'A choice among no choice': Exploring Taiwanese mother's agency and identity along the blurred boundaries between leisure, work, and consumption (China)

The purpose of this dissertation is to use an ethnographic approach to reveal how Taiwanese mothers determine the meanings of their daily life as well as demonstrate the process of their negotiation. I use their daily consumption---shopping---as a prism to discuss the type of situation they are in, the way they recognize themselves in the situation, and most importantly, the type of strategy they adopt in order to make themselves to live "better and happier". In particular, I focus on how they perceive and define leisure and wonder: what those women's "selves" should be.; On the basis of a set of ethnographical interviews with eighteen Taiwanese mothers, this study has argued that leisure, determined by women's own definitions, represents women's autonomy and the ability to negotiate with constraints in their motherhoods. Moreover it has served as a site for women to re-construct and re-interpret the traditional images of "passive actors" recognized by the androcentric ideology. According to my conversational partners' narratives, leisure has been reaffirmed as a "state of mind", or a subjective experience that enables women to acquire their "sense of self" while they confront the restrictive situations caused by their voluntary and vulnerability for being "good mothers". Through the function of a mother's leisure that endows them with possible "choices", for a mother, motherhood may symbolize a restrictive---a no choice---situation. Yet, this identity is anything but passive.; Through the scope of women's determination toward their leisure, women's shopping, as a fundamental activity in women's everyday life, successfully represents the importance of this "choice among no choice" situation of mothers, in relation to the multiple functions and varied enjoyments shopping carries in the public sphere that has been engendered by women themselves. Mothers' daily consumption, long ignored in leisure literature, can combine with the notion of leisure and can be proved as important and significant in women's daily life.