Acting Otherwise: Institutionalization of Women’s/Gender Studies in Taiwan’s Universities 陳佩英，華梵大學人文教育研究中心教育學程©版權所有 論文草稿，請勿引用。如有急需，請與作者聯繫！  This paper aims to explore the role of intellectual activism in the emergence and institutionalization of women’s and gender studies in Taiwan. I developed a microfoundational approach to illustrate the interplay of identity, action and structure in order to explore how, and by what means, women’s studies practitioners and feminist scholars created networks, formed identities, and strategized action that led to the production and transmission of feminist perspectives and knowledge in Taiwanese academia. I have argued that the form, scope, and degree of the institutionalization of women’s and gender studies in Taiwan has been the result of the ongoing, multifaceted efforts of these academicians whom I call pathfinders. Main Concepts A microfoundational approach was developed for understanding pathfinders underlined by three main concepts--consciousness-raising, formation of personal and collective identity, and strategies of action. Consciousness and Identity For this study purpose, the concept of identity is defined by both static and proccessual properties. The construction of individual subjectivity can be located in two domains: one is the relatively static reference to professional identity associated with the pathfinders’ identification with work-assigned roles and ethics; the other pertains to the dynamic nature of identity, that is, the formation of the feminist/political identity that might work “against the grain.” While identity and consciousness are diversely defined in feminist theorization, I differentiate the two terms as follows. Keeping in mind that the “pathfinders” in this study are the feminist scholars who sought to institutionalize women’s studies in Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, I define the term “consciousness” as an awareness of institutional sexism, identification of feminist values, and reflection upon personal action, and a sensitivity toward identity politics and the conflicts between the scholarly interests and political interests of women’s studies. It is developmental and can be changed along with consciousness-raising (Paccione, 2000). The term “identity,” in this study, refers to the individual and collective performance of professional roles and feminist consciousness. It is key concept to understand value-added social action (Giddens, 1991; Castells, 1997; Mecucci, 1988, 1992, 1995). Identity encompasses one’s scholarly and public practices, including the embodiment of a feminist orientation in the teaching, research, networking, and struggles in which one engages within academe and social movements. Strategies of Action Strategies of action are conceived as the nodal points of a moving interplay between identity-action and structure in a historical process. The basic idea of “strategy,” defined by Swidler (1986), is not meant as a plan for attaining a goal; rather, it is a general and incorporating way of organizing action to achieve multiple life goals. In order to grasp the dynamic of action and structure, I formulate the crucial elements of strategies of action into three dimensions—empowerment, networking, and confrontation. 1. Empowerment Empowerment involves cognitive restructuring or consciousness-raising to construct an alternative knowing and self-valorization of social world (Weeks, 1998; Hekman, 1998; Sandoval, 2000). It is thus developed and attained through the affirmation of identity. As Weeks (1998) posits, pathfinders are able to affirm themselves through “a being of the doing” and “a being of becoming” (p. 133). 2. Networking Networking, for the purpose of this study, consists of outreaching, which builds ties among friends and supporters. The primary purpose of networking is to make meaningful links among people in order to accumulate the social capital that is essential to social action. The benefits of social networking include information exchange, social and emotional support, consciousness raising, identity formation, provision of services and cultural activities, developing a repertoire of strategies, and mobilization (Taylor & Whittier, 1995; Minkoff, 1999). 3. Confrontation The concept of confrontation in this study is associated with individual pathfinders who desire to act otherwise by grasping the emotions and feelings of being discriminating, by deconstructing traditional values and meanings, by leaving a familiar network, and by encountering, living with, or resolving conflicts. Confrontation is also defined as boundary-drawing actions. It entails reflection upon the contextualization and representation of experiences, voices, and interests, and encountering the power relations between women (Weeks, 1998; Sandoval, 2000). As for collective action, confrontation in this study particularly refers to advocacy strategy. Advocacy, according to Minkoff (1999),i is often reactive and implemented through lobbying, litigation, media alerts, and so forth, to influence policies and public opinion. Such advocacy attacks the intermediate level of institutional or bureaucratic norms and usually is used as a means to achieve collective demands of reform or a change in policy. Methodology I employed a multi-case research strategy (Yin, 1994), with open-ended interviewing (Seidman, 1998) as the primary qualitative research device, to investigate the emergence and institutionalization of women’s studies at two Taiwanese universities--Yushan University and Formosa University (pseudonyms). I interviewed thirty-five academicians for this study.ii They can be divided into two types of people. The first type numbered thirty-one that consisted of active feminist scholars and practitioners (current and former directors, staff, and faculty). Seven of these thirty-one people were male academicians.iii The second type numbered four out of the total and consisted of three current officers in the Ministry of Education and one former staff member from the Asia Foundation. The average interview lasted about one and a half hours, but the length of interviews ranged from thirty minutes to six hours. I largely relied on printed data to cross-check and to draw connections to a larger picture of Taiwan’s academic contexts and society. The data included curriculum and programs of women’s studies, faculty curriculum vitae, number of students, evaluations, budgeting, meeting notes, and memos, organizational newsletters and magazines,iv and the journal articles, books, and theses of feminist academicians, graduate students, and research centers. Results In this section, I explored the meanings of the pathfinders’ social action and made connection between identity and action and action and structure that has effected on the emergence of women’s studies in Taiwan. I first explicate the interplay between identity and action, within which the pathfinders’ identities are reaffirmed in a process of enactment. I then describe three dimensions (empowerment, networking, and confrontation) to the strategies of