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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Defining Choices Redefined: Heroic Life Narratives Of Taiwanese Buddhist Monastics, Hillary Crane
Defining Choices Redefined: Heroic Life Narratives Of Taiwanese Buddhist Monastics, Hillary Crane
Faculty Publications
The Taiwanese Buddhist monastics in this study confront negative stereotypes that dominate within their wider societal context, and they challenge these stereotypes by positing counter-narratives. After exploring the monastics’ interest in proselytizing both to me and to a wider audience as a context that influences the interview encounter, this chapter focuses on the monastics’ response to negative stereotypes and their endeavors to craft a new, positive image of monastics. I argue that they employ the heroic trope of the da zhangfu (大丈夫, ‘great man’) to reconceive as heroic the life choices they have made that wider Taiwanese society characterizes as …
Resistance Through Transformation? The Meanings Of Gender Reversals In A Taiwanese Buddhist Monastery, Hillary Crane
Resistance Through Transformation? The Meanings Of Gender Reversals In A Taiwanese Buddhist Monastery, Hillary Crane
Faculty Publications
This chapter demonstrates that Taiwanese Buddhist nuns resist the limitations of traditional Han gender ideologies by drawing on opportunities offered within those traditional gender constructions—opportunities that allow them to define themselves in opposition to the limited female gender characteristics and roles they reject. Crane argues that we should not interpret these nuns' masculine identification simply as resisting dominant Han gender ideologies. Instead, the nuns embrace the traditional, sexist Han ideologies, even to the point of exaggeration—portraying women not only as dangerous to the spiritual cultivation of others, but also of limited spiritual ability. They define the negative characteristics of women …
Becoming A Nun, Becoming A Man: Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns’ Gender Transformation, Hillary Crane
Becoming A Nun, Becoming A Man: Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns’ Gender Transformation, Hillary Crane
Faculty Publications
This paper explores apparent contradictions in the gender identifications of Taiwanese Buddhist nuns. Because the texts and teachings of their tradition provide conflicting messages about women's spiritual abilities, the nuns create a complex gender cosmology as a means to accommodate textual contradictions without rejecting any textual statements. This strategy allows the nuns to assert that they have spiritual abilities equal to those of men without rejecting or contradicting textual statements that they do not. Without denying that they are women (and that they are therefore threatening to men) the nuns primarily identify with the male gender. Compartmentalizing and contextualizing gender …
Resisting Marriage And Renouncing Womanhood: The Choice Of Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns, Hillary Crane
Resisting Marriage And Renouncing Womanhood: The Choice Of Taiwanese Buddhist Nuns, Hillary Crane
Faculty Publications
The traditional Chinese perception of Buddhist monastics is that they choose to renounce the world out of desperation — after failing in the world such that their only options are suicide or the monastery. That this perception of the monastic life persists in Taiwan today is evident in monastics’ own descriptions of their families’ responses to their choice as well as in several recent scandals related to monastic life. Despite the widespread negative perception of monastics, increasing numbers of women are choosing this life. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with relatively new monastics, the author explores the choice Buddhist nuns make …