The Patriarchal State, Women’s Movements, and Women’s Studies in Taiwan

This chapter introduces the socio-historical context in which women’s studies emerged and has developed in Taiwanese society. In order to display the connection between structural forces and social action, I specify three important forces that have worked either to construct and enforce a certain patriarchal ideal of Taiwanese womanhood or, on the contrary, to assert and reinvent a self-determined subjectivity for women during Taiwan’s democratic transition in the 1980s. They are the patriarchal state, on the one hand, and the women’s movement and women’s studies on the other.