action the pathfinders have taken to enact feminist values and thereby institutionalize women’s studies at Yushan University and Formosa University. Identity-Action The pathfinders in this study, on their journeys to discover a feminist identity, have constructed their complex, multiple paths of becoming in the contexts of learning, reading, doing, and advocating women’s studies and feminist thinking. Their “becoming” is organized around the principle of an “eternal return” of feminist values, which entails a selection of specific meanings and practices that both delimit and enable the pathfinders. This process of selective action, with its consequences for personal and social identity, can be conceived as an orientation and an ongoing enactment, rather than as the result of a single action or declaration of identity (Weeks, 1998). In the process of feminist awakening, many of the pathfinders at different times experienced several types of change—contextual, emergent, transformative (Paccione, 2000). A “womanist” model based on the positive influence a mother or grandmother, a small family structure without boy siblings, or exposure to the women’s movement constituted the contextual seeds of consciousness that helped the pathfinders grow into feminists in a later period. Study overseas or graduate training at a Taiwanese university was crucial to all of the pathfinders’ first intensive exposure to feminist critical thinking and immersion in feminist literature. I view the becoming of the pathfinders as a process by which they have enacted feminist values in their lives. These values comprise the various sources of their desire to become feminists and to engage in women’s and gender studies. Some pathfinders were propelled by the simple idea that the field of women’s studies is worth pursuing. Some observed or experienced sexual discrimination, motivating them to do research about patriarchal systems and practices. Some converted themselves into feminists through intensive exposure to literature on women’s movements and the feminism of the West. Some participated in the women’s movement in Taiwan and began to conceive of feminist thinking as a source of empowerment that could potentially change women’s lives. They have all been through the processes of deconstructing and reconstructing ways of learning, seeing, and affirming a counter-hegemonic, feminist standpoint. They have also committed themselves to a collective project to reconstruct women’s images and voices by producing and diffusing knowledge about women. Through these actions, they chose to identify with feminism and thus to heighten their consciousness of gender relations in both academia and society of Taiwan. The pieces of the pathfinders’ life histories have shown that identities do not form in a social or historical vacuum. Their multiple paths of becoming thus demonstrate that the pathfinders’ formation of a feminist identity resulted from the interplay between consciousness of the self and reconceptualization of the outside world and its gender relations. The shifting self-consciousness was thus manifest in the mutating consciousness of social reality at the micro-level and the change of gender relations in society at the macro-level. Like many developing countries, where women’s activism has been closely affiliated with a modern agenda for advocating human rights and a paradigm for economic development (Mohamad, 1994), a humanist and rationalist-liberal framework has been predominant in women activist circles in Taiwan. Primarily mobilized by the Awakening since the 1980, they have promoted educational and legal reforms in order to bring social justice to all genders. In the Taiwanese academic world of the 1980s, female academicians employed the framework of “women in development,” endorsed by the first United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985), to broaden women’s participation in remunerative work and in the public sector. The political stance, whether overt or covert, taken by both women’s movement organizations and women’s studies, confronted the “legitimate womanhood” overdetermined by the patriarchal state. In effect, the state had re-appropriated traditional virtues of womanhood, thereby legitimating the subordination of Taiwanese women as a group in the process of post-war modernization and industrialization. The pathfinders and women’s movement activists in this study made claims that Taiwanese women had been left out of the modernization process. They argued that women deserved to take part in the process by means of individual liberties and personal freedom, provided by the Republic of China Constitution. Both women activists and scholars borrowed the tools of rationalist discourse and scientific research to construct a self-definition and autonomy for women in the second wave of women’s movement in the 1980s in Taiwan. After 1995, the proliferation of other social movements revolving around such issues as sexuality, sex liberation and gay and lesbian rights, helped to broaden the reach of feminism (e.g., regarding views on sexuality). The establishment of the Taiwanese Feminist Scholars Association in 1993 further deepened the influence of feminist scholars in both academe and society in Taiwan. The diversification of women’s and gender issues generated by social movements and women’s studies seemingly reflected a complex exchange of ideas with western feminisms. The local appropriation of western ideas, which were spread by the Taiwanese scholars who had traveled and studied overseas at different periods, produced a complex and hybrid cultural phenomenon. This process of adaptation could be observed in the ways in which the various social movements discursively framed women-related issues in Taiwan using western-inspired feminist ideologies on the politics of difference. The hybrid connections between global and local discourses often generated tensions between the older and newer generations of pathfinders, between, that is, the older ideas rooted in struggles by women in Taiwan, and the newly imported feminist thinking that was still trying to find its place. In the first decade of these conflicts, they at times fragmented the local feminist discourses and jeopardized the solidarity forged by earlier local women’s movements. Action-Structure As some feminist scholars have argued from a sociology of knowledge perspective, the “interest” factor cannot fully explain the motivations and intentions of the pathfinders who have affiliated themselves with women’s studies, or why they became advocates of feminist ideas after recreating their subjectivities (Laslett & Thorne, 1997). The current study’s microfoundational approach to the pathfinders goes beyond individual interests. It emphasizes the interconnection among consciousness-raising, identity formation, and action of the pathfinders that unfolds the moving interplay between agency and structure. Three basic orientations have been explored to understand the dynamics of identity-action and structure: empowerment, networking, and