| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 建築與城鄉研究所 === 105 === In the 1960s and 1970s, Taiwan’s economic takeoff propelled the transition of the agricultural sector into industrial production and the emigration of the agricultural population into urbanized areas. Following the emergence of urban problems, the accumulation of cultural and economic capital, and the inspiration of Meinung’s social movement and community empowerment projects, many a progressive intellectual and activist determined to return to the homeland of Meinung.
Being a Meinung ‘daughter’ who attempts to embark on a homecoming journey after more than twenty years of exodus for better education, I encounter many like-minded women who are drawn back to the place of symbolic significance but are also endowed with and confined within the social role of ‘daughter.’ We are critically self-conscious but constrained by the conundrums of disarticulation from local society due to long-term departure from home and the structural exclusion from being a member of rightful subjectivity of the patriarchal familial institution. The process of the daughters’ homecoming journey to reconstruct the place identity as well as our own identities not only reflects the struggles between the urban and the rural, the young and the aged, and the mobile and the rooted; but also, from the feminist perspective, manifests the multiple issues of the traditional patriarchal system in the era of modern development and gender equality.
I contend that the patriarchal familial institution continues to dominate Meinung’s social belief and property ownership - though occasionally challenged in the course of modernization, through the rituals of ancestral worship and the custom of inheritance, and compels the emigrated offspring to be connected with the homeland through patriarchal familial lineage. Familial kinship does not simply represent the social relations of the domestic sphere, but also extends into the public arena of socio-spatial organization and influences the development of the local. I intend to compare the patriarchal familial institution as an intrinsically fixed concept of place with the diverse spatial practices of the homecoming daughters as a more inclusive and sustainable paradigm of place. The collaborative and dialogical network of the daughters in present-day Meinung also facilitates the reconstruction of the familial relationship in which the subjectivity of the daughter is traditionally absent.
This thesis reveals the subjective experiences of the female characters often excluded from the patriarchal system, while the employed feminist methodology of praxis further combines theory and practices to foster the mutual empowerment and network building of Meinung daughters. It is hoped that the research activates the cooperative experiments of the daughters to substantially reform the oppressed conditions of living in a place of patriarchal domination.
|
|---|
