Beyond The Boundary Of Home: Religion, Space, and Women in Hong Kong

Abstract: This article focuses on women’s place/space in Hong Kong with both deliberate attention to women’s absence/presence in history and an aspiration to reinstall women’s contribution to the place it deserves. Inspired by Derrida’s dialectic between presence and absence, the author traces women’s “presence” through their deeds and voices from “behind” and “underneath” their historical “absence.” As explained by Turner’s liminality of religion as an “in-between” space, the woman subject stretches her spatial map beyond the boundary of “home.” Through their religious devotion, women cross from their “designated” domestic confinement to the social and the private spheres, to the public sphere. The author draws on four women’s cases, each from a religious tradition in Hong Kong—Christianity, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam—to illustrate the various forms of negotiation they exercised in everyday life to find a subject in multiplicity. The gendered subject is never a monolithic essence but ever becoming.