confrontation. “Empowerment” refers to pathfinders’ creating a space where alternative communal meanings and feminist identity can be affirmed and the growth of women’s studies can be embodied. “Networking” highlights the crucial social capital engendered by making connections among people, particularly by and for disadvantaged groups. The notion of confrontation displays the tensions inherent in doing women’s studies. It is related to strategies of advocacy and boundary-drawing for the field as well as for a collective identity. These activities result from efforts to define what women’s studies is, who can define it, and what form best serves women’s studies in the long run. a. Strategy of Empowering Empowerment is about “the power of creative affirmation, the power to constitute new practices” (Weeks, 1998, p. 147). It is the power to reinvent women’s identities and innovate women’s studies practices in academia. The awareness of hegemonic discourses of the pathfinders stimulates the growth of oppositional consciousness. Differently put, deconstruction entails reconstruction, and together they constitute a spiral of consciousness growth. The pathfinders felt that they were empowered by the collective affirmation of the value of the subjugated knowledge about women. Being affirmed heightened their consciousness and the yearning to revalorize alternative perspectives on the world. Empowerment is, then, developed and attained through the affirmation of identity. As Weeks (1998) posits, pathfinders are able to affirm themselves through “a being of the doing” and “a being of becoming” (p. 133). “To affirm is to create, not to bear, put up with or accept” (Weeks, 1998, p.146). Creating and doing women’s studies are ways of affirming feminist identity and attaining empowerment. Pathfinders at both Formosa University and Yushan University acknowledged that teaching gender courses and feminist theories was meaningful and empowering. They found the teaching highly relevant to their lives as women, to their identities as pro-feminists or feminists, and to the possibilities for social change. Some regarded it as a healing process, to undo gendered stereotypes and practices by producing and diffusing alternative images for Chinese/Taiwanese women. Others sought feminist theories to do away with the wounds, to confront the mark of the “oriental other” constituted by Western hegemonic discourses that had shaped “Orientalism” in relation to the western subject. Through doing gender studies, these pathfinders become feminist scholars. Some young pathfinders used the teaching and learning process as a means of intervention, as a way to change the hierarchical relationship between the teacher and the students, to empower students to see the world differently, and to help them aspire to a nontraditional path in the future. Some of the pathfinders took the classroom as a cultural site for a social movement and worked with students to challenge the patriarchal constructs and practices permeating all social practices. Their experiences of seeking and affirming alternative meanings illuminates how the pathfinders have employed different means by which to create a cognitive space for reinventing subjectivity in the private and personal spaces of individual instructors and students’ consciousness. Their goals have been embodied in the processes of teaching, learning, and knowledge production. For these pathfinders, to empower has meant to affirm a self-inventing subjectivity grounded in action, and to question and challenge the conventional meanings of Taiwanese woman, social reality, and the conceptual frameworks and methods that have been used to produce “male-stream” knowledge. In addition to teaching and learning, creating a physical space for women’s studies is also essential for affirming communal meanings. In such spaces, people can deliver a discursive politics of resistance. As we have seen, the first collective spaces for women’s studies research programs in Taiwan were formed at Yushan University (YU) and Formosa University (FU). The two spaces have served not only as physical sites where the pathfinders can get together to exchange information and scholarly ideas, or as clearinghouses used to store books and academic materials, but also as cultural sites where oppositional consciousness and feminist values have been incubated and formed. Empowerment, in addition to its positive connotations, sometimes provokes contradictory meanings. It might work against ideal feminist thinking about action. It may strategically direct the action to make compromises with authority, or unintentionally reproduce femininity to gain larger social support and strengthen a weak base of social action. In the case of the evolution of women’s studies in Taiwan in the 1980s when the universities were perceived as repressive environments, the founders of the Women’s Research Unit (WRU) at YU practiced a low-profile strategy to incubate and preserve women’s studies there. They proceeded with caution when they created a small space for women’s studies and adopted the least threatening strategies of action to gain empowerment (creating a space) rather than ones of confrontation with the central authorities. Their low-profile strategy is reflected in the naming of the research programs. The founders called their programs “research programs on the ‘two sexes’ (lian-xing) and society,” rather than “women’s studies,” reflecting a compromise between women’s studies practitioners and liberal intellectuals. The RPTS was not renamed a “gender” studies research program until 2000. At the WRU, in the first few years after its establishment, the program’s “women’s studies” agenda was not specifically defined by the pathfinders there. Both programs’ activities primarily consisted of collecting women-related research and data from the past and listing all the discipline-based research and courses that contained women as a factor or women-related components (i.e., family development, population studies, home economics, and women’s health). The initial expansive definition, straightforward activities, and generic naming of the programs helped to shape the perception among the gatekeepers of the academy that this new field was not a threat, but a marginal field of study devoid of any destructive power. It could hardly have been called a deviant field of studies or a radical political project in academia. Yet the vague definition of women’s studies always carried with it the risk that it might work against its purpose of seeking women’s voices and might even foil the desire to reconstruct women’s subjectivity. Not surprisingly, it generated tensions between women’s studies founders and women’s movement activists, since the latter needed strong allies from academia to legitimize a mobilization framework for representing women’s voices and promoting women’s rights in the highly controlled KMT regime of the 1980s. Strategy of Networking Networking is a powerful way to attain empowerment by linking people into a web of relations. It broadens social support, recruits like-minded members, and amplifies collective voices that are all important in promoting feminist values and women’s studies. There were three basic types of networking among the Taiwanese pathfinders involved in the present study--informal networks, networks of women’s movement organizations such as Awakening, TFSA, and the network of on-campus research centers of women’s studies. 