‘Looking nice for my husband is a full-time job’: humour as a means to challenge hegemonic femininities

Abstract

In this paper we explore humour as a means to challenge hegemonic femininities by analysing the ways in which women expatriates use this discursive strategy when talking about how their lives have changed as a result of moving to Hong Kong to follow their husbands on their overseas work assignment. These women had successful careers ‘back home’ but due to moving to Hong Kong they had to put them ‘on hold’ and in some cases give them up. Thus, for these women, moving overseas meant not only making a new start but also re-defining and sometimes re-inventing who they are and how they view themselves – in particular in relation to their immediate family and what they perceive to be the expectations of their new environment. Drawing on 15 audio-recorded interviews and five online blogs, we use interactional sociolinguistic methods to analyse how these ex-professional expatriate women use humour as an interactional resource to construct a place for themselves and to describe who they are. They achieve this interactionally by making fun of themselves and sending up some of the stereotypical expectations often projected onto expatriate women, such as the image of the ‘tai tai’, a wealthy married woman who does not work and enjoys a life of luxury. These women thereby create a space for themselves in-between the predominant expectations of their environment which are closely linked to hegemonic femininities (of expatriate women as tai tais, wives and mothers) and their own expectations and ideals (which are often closely related to their previous professional careers). Humour is a valuable resource to achieve this as it enables them to bring up and strategically draw on a diversity of gendered roles while at the same time distancing themselves from them and challenging the hegemonic femininities that underlie them.