Hsin-Chin Evelyn Hsieh
National Taipei University of Education
Biography
Hsin-Chin Evelyn Hsieh is currently Assistant Professor at Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Culture at National Taipei University of Education, and also serves as the secretary-general of Association for Taiwan Literature since 2018. She obtained her PhD degree in East Asian Languages and Literatures from University of Oregon, USA. Her research interests include contemporary Taiwan literature, film and documentary, migration studies, Sinophone studies, and women studies, particularly looking at the relation between contemporary cultural production and inbound and outbound migration of Taiwan. Her dissertation examines the representation of the transforming family and the reinvention of home-ness through migrant women’s lens in contemporary Sinophone and Chinese literature and film. She is currently conducting multiple research projects on Taiwanese American literature and cinematic representations of migrants’ lived experiences and transnationality in contemporary Taiwan cinema. She has published articles in China Information, Chinese America: History and Perspectives, and Tamkang Journal of Chinese Literature, etc. Prior to joining NTUE, she taught at Wesleyan University.
「 Documentary as a Tool of Intervention: Gender and Identity Politics of Southeast Asian Marriage Migrants in Taiwan 」
This paper explores the significance of documentary filmmaking on Southeast Asian marriage migrants in Taiwan and examines how documentary represents these immigrants’ gendered roles and their participation in social movement and cultural production in the host state Taiwan. Marriage migrants are defined as those who immigrated to Taiwan through marriage. China and Southeast Asia have been two major origin areas of migrant spouses since the 1980s. Given their varying cultural backgrounds and linguistic proficiency, Chinese and Southeast Asian migrants hold a distinct social status and encounter different challenges in the host society. This paper pays special attention to female immigrants from Southeast Asian countries and their participation and involvement in cultural production because they have been marginalized and relatively voiceless in society. Documentary film as alternative media embodies resistance, serves for social intervention, and offers a space where voiceless migrants can speak for themselves and increase their visibility in the public sphere. Paying attention to the representational politics of documentary filmmaking, this paper looks at the following three questions: (1) What gendered roles do marriage migrants play within the domestic sphere and beyond? (2) How does spatial transgression reshape marriage migrants’ identities? (3) With the cinematic representation of marriage migrants, how does documentary filmmaking as a tool intervene the national-building project and the construction of the multicultural society of Taiwan?
