The Production of a Gendered Space: Reading Women's Landmarks in Anping, Taiwan

This study explores how Anping, one of the most significant cultural centers in Asia, has been transformed into a gendered space. To read Anping as a gendered space, this paper, based upon news reports and intensive interviews with participating agents in the community, will focus on the only two officially designated women's landmarks in the region as the subjects of textual analysis. I will show the process of the production and representation of tin Mor Niang Park and the statues of Miss Jin as well as her mother. First, I will analyze how metaphors of gender inscribed in the landmarks are employed to reinforce dominant gender stereotypes. Next, I will explore how the women's landmarks have turned into the most desirable forms of contemporary cultural capital related to a growth in tourism and a shift towards an entrepreneurial form of urban governance. Indeed, gender is not only constitutive of, but virtually indispensable to, the configuration of the place. In contrast to the current masculine version of Anping's map, which is full of military and colonial landmarks, this study seeks to enrich Anping's outlook by identifying significant sites particularly associated with female representatives of their time. My purpose is to produce a new way to understand the city's cultural landscape by locating women's stories in the mapping of Anping's history. By representing the new visual modalities such as Lin Mor Niang Park and Miss Jin's statue into the current mapping, this study can contribute to what might be called a feminist politics of place construction.