Female Gender in Chinese Religious Symbols: Kuan Yin, Ma Tsu, and the "Eternal Mother"

Abstract

ern mother goddessess (e.g., Virgin Mary) make the meanings of Chinese deities' gender qualities appear self-evident. Yet it is no more natural (if nature is opposed to culture) to attribute qualities like compassion, mercy, and nurturance to female deities than it is to characterize actual women as submissive and domestic; recent crosscultural studies of gender convince us of that. In other words, gender qualities, be they attributed to deities or persons, are culturally constituted and embedded in symbolic matrices of meaning that vary considerably from one society to the next. Moreover, as this paper attempts to demonstrate, the gender qualities ascribed to deities and to women are not necessarily isomorphic. Indeed, discontinuities between qualities associated with female deities and those associated with women highlight important culturally posed and, in practice, irresolvable existential dilemmas for Chinese women. My objective in this paper, which focuses on three female-deity cults active in northern Taiwan, is to draw attention to the religious