1. Informal and Provisional Network Friendship may signify a strong bond, but may not necessarily be so in an organized form. It generates a sentiment of feminist thinking and solidarity beyond scholarly interests. The social, emotional, and intellectual support of friends are the most important source of self-affirmation. For instance, four pathfinders clearly perceived that, as they encountered challenges from students or colleagues, they always talked to their friends to seek support and reaffirm their feminist identity. Those friends may or may not have been in the same organizations. Some chose to maintain informal relationships with all women’s organizations in order to craft and sustain an open public discourse for women’s issues. Without group pressure or cultural practices of “saving face” they were able to follow their “heart” and really take broad-minded positions on women-related issues. 2. Women’s Movement Organizations Despite the time and energy involved, twenty pathfinders out of the total reported positive experiences of intellectual, social, and emotional support through their engagement with women’s movement organizations. They considered the organizations important cultural sites and alternative spaces that nurtured feminist thinking and new ideas for teaching on and researching women. For instance, the TFSA has been the most important and the largest association for the networking of feminist scholars. The annual Women’s Day ceremony has worked as a performative play to deconstruct the gender stereotypes permeating Taiwanese society. Such networking has helped members to form a collective identity through the creation of an effective collective framework for political action. It has empowered individuals to act otherwise in their situated locations. Through collective performance, the pathfinders have built common bonds, solidified political frameworks, and gathered the courage to declare their feminist identity in public. For instance, the TFSA held a national conference in 2002 to investigate the gender bias embedded in college textbooks. For many presenters, it was their first time to point out the androcentric conceptual frameworks embedded in pedagogical and intellectual practices in Taiwan’s universities. Some presenters expressed their struggle to muster the courage to attend the conference and to declare themselves to be feminists. One presenter (Hsiao, 2002) disclosed that after she underwent a feminist awakening process, she became empowered to unveil the gender biases predominant in some popular college textbooks. Without the networked support from the TFSA, she claimed, the confrontation would have been much daunting. 3. Women’s Studies Research Programs By comparison, academic feminist organizations have had a harder time than movement organizations have had in forming a collective identity through networking. The differences can largely be attributed to the objectives and structures of women’s activist networking versus those of academic institutions.v a. The First Stage Like many developing countries in Asia, the appearance of women’s studies research programs in Taiwan is associated with the western international NGOs, which have deliberately facilitated modernization and promoted human rights in developing countries through funding projects in the postwar period (Miske, 1995; Chamberlain & Howe, 1995). Taiwan’s women activists and scholars built a solid relationship with the Asia Foundation in the 1980s in order to access the international information, resources, and funding needed to build institutional resistance outside the universities. In addition, the Foundation served as a source of pressure from the West that women’s activists used to leverage change at home; it even served as a window to the world when traveling was prohibited under the martial law decree. Under the political repression, the ties between a western donor and activists appeared to be an expression of affinity between western human rights ideologies and a local women’s movement, including Taiwan’s women’s studies.vi In the initial stage, the pathfinders felt that they had to “sneak into” the universities. They did this by reaching out for social support and broadening academic support from direct audiences, constituencies, students and colleagues. Ultimately, in the early stages, both the WRU and the RPTS formed only weak ties and weak forms of networking with women’s studies scholars, liberal intellectuals, like-minded colleagues, administrators, senior faculty, and graduate students. They felt it was important to carefully accumulate social capital from socially legitimate sources in the beginning stage. For instance, the WRU chose to affiliate with the Center of Population Studies and to obtain substantial support from its male director. The founders of the WRU invited the President of YU to attend formal activities, such as national conferences, to convey the message that women’s studies had the support of the school’s administration. Moreover, the founders kept in touch with international women’s studies scholars and other women’s studies research centers in order to make connection with international women’s studies communities, which could potentially become an important source of justification of the significance of women’s studies in Taiwan’s academia. As for the RPTS, its founders perceived that a more effective way of creating an entry point for women’s studies into the university was to root the women’s studies research program in campus life. For this purpose, they sought support from the first male dean of CHASS, who symbolically represented the backing of liberal intellectuals, male colleagues, and senior scholars at FU. This framework helped to create a level of comfort among the male academicians, which assisted in gaining their indirect or direct support from the beginning. Consequently, men doing women’s studies was initially legitimized and institutionalized at FU. The strategy to broaden academic community support was essential in gaining the necessary bargaining power. In a repressive environment that ignored women’s studies, networking for social and academic support, which would serve as a buffer from administrative disturbance and a bridge to scarce resources, was the pressing concern of most women’s studies founders at the start. For instance, the first 10-years of financing the WRU relied heavily on individual pathfinders’ relationships with government organs and several foundations, as means to access funding information and monies. While the RPTS pathfinders failed to obtain research funding from the university, the first dean succeeded in securing a modest