Contesting patriarchy: Employment and gender roles of East Asian middle-class marriage migrants in Taiwan

Abstract

ABSTRACT Studies of trans-local marriages in Taiwan focused on Mainland Chinese and Southeast Asian women married to Taiwanese men, documenting how they had joined the lower rungs of the work force, and shouldered a major amount of family responsibilities that included reproductive roles. They were projected in literature and the media as subjugated women and objects of commodified marriages and exploitation. In contrast, marriage migration of middle-class women was seldom studied. This paper explores East Asian middle-class marriage migrants’ embodied experiences in their work and family roles, exposing them to the patriarchal structures and unequal power relations that exist in Taiwan. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted from 2019 to 2021 on participants from Greater China (Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau), Korea, Japan, and Singapore. Advanced education, professional performance, and feminist consciousness have empowered these women to become agents of change in the family and the workplace and shall benefit Taiwan’s economy in the long run as highly skilled human resources.