Complicating the Entrepreneurial Self: Professional Chinese Immigrant Women Negotiating Occupations in Canada

A core mode of governance in the era of neoliberalism is through the production of ‘entrepreneurial self’. This paper explores how the ‘entrepreneurial self’ is produced for 21 Chinese immigrant women in Canada. The women displayed extraordinary entrepreneurialism by investing in Canadian education. Becoming entrepreneurial, however, is more than an individualised ‘choice’. It is imbricated with the ideology of meritocracy cultivated in China, the ‘credential and certificate regime’ in Canada, and the gendered expectations in the host labour market and at home. Given the ideological confluence, and the material conditions the women lived, a feminized and racialized labour is reproduced.

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