Fluid motherhood: gender, Chinese religions, and kinship maneuvers in the Buddhist women’s Southern Sea diaspora (1880–1960)

ABSTRACT Chinese kinship, the basis and vital force of Chinese societies, is defined by patrilineal descent; thus, it has an agnatic character. The Chinese kinship system was brought to Southeast Asia by Chinese communities in their various diasporic trajectories. Its patriarchal norms have been maintained through various social institutions, under which women were generally peripheral. This article utilizes new materials garnered from fieldwork on women’s temples in Singapore to demonstrate how unmarried, widowed, and unattached Chinese women organized themselves and their networks through matricentric religious establishments. Further, they reconfigured, rebuilt, and reorganized their kinships based on religious lineages, dialect groups, and mutual interests rather than blood. Through providing empirical insights into the gendering and religionizing of Chinese kinships in Southeast Asia, this article seeks to address the persistent male bias in studies of Chinese kinship, arguing for the need to consider non-normative family units that center around women and female religious leadership. Many of the religious women concerned were associated with Buddhism in some way; therefore, this article suggests that Buddhist “families” on the ground do not necessarily comply with traditional Buddhist monastic orders. Rather, they have fluid dispositions and diversified natures. The ambivalence that characterized these local forms of Chinese Buddhism enabled women to navigate and negotiate their multiple socioreligious identities and create their own spiritual homes in male-centered Chinese diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.