operational budget from the FU Administration. Searching for, producing, and transmitting women’s knowledge was also part of a networking strategy. Both the WRU and the RPTS initiated large research projects to bring like-minded faculty members and graduate students together. For instance, the RPTS coordinated the colleagues of CHASS to develop experimental and interdisciplinary courses and team-teaching pedagogy on women’s studies. These large research projects, as several pathfinders confirmed, were important in generating dialogue among the affiliated faculty members who facilitated scholarly interest in teaching and researching on women. Subsequently, the pathfinders organized national conferences to present the outcomes of the collaborative research projects. Through conference participation and presentations, the pathfinders came to connect their scholarly interests with women’s studies and to form a collective project for advocating, diffusing, and advancing women’s studies throughout universities in Taiwan. b. The Second Stage After 1995, the concerns of the pathfinders at the two universities shifted toward the need to create depth in the field and to change the “shadow structure”vii status of women’s studies organizations. The relaxation of the university law in 1994 opened up lively debates and competition for scarce resources in academia. There was also a noticeable growth of women’s studies centers in other universities; six such research programs appeared between 1995 and 1996. The growth of programs and centers of women’s studies nationwide stimulated the WRU and the RPTS to move forward particularly in their status-building efforts and, more generally, to advance women’s studies in Taiwan’s universities. Both the WRU and the RPTS chose to create certificate programs to deepen the influence of women’s studies on campus. A certificate program connotes that learning and teaching women’s studies are important assets and services of the universities. At the same time, it is an expedient way to diffuse feminist consciousness. The WRU made diplomatic visits to convince academic senates and the deans of different schools to pass their proposal. Nevertheless, its expansion was ultimately achieved by the extra free services of coordinating and administering gender-related courses, without any financial support from the university. The RPTS, on the other hand, chose a more difficult way to develop its teaching program. It aimed to develop an integrated and interdisciplinary women’s studies curriculum, based on themes and areas of interest. Expansion and diversification were also anticipated by the appearance of the larger critical mass—networked scholars and graduate students. As new scholars and graduate students joined the research programs, they instilled new energy, framing, and knowledge of women’s studies in the established network. The expansion of the women’s studies knowledge base particularly attracted new participants in academic activities. At YU, new issues for women’s studies were developed, and qualitative research was introduced from the social sciences for exploring women’s experiences and voices. The male pathfinders at the WRU advocated men’s studies and “white-ribbon” campaigns to unveil the myth of masculinity and to stop men’s violence against women. At FU, student activism in the early 1990s facilitated feminist consciousness-raising and a climate of engagement in feminist activities. The collaborative actions, such as book reviews written by the pathfinders, the website launch achieved with much help from students, and readings and discussions about feminist theories online, all contributed to generating an enthusiastic climate in which to learn, teach, and conduct research about and for women in the mid-1990s. Consequently, gender components have been integrated into 30 discipline-based courses to date at FU. In the late 1990s, while fiscal crisis loomed on many campuses after the MOE’s budget cut, and competition for scarce resources escalated due, in part, to the rapid expansion of higher education in the 1990s, both the WRU and the RPTS faced difficulties in maintaining the core function of gender studies research programs. The WRU searched for new sources of funding in order to maintain minimal organizational operation and to sustain the quality of library services. The incumbent coordinator (leader) took a strong stance to specialize the organization, to computerize all the research publications, data, and books, and to create key words and indexes for the database. Through the coding and compilation process, the coordinator hoped that gender studies would gradually develop a common database and language of feminist research. Generally, such a colossal task is not accomplished by a small organization, and almost never without large funding. This accomplishment gave the WRU a more academic character. Other pathfinders wished to see the WRU independent from the Center of Population Studies so that women’s studies could stand on its own feet and have its own voice. Others also expressed the need for more collaborative efforts and dialogues to advance interdisciplinary teaching programs and to construct a collective identity of gender studies at YU. While the affiliated researchers at the WRU were involved in well-defined tasks, such as editing Newsletter and Journal, those at the RPTS were engaged through their willingness to participate in academic activities. The former was prone to be stable while the latter fluctuated. The current situation of the RPTS has been a low point for it in the eyes of some of the affiliated pathfinders at FU. Several pathfinders attributed the inactivity of the RPTS to the loose networking and lack of commitment among affiliated researchers or of a professional identity in the field. Some hoped that the interdisciplinary teaching programs would restore energy to the pathfinders and bind their academic obligations through collaboration of program teaching. Some young pathfinders reminisced about past collaborative research projects that stimulated dialogue and discussion of gender research studies among the pathfinders, and that created a climate of talking and doing gender studies. Four pathfinders emphasized that further institutionalization of the field, such as constructing the professional identity of the field, formalizing the teaching program, and providing a degree program, were important to sustaining the future of gender studies in Taiwan. Strategy of Confrontation The direct confrontation strategies of the institutional authority, such as protests and critiques of governmental policies, were more likely found in the collective actions mobilized by Awakening and TFSA than by women’s studies research programs. Most of the pathfinders in this study took a modest stance in promoting women’s studies on campuses. They employed their own skills and knowledge to advocate women’s studies in their classrooms. Nevertheless, there were several exceptional cases. For instance, two female scholars challenged their university’s