Maria Hwang

Maria Cecilia Hwang (Ph.D., Brown University) is assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Before joining McGill, she was a Henry Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies at Rice University. Hwang is a qualitative sociologist who employs ethnography to examine social and political-economic processes in globalization. She is interested in identifying the inequalities that emerge in globalization and the borders and boundaries it creates and sustains. Hwang’s current book project, Shadow Migration and Gendered Illegality: The Temporary Labor Migration of Filipina Sex Workers in Asia, examines how the forces of economic globalization and state migration regimes impact the lived experiences of sex workers from the Philippines who circulate across global cities in Asia. This project complicates contemporary discussions on migrant governance by illustrating how gender ideologies shape state migration regimes and expands current theorizations of global circuits by empirically demonstrating the asymmetries in the mobility of transnational professionals and transnational low-wage workers. Hwang has published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, International Migration Review, and International Labor and Working-Class History.