Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic research with twelve Chinese-Indonesian women living in Singapore and Australia, this paper considers subjectivity and victimhood as transnational family narratives of political exile, two decades after experiences of state driven gendered ethnic violence.

Paper long abstract:

In response to the 1998 attacks on Chinese-Indonesians, many young women left Indonesia through family efforts to ensure their safety. Drawing on ethnographic research with twelve Chinese-Indonesian women living in Singapore and Australia, this paper considers challenges to transnational families due to the various states' mobility regimes two decades after experiences of gendered ethnic violence. In contrast to current approaches to these overseas Chinese-Indonesians broadly as migrants, we emphasize their departures and lives in terms of exile. Thus, we illuminate the subtle and enduring effects of state driven political violence on their current gendered practices and family ties, by examining their intimate lives, particularly reproductive and childrearing practices. Their life history narratives reveal fragmented identities and contingent household formations which, while enabling family resilience for some, created long-term fissures for the majority of our respondents. We argue for more critical attention to how gender mutually constitutes political experiences of exile, and the long-term impacts of state driven political violence on marriage and parent-child relations. In doing so we try to address how Chinese Indonesian women as marginalised groups operate within the discourse of state driven political violence as well as the degree to which their identification as 'victims' empower them to re-construct the state's mobility regimes.