Hmong Women Down Under: Diaspora, Gender and Agency in Contemporary Australia

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic study into the life experiences of five first-generation Hmong refugee women now living in Australia. Hmong migrant women's narratives of mobility, displacement and resettlement provide the basis for analysing successive phases of migration, as it took place from Laos to their arrival in Sydney and Canberra. Through processes of forced migration, family breakup and a shifting of gendered roles in the family, the women in this thesis have transformed their lives and paved the way for their children start life as Australians.

In 1976, the Hmong women with whom I worked in Sydney were among the first generation of arrivals in Australia. They came from Thai refugee camps, where they had lived in precarious conditions following their escape from Laos and the communist Pathet Lao regime that came to power in 1975. On arrival in Sydney, with the assistance of the Australian Government, they found temporary residence in migrant hostels and Housing Commission estates. Lacking the relevant skills and qualifications, newly arrived Hmong women found work in low-skilled, poorly paid employment. Since those early days, however, major transitions in their lives have brought about both significant opportunities and challenges. These shifts have also been important junctures that have reshaped their lives, identities, and subjectivities.

Traditional Hmong culture relegates women to an inferior status in society. A woman's social value is measured by her ability to continue her husbands' patriline and by her exemplary performance of traditional gender roles. Growing up in Laos, the Hmong patriarchal system circumscribes women's ability to exercise their equal capacity for agency. First-generation Hmong women who migrated to Australia, for example, were socialised into a patriarchal system that shaped their consciousness to a life of subordination. Their gendered memories spoke of marginalisation and their subordinated positions in Hmong households and communities in their homeland. As a coping mechanism, at a young age they learned to negotiate the limiting nature of the Hmong patriarchal structure.

When my interlocutors migrated to Australia, they continued to live within gendered ideologies and practices. However, migration and resettlement in Australia also encouraged an exploration of new social frontiers, as these women contested and negotiated traditional expectations and gendered identities. Such identities shifted and weakened through exposure and adaptation of both women and men to Western-gendered values.

This study shows that despite the lack of material and cultural capital when they first arrived, first-generation Hmong women have managed to transform their lives by maximising opportunities of employment, financial security, access to social networks and exposure to western rights and values. Their efforts have enabled them to tacitly exercise greater domestic and cultural identity and agency. With such personal and socio-economic shifts and greater agency, Hmong migrant women have transformed traditional concepts of Hmong womanhood and strengthened their role as culture bearers; maintaining inter-clan relationships and provided greater agency for their daughter's generation in the Australian diaspora.

Drawing upon in-depth interviews, participant observation, and focus group discussions with five respondents over one year, I bring to light the implicit and explicit agency of Hmong refugee women now living in Australia. I pay particular attention to their economic activities, and their homemaking as an expression of domestic authority, and seek to understand the inter-generational impact of their newly forged agency on their daughters -- second-generation Hmong women born in Australia. This study provides an important basis of comparison between Hmong migrant-refugee women and other migrant women of different ethnicities in Australian cities.