Mothering, human capital, and the “ideal immigrant”

Abstract

In this paper, we explore how women negotiate femininity and family in relation to their children's schooling within a context of powerful discourses—in particular human capital theory—that produce the subject position of the “ideal immigrant.” Our study is based on mothers and daughters who had recently arrived in Canada from a variety of source countries including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Iran and who were settled in an outer suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. Using in-depth interviews, we illustrate how the women in their struggles over gender, generation, class, and race inequalities negotiated and challenged human capital discourse at the three sites of paid jobs, children's schooling, and hopes and dreams about daughters' futures. While the women made claims through discursive prisms of human capital to articulate their longings, their experiences also point to the discursive incoherence of human capital and illuminate its ideological disguise of power relations.