This paper explores how identity, resistance, and adaptation are negotiated through Indigenous Amis music and dance, historically shaped by a heterosexual binary ontology and increasingly reconfigured within postcolonial Taiwanese contexts and queer engagements with women’s agency. During the Japanese colonial period and under enduring Han Chinese patriarchal norms, maternal Amis traditions were transformed through political suppression, cultural assimilation, and religious conversion. A corollary of these processes was the shift in heritage transmission—language, surnames, land, and property—toward patrilineal inheritance, reinforcing male dominance and constraining women’s agency within contemporary Amis society.

Against this backdrop of gendered restructuring, the paper asks how women cultural bearers negotiate and reinterpret, or converge with and diverge from, dualistic gender values through music-making today. Drawing on Jodie Taylor’s concept of the “intimate insider” (2011), I reflect on friendships formed during fieldwork since 2019 in the Amis communities of Falangaw and Ciwkangan. These relationships reveal the complex role of (pro-)LGBTQ+ male allies—often influential in local music scenes—in facilitating women’s cultural participation and reshaping gendered musicking (Small, 1999) and performative spaces (Butler, 1990).

This analysis applies Indigenous feminist and decolonial frameworks to address Thomas R. Hilder’s call for deeper engagement with Indigenous feminism and cosmology (2016), while critically examining how musicking may intersect with nationalist identity protocols questioned by Roderick A. Ferguson (2004). Finally, I reflect on my positionality as a Han Chinese ethnomusicologist collaborating with younger Amis generations, foregrounding dialogic knowledge-making and avoiding appropriative representation (Robinson, 2020).