Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the impact of women's movement and women's/gender studies, which have developed into full swing since mid-1990s, on educational research in Taiwan. The fields of women's adult education and sex education are chosen as the foci of this investigation for their gender related tradition. Three aspects are taken into consideration while e examined research literature on these two fields: 1) theoretical framework under which a research was conducted, 2) the ways in which gender subjectivity was presented in the research literature, and 3) the diversity of the issues tackled in the research literature.For the field of women's adult education, articles from major journals during the period from 1991 to 2003 were examined. Results from content analyses of these articles show that mainstream research on women's adult education has been indifferent to theories and approaches developed from women's and gender studies, that women's images and subjectivity were of little concern of the researchers. It is only until very recently that the feminist-oriented research started to appear sporadically on these major journals.For the field of sex education, the researchers firstly selected literature from three journals that have been popularly circulated in Taiwan's elementary schools and high schools. Key concepts of politics of differences and politics of identity are adopted in the analyses of sex education literature. It is found that gender-blind and heterosexual centered discourses dominate mainstream sex education literature in popular educational magazines such as Testing and Guidance, Counseling and Guidance and Student Guidance Newsletter. In contrast, gender sensitive sex/uality education discourses are primarily presented in Gender Equity Education Quarterly, a magazine recently emerged under the influences of feminisms and multicultural perspectives.