Spatialising domestic practices: Hong Kong women’s life stories of domesticity and their disjunctive modern womanhood

How do women manage domestic work spatially? How does that change throughout life and relate to their subjectivities and womanhood? Informed by feminist geographers’ concept of ‘lived’ space and queer studies’ concept of disjunctive modernity, this paper spatialises women’s domestic practices through examining 43 older Hong Kong women’s life stories on domesticity. Hong Kong women, since childhood, have creatively employed temporal-spatial strategies to multiply and shrink domestic space to negotiate domestic responsibilities and gender hierarchy prescribed by family and society. Domestic space changes throughout life and intersects with other spaces, including work, institutional, entertainment and public spaces. Through performing various domestic spatial practices at different points in their life course, these women have developed gendered subjectivities such as self-reliant and independent ‘modern’ womanhood, dutiful daughters and tiresome working mothers, which complement, negotiate and contradict with each other, constituting what we term ‘disjunctive modern Hong Kong womanhood’.