Women’s labor expenditures are often ignored structurally. There are neither their credits for celebrating engineering achievements nor their turn to commemorate labor sacrifices. This paper comprehensively examines the labor memorials in Taiwan's construction industry and investigates how many female workers were recorded. The analyzed texts include historical materials, inscriptions, archives, news reports, and other written materials, as well as the monument material, design, and spatial configuration found in field surveys. Explore the invisible, pay attention to the few recorded ones, look back at the political and economic background of the construction site from the present perspective of gender and labor to construct a complex and diverse labor landscape, and look forward to the imagination of a democratic society. Over a hundred years of history of construction in Taiwan, only three labor memorials have appeared with female names: the "Monument to those who died for constructing Jianan Irrigation Canal" in 1931, which included the family members of employees and outsourced female workers; the "Labor Memorials of South-Link Railway" in 1992, which first showed up the female subjectivities as workers; "Taipei 101 Partner Monument" in 2007, on which there are thousands of women’s names, breaking the stereotype of gender division of labor in the construction industry. Although the number of labor memorials with women's figures is small, they contain historical significance. Collective memory is originally socially constructed. Finding the female figures is not only a reconstruction of labor history but also a recognition of women's contributions, to dialogue with contemporary society.

Authors:
Yu-ling Ku, The School of Humanities, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Yuling Ku is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of Transdisciplinary Studies on Creative Writing and Literature, Taipei National University of the Arts. Her research interests focus on cultural studies and the politics of memory.

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