“Strangers Before the Law: Contested Intimacies in Taiwan”
Feat. Sara L. Friedman
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Indiana University
WHEN: Thursday March 5, 2014, 12:30- 2:00pm
WHERE: Boston University
Pardee School of Global Studies
Seminar Room
121 Bay State Road, Boston
Sponsored by ROC Ministry of Education & Education Division – TECO Boston
How does the power of law makes intimate relationships legitimate and acceptable to a larger project of national reproduction? What kinds of intimacies are excluded from this domain? This presentation focuses on two cases that unfolded in overlapping sequence beginning in 2011 in Taiwan. The first case involved the denationalization of an immigrant wife and her citizen child following discovery of the child¹s uncertain paternity (and, hence, the wife¹s non-monogamous sexuality). The second case was sparked by the government¹s effort to revoke a legal marriage between two transgender individuals, both citizens by birth. “Stranger anxiety” has favored heterosexual marriage and family units as the basis for citizenship inclusion and recognition in Taiwan, and the law has molded diverse intimacies to fit normative models of domesticity, and even the very definition of male and female. These proliferations of law and bureaucratic discretion are signs of intense anxiety concerning the status of the heterosexual family in Taiwan and the place of the stranger within the nation.
Sara L. Friedman is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China (Harvard, 2006) and co-editor of Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China (Stanford, 2014). Her current research focuses on marital migration from China to Taiwan and the consequences of Chinese immigration for Taiwan¹s sovereignty dilemmas. Her book, tentatively titled Exceptional States: Chinese Marital Immigrants and the Challenges of Taiwanese Sovereignty, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.