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In this chapter I detail my postcolonial feminist approach, with particular reference to recent moves in the discipline of geography (namely historical geography) to decolonialise the discipline and privilege women’s voices and experiences. I reflect on the use of colonialist tools for postcolonial purposes, my own positionality, and ways in which a focus on links between private and public spaces allows us to reconfigure female geographies. In doing so, I present historical geography and its postcolonial and feminist developments as an effective means of revising existing Chinese Australian historical research, understanding the complexity of female Chinese Australian lives in White Australia, and utilising such understandings to facilitate a clearer understanding of the contemporary Australian context. The book’s central theoretical and methodological position is also established, setting up the framework for the empirical analyses that follow. Within this discussion I posit intersectionality as a way to understand the diverse experiences and politics of belonging of Chinese Australian females in White Australia. I argue that intersectional analyses of women’s experiences are crucial to redressing androcentric and ethnocentric research approaches that have dominated Western research traditions and are pivotal in ensuring that ‘monolithic’ representations of ‘oppressed’ and ‘victimised’ Confucian woman are not perpetuated.

Intersectional Lives explores the varied experiences of Chinese Australian females across time and place during the White Australia Policy era (1901-1973). Chinese Australian women’s personal reflections are examined alongside postcolonial feminist readings of official records to illustrate how their everyday lives were influenced by multiple and fluid identities and subject positions including migrant, mother, daughter, wife, student, worker, entrepreneur and cultural custodian. This book provides new ways to conceptualise Chinese females in the diaspora as gendered, classed, culturally varied and racialised individuals with multiple forms of oppression, agency and mobility. It offers a revision of patriarchal understandings of Chinese Australian history and broader understandings of overseas Chinese migrations and settlement experiences. It also demonstrates how historical geography, informed by postcolonial feminist approaches, can facilitate more nuanced understandings of past (and present) times and places that include women’s diverse experiences at the domestic, local, national and international scale. This book will appeal to social and cultural geographers with additional audiences of interest in history and historical geography, ethnic and racial studies, gender studies, diaspora studies, migration studies, and gender and feminist studies.

Intersectional Lives explores the varied experiences of Chinese Australian females across time and place during the White Australia Policy era (1901-1973). Chinese Australian women’s personal reflections are examined alongside postcolonial feminist readings of official records to illustrate how their everyday lives were influenced by multiple and fluid identities and subject positions including migrant, mother, daughter, wife, student, worker, entrepreneur and cultural custodian. This book provides new ways to conceptualise Chinese females in the diaspora as gendered, classed, culturally varied and racialised individuals with multiple forms of oppression, agency and mobility. It offers a revision of patriarchal understandings of Chinese Australian history and broader understandings of overseas Chinese migrations and settlement experiences. It also demonstrates how historical geography, informed by postcolonial feminist approaches, can facilitate more nuanced understandings of past (and present) times and places that include women’s diverse experiences at the domestic, local, national and international scale. This book will appeal to social and cultural geographers with additional audiences of interest in history and historical geography, ethnic and racial studies, gender studies, diaspora studies, migration studies, and gender and feminist studies.