Becoming a Third Sex? Chinese Women and Postgraduate Education

This article explores how women's postgraduate education becomes entangled with heteronormative gender regimes enacted in public discourses that caution against women becoming too educated in China. The cultural capital of the PhD is obliterated by the loss of cultural capital resulting from gender non-conformity. Two powerful discourses—‘leftover women’ and women with PhDs as a ‘third sex’ operate in tandem, we argue, to make the decision to study at postgraduate level challenging for women in China. Theoretically informed by neotraditionalist familialism, heteronormativity, chrononormativity and the potent affective ecology of shame, this research makes a significant contribution to scholarship on gender and higher education internationally by analysing the lived experiences of 15 Chinese postgraduate female students. The article suggests that by analysing gender and higher education in temporal terms, or culturally loaded age and gender-appropriate decision-making processes in China, chrononormativity effectively undoes the graduate premium and cultural capital of those Chinese women who do not marry or reproduce. We argue, however, that Chinese women are not powerless victims of patriarchal culture. Many are choosing to study for their PhDs (42% of PhDs in Mainland China in 2020 were gained by women), and in doing so are opening up options and lifestyles which disrupt, add value to or query the traditional gendered social order.