Women of the Sisters' Hall: religion and the making of women's alternative space in Taiwan's economic restructuring

Abstract

Against the background of Taiwan's recent economic restructuring, this article investigates the lives of a group of working-class women who were believers of I-Kuan Tao, a sectarian religion, and who had by and large decided to remain single in order to better practice their religious teaching. They lived together in an I-Kuan Tao temple. This article situates singlehood in the literature of resistance and sees it as a strategy of these women seeking an alternative lifestyle from the culturally prescribed roles of wife, mother and daughter-in-law. Three interlocking factors are particularly important to an understanding of these women's experience: cultural (the Taiwanese patrilineal family), religious (I-Kuan Tao), and economic (Taiwan's post-World War II export-oriented industrialization and its recent economic restructuring). Paradoxically, while trying to establish an alternative social space, these women were also seeking cultural legitimacy for their choice. Marriage resistance, in this case, was an act of both transgression and conformity. Yet the different readings that these women and their families applied to their situations, as well as the ingenuous strategies they deployed to solve their predicaments, also added new elements to the cultural repertoire which, collectively considered, might broaden the range of options for future Taiwanese women who attempt a similar life trajectory. In this article, I therefore caution against a totalizing understanding of the concept of resistance based on its final result, but call for a more nuanced analysis focusing on the process.

Con la reciente reestructuración económica en Taiwán como telón de fondo, este artículo estudia la vida de un grupo de obreras creyentes del I-Kuan Tao, una religión sectaria, que habían decidido en su mayoría permanecer solteras para practicar mejor sus enseñanzas religiosas. Vivían juntas en un templo I-Kuan Tao. Este artículo sitúa la soltería en una literatura de resistencia y la ve como una estrategia de estas mujeres que buscaban un estilo de vida alternativo a sus roles culturalmente prescriptos de esposa, madre y nuera. Tres factores entrelazados son particularmente importantes para entender la experiencia de estas mujeres: el cultural (la familia taiwanesa, de línea paterna), el religioso (I-Kuan Tao), y el económico (la industrialización de Taiwán, orientada a la exportación luego de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, y su reciente reestructuración económica). Paradójicamente, mientras intentaban establecer un espacio social alternativo, estas mujeres también buscaban legitimidad cultural para su elección. La resistencia al matrimonio, en este caso, fue un acto tanto de transgresión como de conformidad. Sin embargo, las diferentes lecturas que estas mujeres y sus familias hacían de sus situaciones, así como las ingenuas estrategias que utilizaban para resolver sus predicamentos, también agregaron elementos nuevos al repertorio cultural que, considerados colectivamente, podrían ampliar el rango de opciones para las mujeres taiwanesas que en el futuro intenten una similar trayectoria de vida. En este artículo, por lo tanto, advierto en contra de un concepto totalizador de la idea de resistencia basado en su resultado final, pero llamo a un análisis más matizado que se enfoque en los procesos.

Keywords:

• global industrialization
• Taiwan
• religion
• I-Kuan Tao (Yiguan Dao)
• marriage resistance

Keywords:

• industrialización global
• Taiwán
• religión
• I-Kuan Tao [Yiguan Dao]
• resistencia al matrimonio

Acknowledgements

I thank Brenda Yeoh and the three anonymous reviewers of Gender, Place, and Culture for their invaluable critiques and Keith Markus for his editorial comments. I also thank Hannah Lessinger for her suggestions at the last stage of manuscript preparation.

Notes

1. The personal names used in this article are all pseudonyms.

2. T'ang-chu (literally ‘chairperson’) is the official I-Kuan Tao title given to someone who establishes, owns and/or manages a fo-t'ang (Jordan and Overmyer 1986, 222–3).

3. Based on the Taiwan government's statistics (DGBAS 2001), in 2000, women of unmarried status constituted only 20.67% of the whole female population above age 20, and the number drops to 6.42% of the female population above age 30, although we do observe an increase in the percentage of unmarried women (and, in relation, the divorce rate) over the past 20 years (Chang 1999, 73–5; Chen 2005, 62–3; Jones 2005, 94–6). Single women constitute an even smaller percentage of I-Kuan Tao believers. According to the World I-Kuan Tao Headquarters (2001a), I-Kuan Tao currently has two million members. While a precise number is unavailable, it seems to be the consensus of my I-Kuan Tao informants that there are only a few thousand members among its followers who have decided not to marry, with the majority of them being females. In Western countries, declining rates of marriage have been largely but not completely compensated by de facto arrangements such as common-law marriages or cohabitation. This does not appear to be the case in Taiwan (or elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia where non-marriage among women is also becoming common). There is little hard evidence on this, however (Jones 2005).

4. The I-Kuan Tao Pao-kuang Chien-t'o website: http://www.bgjd.org.tw/content.asp?MessageId = 70 (accessed April 9, 2007).

5. Some of them, particularly the senior ones, went to find jobs in northern Taiwan in their young adulthood where large factories were concentrated, but they returned home to Homei later in their lives and worked in local factories after the export-oriented industrialization developed at full speed in Homei and elsewhere in Taiwan.

6. NT$31 ≅ US$1.

7. This insight was offered by Dr Huang Yeewen of Changhua Christian Hospital, who contributed his experience as both a psychiatrist and chaplain in the Hospital, working closely with the same population on whom I based my current research, to understand the religious experience of women in this article.

8. Since the 1990s, there has been a religious revival in Taiwan in which women play an important role (Huang Forthcoming, 2009; Huang and Weller 1998; Weller 1999, 2005). A full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, however, the active participation of women at Sacred Heaven could be considered as a part of – or aided by – this larger trend.