In‐between: Re‐migration, orbital mobilities and emotional circulations of women from China to Taiwan and back to China

Abstract

After a first labour migration from the countryside to the city in China, some Chinese migrant working women are engaged in marriage migration to Taiwan. There, they face social, gendered and economic subalternity. Therefore, some women divorce and re‐migrate to China, to the city they had been previously working in, where they remobilise social, economic and emotional resources, as well as the new competences and knowledge capitalised during mobility experiences in China and Taiwan. They oscillate between new local and global scales, and generate creative social, economic and emotional connections among spaces, places and people. Mobilities take the shape of physical and virtual, material and emotional ‘orbits’, connecting diverse spatialities, temporalities and affections. Drawing on a multi‐situated global ethnographic work tracking women's migrations from China to Taiwan and from Taiwan to China, this article contributes to the study of physical and virtual, material and emotional mobilities of migrants in a globalised social world of interconnection and hypermobility. It provides insights to apprehend, theoretically, methodologically and empirically, the link between mobilities, emotions the digitalisation of social and economic practices. Navigating through spatialities, temporalities and emotions, Chinese women produce ‘in‐between’ cosmopolitan biographies inside mutating and fluid local and global, physical and virtual, spaces. Mobilities take an orbital shape, embedded in social and affectional relations, economic practices, and emotions.