Hybridity, indigeneity, and gendering: Chang Hui-Mei, popular music, and Taiwanese identity

Abstract

While Austronesian study has become prevalent in Taiwan, the conscious preservation of aboriginal culture is growing stronger just as that culture itself is endangered. Taiwanese culture is hybrid by nature, due to the nation's colonial history. Cultural penetration by colonizers, including the Dutch, early Han settlers, the Japanese, and the more recent Chinese Nationalists, has resulted in several changes of identity for the Taiwanese people. However, aboriginal culture has become one of the foundations of Taiwanese cultural hybridity. In this thesis, I focus specifically on the indigeneity and matriarchal characteristics suppressed by those colonial patriarchies, through an exploration of the production and performance of Taiwanese identity in popular music. Focusing on the images and performance personae in the Taiwanese popular music industry, and using data collected during fieldwork from concerts, TV shows, and interviews, this work illuminates aboriginal movements that seek self-affirmation and a hope for the future. This thesis examines a variety of aboriginal musicians in the Golden Melody Awards (the Taiwanese equivalent of the Grammy Awards), and their ethnic classification is studied in depth. In particular, I focus mainly on Chang Hui-Mei, a pop female singer from the Pinuyumayan, one of Taiwan's aboriginal groups. I interrogate the cultural paradox arising from a hybrid patriarchal power structure imposed upon a matrilineal culture base. I posit in this case that the mechanism of disidentification (Muñoz) is critical in generating a contemporary national consciousness, and look at how the resultant internal conflict affects individual perceptions of identity construction in Taiwan.