Emotions, race and gender – female students’ emotional reasoning about academic becoming in transnational higher education

This paper explores the affects of academic becoming in transnational education. Very few studies have dealt with the affective structuring of students’ reasoning of academic identities in transnational education. This paper centers female students’ reasoning about their emotional (re)action in the processes of academic becoming, and shows that the processes of racialization become particularly visible in the emotional aspect of transnational schooling. It builds on an ethnographical study of students’ subjectivity processes in a jointly run Sino-Danish university in Beijing. Through a framework that links Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality with a proposed concept of emotional reasoning bridging Sara Ahmed’s notion of emotionality and Thomas Popkewitz’ rules of reasoning, the study elucidates how students’ affective positions are fashioned by unequal interlockings of race with gender and age. In this space, the students gain differentiated affective possibilities to act depending on whether their body is surfaced as white-young-female or Chinese-young-female. Thus the findings show that the hierarchies of emotions are linked to particular intersections of race with gender and age. These interlockings can thus be read as reflections of unequal interlocking of power relations in a transnational educational space.