Reading Sex and Temperament in Taiwan: Margaret Mead and Postwar Taiwanese Feminism

dc.contributor.author	Chang, Doris T.
dc.date.accessioned	2009-06-29T01:46:58Z
dc.date.available	2009-06-29T01:46:58Z
dc.date.issued	2009
dc.identifier.citation	Chang, Doris T. NWSA Journal, Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 51-75	en
dc.identifier.issn	1040-0656
dc.identifier.other	DOI: 10.1353/nwsa.0.0071
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10057/2046
dc.description.abstract	This essay examines the ways in which Margaret Mead's research findings in New Guinea were transmitted to a Chinese-speaking audience through Yang Mei-hui's annotated Chinese summary of part 4 of Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). In so doing, Yang served as a cultural intermediary who transmitted Mead's concept of cultural relativism on gender-role formation to her Chinese-speaking audience. Yang's annotated summary (1973) serves as a case study of the ways in which a cultural intermediary's injections of her personal commentaries within a specific cross-cultural context can facilitate her audience's understanding of the arguments made in the original English text. In this essay, I undertake a textual comparison of Yang's Chinese annotated summary with Mead's original English text for the purpose of evaluating Yang's effectiveness in conveying Mead's main arguments. In the 1970s and thereafter, Taiwanese feminists applied Mead's concept of cultural relativism of socially constructed gender to subvert the rigid gender roles in Taiwanese society. In so doing, they contributed to women's self-determination during the era of Taiwan's democratization.	en
dc.format.extent	472665 bytes
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.language.iso	en_US	en
dc.publisher	Indiana University Press	en
dc.relation.ispartof	Doris Chang's Publications	en
dc.relation.ispartofseries	NWSA Journal	en
dc.relation.ispartofseries	v.21, no.1	en
dc.rights	Copyright by Indiana University Press	en
dc.subject	Taiwanese feminism	en
dc.subject	Chinese feminism	en
dc.subject	Women’s movements	en
dc.subject	Margaret Mead	en
dc.subject	Hsiu-lien Annette Lu	en
dc.subject	Lee Yuan-chen	en
dc.subject	Yang Mei-hui	en
dc.subject	Cultural relativism	en
dc.subject	Textual comparison	en
dc.title	Reading Sex and Temperament in Taiwan: Margaret Mead and Postwar Taiwanese Feminism	en
dc.type	Article	en
dc.description.version	Peer reviewed