administration for placing them in lower-ranking teaching jobs. One extraordinary case was found in a junior female scholar who dared to make an appeal to win back her due rights in a conservative university. She took bold steps by listening to her inner feminist voice, rather than complying with the authority that expected a subservient role of women. In this process, she deconstructed the traditional image of Taiwanese women, problematized the university’s treatment toward female academicians, and took on the task of reaffirming the rights and subjectivity of a feminist. In most cases, advocacy rather than direct confrontation is found as the salient orientation of action in the process of the institutionalization of women’s studies in both YU and FU. The direct conflicts in relation to women’s studies bear a direct relation to boundary-shaping regarding what women’s studies is about, and who is entitled to do it. They were displayed in three domains: academics vs. activism, women’s studies vs. study of sexualities, and men doing women’s studies. They all 1. Advocacy--Pathfinders’ Indirect Confrontation The predominant strategy that the pathfinders in this study used to promote women’s studies in the emergent women’s studies period was “advocacy.” It was related to the cultural preference of social harmony. Such a cultural preference thus disadvantages any affirming strategies of action or alternative values of a women’s movement (Committee on Women’s Studies in Asia, 1994; Miske, 1995). The same attitudes were also assumed by some of the pathfinders at the WRU and the RPTS. Some of them said that they were not comfortable speaking directly to people’s faces or generating direct conflict that would humiliate the people involved. They upset themselves when they were hurting other people. They considered it more as a personal attack rather than one on authority. They were ever reluctant to fight for due recognition or promotion even when they felt they were rudely ruled out. One senior pathfinder reflected that she had not realized until very much later that confrontation was an unavoidable strategy in effectively intervening in the government’s health policies, which she was involved in for many years. Particularly under the rule of the patriarchal state, women were construed as followers, which contradicted the image of an intellectual or leader. Under the repressive cultural norm that discouraged confrontation, it became a difficult project in terms of questioning and changing the gendered order and the patriarchal ideology. Most of the pathfinders in this study showed little interest in directly confronting the authorities. They preferred the tactics of compromise, co-option, lobbying, and persuading in their quiet advocacy of women’s studies. Advocacy, in Minkoff’s definition, is reactive and implemented through lobbying, litigation, media alerts and so on, to influence policies and public opinion. The weakness of the advocacy strategy is that it is less aggressive. Devoid of any threat, the university administrations knew how to use the presence of women’s studies as a symbol to demonstrate their rhetoric support of women’s studies and women’s issues. The existence of women’s studies research programs on two campuses served to relieve the administrations and other university scholars from addressing women’s issues with more sincerity. The indirect way of encountering institutional authorities set the research programs up as a conservative camp. Naturally, women’s movement activists criticized them. Even so, there was no doubt that the discourse and activities women’s studies scholars generated were definitely used for resistance rather than for reproducing the status-quo gender relations in Taiwan. 2. The Academics vs. the Activism In the beginning stage, while the pathfinders of the WRU emphasized empowerment and networking strategies, most of them chose not to closely align with the local women’s movement to exchange academic receptivity and accumulate cultural and symbolic capital for women’s studies in academia. Some of the RPTS pathfinders also felt that academic study and activism were two entirely different fields of action. They felt vulnerable when involving themselves in both the women’s movements and women’s studies. Two primary reasons accounted for the reluctant attitudes of the older generation of the pathfinders engaging in women’s movement in Taiwan. Firstly, on the one hand, getting involved in women’s movement meant they would not take the academics seriously. On the other hand, they believed that with their rigorous and objective methods, they were able to generate knowledge unveiling sex discrimination. Secondly, the “shadow structure” of women’s studies and weak bargaining power of feminist scholars limited their strategies of action. For the early generation of pathfinders, the fusion of academia and politics would increase the vulnerability and invite attacks on women’s studies scholars from administrations and gatekeepers rather than empower them to confront these conservative forces in academia. In contrast, the women’s movement activists emphasized the fusion between activism and academics. They thus denounced women’s studies scholars on two fronts: first, declaring their stance as neutral, in the name of objective research, had the effect of separating women’s studies from either feminism or women’s movements. Furthermore, the employment of a conservative strategy was useless in terms of promoting women’s studies or gender consciousness-raising on campuses. The dispute, which generated enduring tensions between the women’s studies scholars and women’s movement activists, erupted in the late 1980s. Despite emotional damage and pains resulting from the harsh critiques, the disputes were also conceived as a constructive tension. For one, the conflicts stimulated the pathfinders of the WRU and the RPTS to reflect upon the relations among women’s studies, feminism, and women’s movements in Taiwan; they also were moved to examine the relations between domestic and international/global influences of women’s studies from the West (mostly the United States). The dialogues and discussions generated by the disputes became important sources of reconstruction and identity formation involving both women’s movement activists and women’s studies practitioners. It prodded interested parties to clarify the boundary of women’s studies and women’s movement, and their relationships with feminist values. It thus prompted rather than impeded the development of women’s studies in the early 1990s. In addition to academic activities, cooperation with student activists was an effective way to diffuse gender consciousness. The two research programs, however, had different attitudes toward student activism. In the early 1990s, as sexual harassment cases became increasingly publicized on many campuses, the leaders of the RPTS took advantage of the publicity to collaborate with students in terms of gender consciousness-raising. Campus activism galvanized much of the students’ energy and