Abstract
The Presbyterian missions and medical missions in 19th-century Taiwan were successful enterprises that over time developed into the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, which stands today as the largest Christian minority church in this country. Through a Foucauldian biopolitical perspective, this paper analyzes the roles of female missionaries in the management of bodies and the subjective experiences of both foreign and Native women in the missions. Going beyond descriptive narratives and control-versus-agency reductionist frames, the paper points the polyvalent semantics of such roles and experiences. It also explores the complex relations between the women’s biopolitical functions, the PCT’s industrial type of biopolitical apparatus, and the biopolitical regimes of the late Qing dynasty and the Japanese colonial government in the early 20th century. The conclusions remark on the analytical relevance of biopolitical perspectives in the study of gender and body-related phenomena in Christian missions and Christian religions beyond Western societies.
Highlights
Backed by the prerogatives granted by the 1858 Treaties of Tianjin, and after a first wave of American and European Protestant missionaries who preached in the south of mainland China in the early 19th century (Tiedemann 2009), Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Taiwan for the first time in 1865
The analysis of our textual corpus was guided by the search for both patterns of discourses and practices (Zavala-Pelayo 2021) as well as “minute deviations” (Foucault 1977, p. 146) or “oddities” (Choi 2009, p. 5). It was conducted in three stages (Jäger 2001): (i) a literal analysis, whereby frequent explicit themes and subjects were identified within documents and across the data set; (ii) an interpretative analysis that yielded further categories of explicit and implicit subjects across the data set; and (iii) a conceptual analysis, whereby the categories were interpreted through the biopolitical perspective outlined above
While trying not to lose sight of coeval biopolitical programs in the late Qing dynasty and the Japanese colonial government, in this paper we have tried to shed light on the Presbyterian missions’ biopolitical apparatus, its knowledge bases, types of bodily regulations and interventions, and women’s range of roles and subjective experiences, which went beyond a control–agency binary frame
Summary
Backed by the prerogatives granted by the 1858 Treaties of Tianjin, and after a first wave of American and European Protestant missionaries who preached in the south of mainland China in the early 19th century (Tiedemann 2009), Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Taiwan for the first time in 1865. With this conceptual–analytical approach, we attempt to shed light on women’s medical work or the missionaries’ policing of female bodies, and on the range of body-related roles and subjective experiences of women, and the connection between those roles and experiences and what can be considered the Presbyterian missions’ biopolitical apparatus To understand this complex set of biopolitical dimensions and phenomena in a broad context, our analysis covers both the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, that is, the foundational missionary period under the late Qing dynasty and the Presbyterian missions during the Japanese colonial government (1895–1945) in Taiwan. The conclusions remark on the polyvalent semantics of women’s body-related roles and experiences in the biopolitics of the Presbyterian missions and highlight the analytical relevance of biopolitical perspectives in the study of body-related phenomena in Christian missions and Christian religions beyond Western societies
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