Abstract
This study examines the incorporation of gender and feminist scholarship into Taiwan's mainstream scholarship, with a focus on three fields: Western literature and culture studies, sociology, and education. The current work proposes an analytical framework consisting of two sets of factors to explain the level of integration of feminist scholarship into the mainstream. These factors include the distinctive features of each discipline and the researcher's identification with feminism.To assess how well feminist scholarship has been accepted and how well the field of gender studies has made its way into the academic mainstream, this study investigates the number of women's and gender studies articles published in core journals of these three fields from 1990 to 2007 and explores the theoretical perspectives, research themes, and methods of these articles. The findings indicate that gender studies is identified as a ”women's field” and has been marginalized and segregated in the mainstream academics. The number and percentage of feminist articles in core journals of the three disciplines also vary. In the field of western literature and culture studies, the number of articles peaked in the 1990s, but rapidly decreased in the new millennium. In education, both figures are the lowest, compared to the other two disciplines. Only in the sociology core journals have feminist articles taken a relatively significant position. These findings are discussed with our analytical framework. In conclusion, we suggest that the mutual engagement of social activism and academic research have been the engine driving the expansion of gender studies across all three disciplines. However, only feminist scholars in sociology have embodied a commitment to this unique facet of gender studies.