Carolyn Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University. Her areas of research are religion, migration, and race and ethnicity. Her book Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigrants Converting to Evangelical Christianity and Buddhism is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
Although recent scholarship focuses on the importance of religion to immigrants in the United States, relatively little attention has been given to how religion shapes the everyday lives of immigrant women. This article examines how Taiwanese immigrant women as religious converts use Buddhism and Christianity to construct a distinct sense of self from the family. Buddhism and Christianity challenge traditional gender roles by offering alternative conceptions of a genderless self. Women's new religious commitments may compete with their traditional commitments to their families. Through religious conversion, women carve out spaces of independence and authority for themselves, albeit never at the cost of threatening the nuclear family.
目次
Method and Setting 337 Religion, Immigration, and Gender 338 Women and Individual Interpretations of Religion 340 Religion and the Rejection of the Family 341 Religion and Women's Rejection of the Kin-Defined Self 342 Becoming New Selves: Working Out Taiwanese Traditions and American Contradictions 342 A Separate Self from the Family 345 "Becoming Her Own Person": A Christian Experience 345 "Letting Her True Nature Come Out": A Buddhist Experience 347 Religion and Family: Competing Commitments 350 Women Prioritizing Religion 350 Religion within the Constraints of the Family 352 Conclusion 353 References 354
