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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 Exploring Gender Differences on Attitudes towards Independence/Unification: From the Perspectives of Peace-War and Development-Interest

Exploring Gender Differences on Attitudes towards Independence/Unification: From the Perspectives of Peace-War and Development-Interest

Wan-Ying Yang and Jie-Wei Liu
2009 / 05
Volume 16, No.1

pp.37-66
10.6612/tjes.2009.16.01.37-66
Paper

Abstract

What are the differences between women and men on their attitudes toward Taiwan independence and unification with mainland China? What can we account for the differences if exist? This study attempts to answer these two questions by providing a gendered and contextualized analysis on Taiwan's national identity issues. From gender perspective, given that national identity is an unstable and constantly changing identity, the relationship between gender and nationalism is mostly affected by the associated values or projects raised within specific nationalism contexts. In Taiwan, the nationalism issues involving Pro-independence (Taiwanese nationalism) and Pro-unification (Chinese nationalism) have been fervently debated within Taiwan, and each is associated with different issues and connotes different gender implications. Nationalisms in Taiwan are associated with at least two predominated issues-the militaristic threat from mainland China and materialistic gap across the Strait, yet each is weighted differently by men and women. This study will first examine how nationalisms are constructed in Taiwan, and their gender implications from that construction. Through which we hypothesize that men and women are asymmetrically affected by these different issues and concerns associated with nationalist positions in Taiwan. Given contextualized understandings on Taiwan's nationalism, this study shall apply survey data to illustrate how the nationalism is constructed affects the way women and men's view nationalism differently.

Keywords

Nationalism

independence vs. unification

feminist

militaristic threat

cross-strait conditions