Suchergebnisse

This book is the first in English to consider women's movements and feminist discourses in twentieth-century Taiwan. Doris T. Chang examines the way in which Taiwanese women in the twentieth century selectively appropriated Western feminist theories to meet their needs in a modernizing Confucian culture. She illustrates the rise and fall of women's movements against the historical backdrop of the island's contested national identities, first vis-à-vis imperial Japan (1895-1945) and later with postwar China (1945-2000). --From publisher's description

Abstract
In 2019 Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage pursuant to the Constitutional Court's decision two years earlier. This article adds to previous research on same-sex marriage in Taiwan in two respects. Firstly, this study contends that most of the major arguments made in the Court's decision in 2017 that legalised same-sex marriage were already present in several legislative bills that preceded the Court's ruling. Secondly, the separate same-sex marriage law that was finally passed in 2019 reflected the government's endeavour to reach a compromise in meeting some of the demands of both advocates and opponents of marriage equality in Taiwanese society. The story of the marriage equality debate is analysed through textual comparisons of relevant government documents, ngo websites of marriage equality advocates and opponents, newspaper articles, and academic journal articles.

In the twentieth century, Taiwanese feminists have selectively appropriated various strands of Western feminism to improve women's status and meet women's needs. In this article, several scholarly works pertaining to the analysis of various strands of Taiwanese feminism, and the historical development of women's movements published in the 1990s, as well as after, will be reviewed and discussed. The lifting of martial law in 1987 created the political climate that enabled Taiwanese feminists to lift their self-censorship and contribute to the diversification of feminist discourses and ngos in Taiwanese civil society. The mid-1990s was another watershed in the transformation of Taiwanese feminist discourses and women's movement strategies.

In 1995, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (hereafter referred to as the Platform for Action) promulgated during the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women called for the use of gender mainstreaming as a strategy in policy formulations for pursuing the goals of gender equality. Feminist leaders of NGOs who joined the Taiwanese government in the mid-1990s were strategically positioned to contribute to policy formulations that would integrate gender-mainstreaming perspectives into policies and institutions in the Taiwanese government. Among the various approaches to gender-mainstreaming, taking positive actions to set pro-women policy agendas have been the predominant approach deployed by the Taiwanese government for promoting gender parity. However, the government's gender-mainstreaming strategies also include limited applications of the expert-technocratic approach to policy-making and the transversal approach for gauging public opinions through dialogues in citizens' forums to explore ways to meet the needs of women from diverse backgrounds. This article assesses the progress the Taiwanese government and civil society have made toward eliminating gender inequality as well as the specific areas that still need improvement before greater gender parity can be achieved.

This essay examines the ways in which Margaret Mead's research findings in New Guinea were transmitted to a Chinese-speaking audience through Yang Mei-hui's annotated Chinese summary of part 4 of Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). In so doing, Yang served as a cultural intermediary who transmitted Mead's concept of cultural relativism on gender-role formation to her Chinese-speaking audience. Yang's annotated summary (1973) serves as a case study of the ways in which a cultural intermediary's injections of her personal commentaries within a specific cross-cultural context can facilitate her audience's understanding of the arguments made in the original English text. In this essay, I undertake a textual comparison of Yang's Chinese annotated summary with Mead's original English text for the purpose of evaluating Yang's effectiveness in conveying Mead's main arguments. In the 1970s and thereafter, Taiwanese feminists applied Mead's concept of cultural relativism of socially constructed gender to subvert the rigid gender roles in Taiwanese society. In so doing, they contributed to women's self-determination during the era of Taiwan's democratization.