The purpose of the dissertation is to explore and theorize how the organization of gender plays a role in the democratization process in Taiwan. Most studies on the Taiwanese democratic experience attribute its peaceful transition either to economic development or to the work of opposition parties. Both approaches focus on the macro and institutional sweeps of change that are disengaged from the subjects of the political enterprise. The separation between political activity and its subjects leave little room to address the kind of social and gender dynamic that take shape in the process, the kinds of subjectivities are constituted for a democracy, how individuals change from subjects of the old regime to the new, and how their everyday experiences deter or contribute to the momentum of the democratization project.

This study examines the lives of Taiwanese women in a period spanning five decades and crossing two political regimes to see how they dealt with, and maneuvered to change a terrain earmarked by the state with its prescriptions of gender aimed at eliciting loyalty and securing women's identification to the political authority. Using findings from in depth interviews conducted from a ten-month stay in Taiwan, and extensive archival research, the dissertation theorizes the processes and the conditions that facilitate political change that came from the stockpiling of women's subjective experiences. The manuscript shows in detail how the alternative frames of experience for Taiwanese women arrived, not because they were actively seeking to change the gender order or the political situation, but while dealing with everyday life problems that pertained to women and that pervaded in their immediate environment.

The dissertation's choice to attend to women's experiences is analytically productive in that it provides an alternative approach to existing discussions on democratization. The framework leads not only to a better understanding of the Taiwanese case, but also more generally to a deeper analysis of how gendered subjectivities emerge in the context of social and institutional transformations and the mechanisms that enable individuals to shape political change.