Dating And Mate Selection In Modern Taiwan

This book examines the changing nature of dating and mate selection in contemporary China, and addresses a wide array of both causes and consequences concerning mate selection, including economic change, traditional cultural norms, evolving gender roles, and both marriage and fertility aspirations.

The growing field of popular culture studies in Taiwan can be divided into two distinct academic trends; a different analytical framework is used to examine either locally oriented popular culture or transnational pop culture. This volume combine these two academic trends, firstly by revealing that localized popular culture in Taiwan is in many ways a merging of Chinese, Japanese, American, and indigenous cultures and therefore is a form of hybridity that arose long before the term became popular. Secondly, the chapters show that the transnational character of Taiwan’s pop culture is one of the more important ways that it distinguishes itself from mainland China. In other words, it is precisely Taiwan’s transnational hybrid character that helps to define it as a distinctive local space. The contributors explore how traditional Chinese influences modern localized lives in Taiwan, localized identity, culture, and politics as a contested domain with Chinese and traditional Taiwanese identities and Taiwan’s localization process as contesting Taiwan’s gravitation towards globalized Western culture. Including chapters on baseball, poetry, pop music, puppets and Harry Potter, Popular Culture in Taiwan is an accessible and stimulating read for those studying the culture and society of Taiwan and China as well as cultural studies more generally.

This is a comprehensive portrait of Taiwan. It covers the major periods in the development of this small but powerful island province/nation. The work is designed in the style of the multi-volume ""Cambridge History of China""

This is a comprehensive portrait of Taiwan. It covers the major periods in the development of this small but powerful island province/nation. The work is designed in the style of the multi-volume "Cambridge History of China".

Until the 1940s, social life in Taiwan was generally organized through the family—marriages were arranged by parents, for example, and senior males held authority. In the following years, as Taiwan evolved rapidly from an agrarian to an industrialized society, individual decisions became less dependent on the family and more influenced by outside forces. Social Change and the Family in Taiwan provides an in-depth analysis of the complex changes in family relations in a society undergoing revolutionary social and economic transformation. This interdisciplinary study explores the patterns and causes of change in education, work, income, leisure time, marriage, living arrangements, and interactions among extended kin. Theoretical chapters enunciate a theory of family and social change centered on the life course and modes of social organization. Other chapters look at the shift from arranged marriages toward love matches, as well as changes in dating practices, premarital sex, fertility, and divorce. Contributions to the book are made by Jui-Shan Chang, Ming-Cheng Chang, Deborah S. Freedman, Ronald Freedman, Thomas E. Fricke, Albert Hermalin, Mei-Lin Lee, Paul K. C. Liu, Hui-Sheng Lin, Te-Hsiung Sun, Arland Thornton, Maxine Weinstein, and Li-Shou Yang.

With a wedding impending, the Taiwanese bride-to-be turns to bridal photographers, makeup artists, and hair stylists to transform her image beyond recognition. They give her fairer skin, eyes like a Western baby doll, and gowns inspired by sources from Victorian England to MTV. An absorbing consideration of contemporary bridal practices in Taiwan, Framing the Bride shows how the lavish photographs represent more than mere conspicuous consumption. They are artifacts infused with cultural meaning and emotional significance, products of the gender- and generation-based conflicts in Taiwan’s hybrid system of modern matrimony. From the bridal photographs, the book opens out into broader issues such as courtship, marriage, kinship, globalization, and the meaning of the "West" and "Western" cultural images of beauty. Bonnie Adrian argues that in compiling enormous bridal albums full of photographs of brides and grooms in varieties of finery, posed in different places, and exuding romance, Taiwanese brides engage in a new rite of passage—one that challenges the terms of marriage set out in conventional wedding rites. In Framing the Bride, we see how this practice is also a creative response to U.S. domination of transnational visual imagery—how bridal photographers and their subjects take the project of globalization into their own hands, defining its terms for their lives even as they expose the emptiness of its images.