Gengfan Chen

Under the supervision of Isabelle Gobatto (UMR Passages) and Simeng Wang (CERMES3)

This thesis focuses on therapeutic itineraries (TI), starting from the ailments linked to the issue of menstruation among Chinese women migrants in France. It seeks to discover the practices and representations of care for this population in France in order to understand the emic logic of these women, through factors such as language barriers, the culture of origin, and their traditions and family values, etc. Multi-located in Paris and Bordeaux, this thesis targets various profiles of Chinese women migrants, taking into account their regions in the country of origin and social status, such as students (in License, Master, thesis), stay-at-home mothers who came with or to join their husbands, researchers, women who work in restaurants, undocumented migrants such as sex workers, etc., in the hope of adding more typologies of Chinese women migrants to current research on this population. Under the current pandemic of COVID-19, despite its invisibility in medical services according to previous studies and my background, the Chinese population has been made very visible because of the stigma and prejudices associated with COVID-19 from the time of the epidemic in Wuhan. A new part is therefore added to the thesis on this impact of the pandemic among Chinese women migrants in France. This thesis is a qualitative study with an anthropological approach. Data is collected through direct observation and participant observation, semi-structured interviews and informal conversations. But with COVID-19 ongoing, places for observation are less accessible. Interviews can be conducted over the phone or face to face with masks.