Making ‘mobile’ homes: female professionals’ negotiations of singlehood in Shenzhen, China

This paper explores the relationship between young female professionals’ negotiations of singlehood and their everyday home-making practices in Shenzhen—one of China’s fastest-growing cities. Using biographical narratives and home video tours of nine female professionals who relocated to Shenzhen from other regions in China, this paper finds that, rather than viewing singlehood as a temporary life stage, these women leverage their middle-class privileges and Shenzhen’s merit-based policy environment to reshape it as a period of autonomy. Their practices of selectively unpacking personal belongings while strategically planning for future home-moving demonstrate these women’s agency in pursuing their expected life choices. These home-making practices indicates a form of spatial agency that resembles ‘sailing’ through waters of precarity in one’s life course. Nevertheless, the flexibility that these women achieved also underscores the unsustainable nature of their rental lives, the pressure of long working hours, and anxieties about ageing and long-term stability. The findings of this study provide the gender lens in understanding single people’s geographies of home and China’s urbanisation.