said, spouses demonstrate agentic contestations during this process. Particularly, we show that female and male spouses adopt different strategies to transcend the femininity conferred by this role: female spouses’ contestation is more alliance-based while male spouses tend to follow an individualist approach.