Gendered lives under neutral laws: Women, the family, and feminist legal reform in Taiwan.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the entangled relationships among sex inequality, the family, and the law. It is an engagement with the questions of how the law functions to perpetuate the subordination of women in the family and through the family, and of the extent to which feminist legal reform has challenged and changed this schema. The analysis is locally grounded in that it centers on the case of Taiwan. It provides a critique of the notion and application of gender neutrality, and of women's gendered lives under neutral laws. I first examine how sex equality became a constitutional principle in Taiwan, the substance of this sex equality doctrine, and the role of feminist activism in the shaping of this doctrine. I also investigate the transformation of the ideal family under the law (from the extended family towards an egalitarian nuclear family model), and how this transformation relates to women's subordination. I then explore three overlapping kinds of women's gendered roles in the family: daughter, wife/daughter-in-law, and mother, so as to demonstrate how these roles function as the bases of women's subordination in and through the family. My investigation of the daughter's legal status shows that modern Taiwanese law's reformulation of the relationship between a daughter and her parents, which appears to be a reciprocal one, fails in its mission to connect the fragile ties between them and to reclaim justice for the daughter. The wife/daughter-in-law's legal status receives treatment from three perspectives: firstly, sexual subordination through the regulation of marital and non-marital sex, and systematic and oppressive effects of domestic violence; secondly, economic subordination in the family and in the workplace; thirdly, the subordination under the divorce system, including its regulatory power in enforcing wifely conducts, and its disadvantegeous consequences for women. I then explore women's subordination through the institution of motherhood by discussing the right to abortion and the abuse of new reproductive technologies that function to restrict, rather than facilitate, women's reproductive freedom. I also investigate the relationships between mothering and the labor market system, as well as the gendered allocation of parental rights and responsibilities.