A Self of One’s Own

Abstract

Although recent scholarship focuses on the importance of religion to immigrants in the United States, relatively little attention has been given to how religion shapes the everyday lives of immigrant women. This article examines how Taiwanese immigrant women as religious converts use Buddhism and Christianity to construct a distinct sense of self from the family. Buddhism and Christianity challenge traditional gender roles by offering alternative conceptions of a genderless self. Women’s new religious commitments may compete with their traditional commitments to their families. Through religious conversion, women carve out spaces of independence and authority for themselves, albeit never at the cost of threatening the nuclear family.