Paper short abstract:

This paper explores masculinity as a compensatory phenomenon. I trace the formation of masculine hierarchies amongst Taiwanese Christians as inter-generational responses to church "sisters"' gendered relationship with their Christian God. I conceptualise masculinity here as a "response formation".

Paper long abstract:

'The church in Taiwan' is the Taiwanese branch of a global, cosmologically-focused Christian group which originated in Fujian, China in the 1920s. Members of the church, following the spiritual anthropology of the group's late leaders, 'Watchman Nee' and 'Witness Lee', differentiate between male psycho-spiritual dispositions and female ones. While "brothers" are described as being overly rational and as being predisposed to remain in their "minds", "sisters" are considered overly impulsive, being predisposed to remain in their "emotions". In line with much of Christian hsitory, brothers have accesses to explicitly recognised positions of authority and are allowed to give "messages" (which are similar to sermons) at a large church gatherings. Sisters however, are denied these possibilities. In this paper, I first introduce a fieldwork friend, sister Wu, who rejected the church for being "too traditional" in its orientations to, among other things, gender. I then use her critiques as a prompt for understanding how those church sisters' who embrace the church's gendered positionalities do not find themselves to be oppressed in the way that sister Wu did. I show how I discovered in fact that the gendered relationship between sisters and their Christian God is more primary to the life of the church than those between brothers and sisters. In fact, I show, brothers' hierarchical masculinity is a compensatory response to their relative exclusion from the sisters' relationship with God. Finally, adapting the psychoanalytical notion of 'reaction formations', the paper contributes toward understanding masculinity as a 'response formation'.