Where is my home? Sense of home among rural migrant women in contemporary China

•Address a multi-scalar sense of home in urban destinations and rural origins.•Feminism and confucian ideology explain Chinese rural migrant women’s sense of home.•Family gender roles, social relations and sensory experiences define home in China.•Rural migrant women’s various sense of home reveal China’s changing gender ideology. In the context of changing patterns in migration and migrant population, the concept of ‘home’ for migrants has broadened, extending to multiple dimensions and scales. While working and living in Chinese cities, rural migrant women face both institutional and individual gender discrimination under Confucian ideology and patriarchal culture. Meanwhile, in contemporary China, a series of changes in context, including education massification, cultural modernisation and the improvement in women’s socioeconomic status, have transformed the thoughts and behaviours of rural migrant women, leading to their diversified construction of a home. Based on in-depth face-to-face interviews and employing ‘critical geographies of home’, this study explores rural migrant women’s sense of home in contemporary China at multiple scales and in urban destinations and rural origins. The study reveals that rural migrant women in China create various forms of intimacies in their daily lives and negotiate the power relations embedded in Confucian ideology to build their lived and desired ‘home’ at multiple scales. The ‘soft’ environment and material objects contribute to their sense of home across the boundaries of urban and rural areas. Overall, the study underscores that rural migrant women’s unstable and fragile ‘home’ reflects their plight in contemporary urban China. Nevertheless, cities provide an important platform for some migrant women to escape from persistent gender discrimination in rural areas and develop a sense of home based on independence, equal gender norms, respect from locals, and engagement in urban life.