created a legitimate climate for faculty and students to get involved in promoting gender studies. In contrast, lacking a strong political agenda, the WRU was not interested in supporting student activism on campuses. The younger generation of pathfinders entered the universities in the mid-1990s when the political climate was quite different, and structural opportunities were more open. Social movements had begun to decline, as had the urgent need for women’s collective action. In addition, since the competition for scarce resources and career promotion became fiercer after the University Law was changed, several young pathfinders expressed the need to focus on research in an effort to improve the quality of feminist knowledge production. Compared to the repressive past, the rising pressure to compete for scarce resources and rewards in the late 1990s seemed to confer on the institutions a stronger power to shape scholars’ preference for academic research. In addition, although many young pathfinders no longer faced problems in declaring themselves to be feminist scholars, especially after TFSA was formed in 1993, they were aware of the conflicts of doing both the movements inside and outside academia. This situation was similar to that of feminists in the United States; which Messer-Davidow (2002) defined as “the translation problem.” the social change I knew from activism I couldn’t reformulate as academic knowledge, and the social change I knew from academic theories I couldn’t deploy in activism. The translation problem, …was produced by the discontinuous discourses in which I was operating. Through activist discourse I acquired know-how as I did change-like a cat leaping, twisting, and landing on its feet- and through disciplinary discourses I acquired knowledge as I read about change--like a scholar analyzing, criticizing, and arguing. These discourses did not provide two perspectives on “change” as the same thing…. The tactical skills of activism rendered “change” as conflicts to be shaped, whereas the intellectual skills of disciplines had rendered it as schematics to be debated (Messer-Davidow, 2002, p. 11). 3. Women’s Studies vs. Study of Sexualities While conflicts between women activists and women’s studies scholars raged on in the early 1990s, discursive politic wrangling between women’s welfare and sex liberation went on in the second half of the 1990s. For the latter, it revolved around women’s welfare and sex liberation issues. It generated explosive emotions and irresolvable conflicts in the interactions between the two major camps led by Awakening, on the one side, and the scholars of the Center of the Study of Sexuality at National Central University on the other. On the one hand, the conflict was closely related to the identity politics of sexual orientations. A large part of the movement agenda of Awakening was framed to solve inequity between the sexes in the workplace and in the legal practices of the heterosexual family, which excluded homosexuality issues. The conflict between these two camps exploded into arguments and formulation of standpoints on larger issues, such as whether or not to abolish public prostitution in Taipei in 1997, and other national issues, such as AIDS and homosexuality. The splintering of sisterhood between the two groups became radical after Awakening fired two long-standing lesbians staff members. This resulted in an irresolvable identity conflict among women’s movement activists and groups in Taiwan. On the other hand, the institutionalization of sexuality studies at the National Central University had rendered it a national academic headquarters of sexuality studies since 1995. Josephine Ho and her team have taken a leading role in producing academic discourses on sexuality and on sexual liberation for sexual minorities. In an anti-sexual harassment demonstration in 1994, her innovative slogan “Yes to orgasm, No to harassment!” made Ho an influential leader of the sex liberation movement. The Center has become a hub of support for lesbians, gays, transgender persons, and marginalized sex workers (Hsieh & Chang, forthcoming). The lesbian/gay movements, sexuality studies and the imported postmodernism gradually gained academic currency in the second half of the 1990s. The new genres of gender studies generated a new conflict among the pathfinders who were drawn to sexuality study and who still attempted to use women’s studies as an instrument for raising public gender consciousness and to effect policy reforms to improve women’s status. Consequently, the debates between women’s studies and the study of sexualities were along the line of promoting women’s welfare versus promoting sex liberation. The older generation of pathfinders was inclined toward advocacy of women’s welfare, which also reflected their preference for women-related issues in teaching and research. For the younger pathfinders, pluralism, identity differences, and the study of genders were thought to better reflect the complex and multi-dimensional social reality, their attitude being that knowledge production and transmission should reflect such complexity and hybridity of social reality. Although the pathfinders of both the WRU and the RPTS held both generations of scholars, the conflicts between the two camps have not yet surfaced, because their research group identities were not rigidly defined. Moreover, the orientation towards academic research rather than activism prevented them from politicizing the differences of identities, as long as the innovation of knowledge had academic currency. Nevertheless, several pathfinders in both universities expressed concern that the powerful discourses of sex liberation were attracting young college students to study sexualities, deprived of sufficient exposure to the diversity of feminist theories. Other young pathfinders, in contrast, did not consider it a problem, since pressing gender issues changed alongside social changes. In addition, they felt that it was more an issue of quality of pedagogy rather than a measure of levity in academia. The identity politics regarding sexual orientation had become an overt conflict invoked among some of the pathfinders or between Awakening and the Center of the Study of Sexualities, rather than among the research programs of women’s studies in the universities. While possible future conflicts may loom large, a more pressing concern seems to lie in the need to draw new boundaries in order to claim organizational identity, academic resources, access to national research funding, legitimization of knowledge, and variegated representations of women’s and gender studies. Until then, the identity politics embedded in the studies of women, gender, and sexualities may become a new drive for these pathfinders to reconstruct their identities, to organize action, and to innovate knowledge under the umbrella of women’s and gender studies in the future. 