The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

Abstract

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.

Keywords:

• Social movements
• women as new activists
• private and public
• maternalism
• Sunflower Movement
• Taiwan

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to this article’s two reviewers, whose comments improved my theoretical framework and analysis. This body of research is part of a larger project, Imagining Change: Women and the Making of Civil Societies in the Arctic Region, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, led by Professor Diana Mulinari at Lund University and funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, 2010-33781-77659-25) between 2011 and 2015. I presented earlier drafts of this article at several conferences. I thank Kjell Nilsson, Yun Fan, Li-Ling Tsai, Po-Wei Chen and Yu-Hsuan Lin for their productive comments. I gratefully acknowledge research support from the Department of Gender Studies at Lund University, the Department of Sociology and Work Science at Gothenburg University in Sweden, and the Graduate Institute of Gender Equity Education at Kaohsiung Normal University in Taiwan.

Notes

1. Two former student movements (the ‘Wild Lily Movement’ in 1990 and ‘Wild Strawberry Movement’ in 2008) were named by the students themselves. In 1990, students used the wild lily, a native species that grows on mountains in Taiwan, to represent the strength of local people striving for democracy. In 2008, students employed wild strawberries to deconstruct the image of ‘fragile’ young people as ‘strawberries that cannot bear any stress’. In contrast, the Sunflower Movement’s name was bestowed almost accidentally by the media and is not accepted by many who are active in the movement. I will nonetheless use this term because of its familiarity: it has appeared in academic articles. In the interest of brevity, I use the ‘Sunflower Movement’ in my article’s title to encompass both the trade pact protest and the nearly simultaneous anti-nuclear protest, since many activists participated in both.

2. This was supposed to be the fourth nuclear power plant in Taiwan, proposed in 1980 and under construction since 1999. The first two nuclear power plants in the same area were named as two of the three most dangerous nuclear power plants in the world (Butler, 2011). The third nuclear power plant is in Southern Taiwan, about 80 km from Kaohsiung, the city where the informants in this article live.

3. I conducted the interviews mainly in Mandarin Chinese, sometimes mixed with some Taiwanese (except for the interview of Gui-Lan, who speaks mostly Taiwanese). My first language is Taiwanese; I learned Mandarin Chinese, Taiwan’s official language, in school. All translations are my own.