Home and the materialization of the divergent subjectivities of older women in Hong Kong

Although the social status of women in Hong Kong has changed significantly
in recent decades, Hong Kong women continue to perform mothering,
caregiving and homemaking tasks into late adulthood. Employing an
agential realist approach to analyse the homes and discursive–materialist
practices of three older women, this paper explores how the entanglement
of materialities, discourses and subjectivities at home as a site of cultural
action contributes to the ongoing enactment of divergent subjectivities of
older Hong Kong women. The structural–spatial configurations of the three
homes manifest the patrilineal and male-dominated family system in Hong
Kong, and such older women perform a set of ‘normal’ (house) wifely and
motherly duties linked to the maintenance of the male-dominated family
system. Nevertheless, these older women’s subjectivities and their domestic
worlds evolve through ongoing discursive–materialist practices. This paper
further argues that, even if such factors as materialities, structures and
practices either are neutral or indeed reinforce existing power imbalances,
the dynamic and ongoing intra-action of these factors results in exclusionary
but open conditions that may stabilize or subvert social phenomena, such
as the ones discussed in this study: patriarchal domestic practices in Hong
Kong homes.