4. The “Men-Problem” in Women’s Studies In the initial stage of establishing women’s studies, male scholars were welcomed to join the programs in order to ward off the “man-hating” stigma attached to women activists and women’s studies scholars. Not surprisingly, four out of six male pathfinders in this study were recognized as prominent figures in women’s studies. They represented the symbolic capital of the validity of women’s studies, and became highly visible as “a small group of men” doing women’s studies. The conflict of men doing women’s studies derives both from identity politics and competition for four forms of capitals relating to women’s and gender studies. Identity politics relates to group identity and gender; for instance, can men become members of feminist organizations or become feminists? TFSA has disallowed men from becoming voting members or taking executive board positions because the space was reserved for training women leadership and nurturing women’s culture. The level of trust and acceptance in “men as feminists” within a feminist circle has been low. However, most of young pathfinders have welcomed men to join gender studies, albeit stressing the need for them to create a new path for gender research. Men doing women’s studies has created a level of suspicion in men’s motivation for engaging in the field. As the resources and capital of the field have been severely limited, the reaping of capital has become a source of distrust and conflict. Many female pathfinders still believe that women’s studies should be a collective project made by and for women; the boundary drawn to define “we” and “they” cannot be blurred, since the patriarchal practices and the “masculine ethic” have not been largely changed in the universities. The majority of female pathfinders have welcomed men to join gender studies; however, they have also expected men to become pioneers of men’s studies, which would invigorate critical gender studies with men’s unique reflection on their own privileges and powers intersecting with other social categories. Conclusion The case studies documented here have shown that feminist action in Taiwan has been a kind of activism that has involved the interplay of feminist networks, identities, scholarly interests, and strategies of action, as well as their effects on the institutionalization of women’s and gender studies. It denotes an intellectual movement involving Taiwanese scholars who identified with a dynamic, socially grounded feminism, and who constructed specific strategies of action for pursuing gender studies in Taiwan’s academia. The emergent field of women’s studies has, thus, been interconnected with the social action and identity forming of the pathfinders, which concurred with a micro-macro link between life histories of individuals and structural changes. The interplay between action and structure, therefore, is shaped “by constant and more or less purposeful individual action and that individual action, however purposeful, is made by history and society” (Abrams, 1982, p. xiii, emphasis in original). References Abrams, Philip (1982). Historical sociology. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Castells, Manuel. (1997). The Power of Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Chamberlain, Mariam K. & Howe, Florence. (1995). Women's studies and developing countries: Focus on Asia. In Rita S. 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Cultural power and social movements. In Hank Johnston and Bert Klanfermans (Eds.) Social movements and culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Taylor, Verta. & Whittier, Nancy E. (1995). Analytical approaches to social movement culture: The culture of the women's movement. In Hank Johnston and Bert Klanfermans (Eds.) Social movements and culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Weeks, Kathi. (1998). Constituting feminist subjects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Yin, Robert K. (1994). Case study research: Design and methods. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. End Notes: Except for “advocacy,” Minkoff (1999) additionally defines “protest” and “services” as main activities of social movement organizations. Protest is defined as a reactive and disruptive means (sit-ins, teach-ins, and marches) with the objective of influencing policies and public opinion. “Services” are usually proactive and entail provision of job training, shelters for battered women, literacy programs, etc. [back] I divided thirty-one participants into two generations. The year of 1994 has been intentionally selected as the dividing point between the two generations in order to reflect the changes of structural opportunities, the decline in postsecondary institutions’ control over curriculum that resulted from the enactment of a new version of the University Law in that year. Nineteen of the thirty-one feminist pathfinders I interviewed were hired by the universities prior to 1994 and can be defined as the first generation of pathfinders. The remaining twelve scholars were what I call the second generation of pathfinders, hired on or after 1994. [back] Although two of these seven men were from universities other than the two selected institutions, I included them in this study because they were important pioneers of women's studies in the 1980s and 1990s. [back] The organizational publications, Awakening Magazine and Bulletin of Women and Gender Studies of the National Taiwan’s University served as important historical documents that have assisted me enormously in understanding what significant topics and important events regarding women’s issues have been reported or studied in the past, and how they have helped shape public discussion, feminist discourses or women’s movements both in Taiwan’s universities and in society at large. I also collected updated government statistics regarding women’s socio-economic and political status in general, and in education in particular. [back] The academic structure comprises departments and disciplines, each with its own reward systems and demarcated by a diversity of scholarly training and interests. Professional practices (teaching, research, services) are considerably isolated within each discipline and subfield of studies. [back] Similar to Miske’s (1995) study of a Thai women’s studies research program, the concern of gathering international support through networking with a foreign donor and borrowing feminist ideas from the West implied a somewhat contradictory relationship between resistance and domination in the Third World countries. Even though pathfinders in the Third World countries have been committed to creating and affirming feminist values with local concerns, the history of the formation of local feminist identities and women’s studies indicates, in the case of Taiwan, that the pathfinders and the local organizations in Taiwan both resisted the ruling ideology of the KMT and reproduced the ideology of the dominant West. [back]  “Shadow structure” refers to a vulnerable and neglected academic margin when compared to the highly visible “surface structure” of the traditional disciplines in academe (Lemert, 1990, cited in Klein, 1996). [back]