I am an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of socio-cultural anthropology, gender studies, family studies, social demography, and East Asian studies. My research interests lie in how gender, bodies, and aspirations are intertwined in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of subjectivity in the era of the reorganization of neoliberal capitalism.
Between 2012 and 2021, I first explore the intersection of femininity, the body politics of desirability, and seeking upward mobility through a study of Taiwanese women’s quest for beauty and then the related discrimination against women’s fat bodies. Starting in 2022, I began working on different projects to explores how individuals’ aspiration and the desire for start a family manifest and evolve within the Taiwanese context of compressed modernity. My ongoing research project is divided into three interconnected lines of inquiry.
Childlessness in Taiwan: Gender and family in the post compressed modernity context
While declining fertility is a global trend, the East Asian region, including Taiwan, has the lowest fertility and highest childlessness rates in the world. This project tells the story of childless people in Taiwan who account for the world’s lowest birth rate. Although there are detailed demographic statistics, young people’s reasoning, hesitation, and complex process of decision-making are often invisibilised in surveys and quantitative investigations. This project uncovers the aspirations and worries of reproductive-age Taiwanese concerning life choices and family building. Beyond an individualistic premise and an ahistorical perspective, childlessness is analysed through a relational lens and is situated in the ongoing transition from Taiwan’s developmentalist period to a post-developmentalist era.
An ethnography of postpartum nursing centers: Exploring the intersections between changing postpartum rituals and gender, race, migration and social class in contemporary Taiwan
This project provides a critical analysis of institutionalisation and commercialisation of postpartum rituals, yuezi (月子), focusing on postpartum nursing centres (產後護理之家) in Taiwan. Taiwan’s extremely low birth rate, combined with a strong emphasis on family, has led parents to have fewer children while significantly increasing their investment in the next generation. Therefore, extremely low fertility coexists with (hyper-)intensive parenting, particularly mothering. This project therefore examines how care is conceived, practised, and reproduced within the emerging postpartum care industry, and how these practices intersect with and challenge kinship, gender systems, migration, and contemporary Taiwanese understandings of motherhood.
Alternative Life Choices: Aspirations and Family Formation Decisions in an era of precarity and uncertainty
This project focuses on Taiwanese youth’s alternative life choices, and why and how they reject conventional definitions of success and upward mobility. This also includes exploring why some young people are reluctant to become parents and start families. This project concentrates on Taiwanese young people's pursuit of alternative lives that are meaningful to them and can be considered a “good life” in the context of post-developmentalism or post catch-up modernity. I mobilize and transform the problematic of Appadurai’s “capacity to aspire” into how young people resist the conventional definition of success, focusing thus on their capacity to not aspire.