Imagined Concubinage

“Thinking Sex” in Taiwan

How might imagined concubinage in the cultural field serve as crucible wherein a hegemonic womanhood’s (xianqi liangmu, “wise wife, good mother”) not-yet- wife- in- monogamy shame becomes transmuted into stigmatic sexuality via figures of prostitutes and concubines, or prostitutes turned concubines, given that prostitute-to- concubine has been and continues to be a trajectory for modern-day “little wives” or secondary wives in Taiwan?¹ What role does the populist feminist imagination play in this process? How might such a combination of feelings and forces add fuel to the fire, so to speak, in a society’s sex panic and in the state’s selective antisex measures? The first two are the main questions for this paper, while the third points to implications that this project continues to explore.

Wife-in- monogamy is an unwieldy term that I have coined to represent the complex of feelings accompanying accession to the position of “wife” (in modern monogamy), feelings that include the desire for and inability to measure up to “wife-in- monogamy” as a dominant status and generalized value. Its counterpart is “wife-in- polygamy,” denoting the primary wife in Chinese polygamy, the only position in a polygamous family accorded legal wife status and a sense of familial representational authority.²

Imagined concubinage refers here to fictional representations of urban marriage and romantic love in crisis in early 1980s Taiwan by women writers in short stories, novellas, and novels featuring female protagonists. This period is at the tail end of a compressed urbanization beginning around the 1960s that precipitates the emergence of a professional urban womanhood voicing discontent as she negotiates familial and socioeconomic changes. Hers is the voice and figure that precedes the popularization of the women’s movement via the media and local feminism’s accession to a nationwide platform through the mid-to late 1990s. My question arises from a Taiwan context wherein a populist feminist antisex sentiment (with dire policy implications for sexual minorities) necessitates renewed understanding of its cultural-historical lineage and affinities. One aspect of feminist antisex sentiment is embedded in an imagined concubinage against which an exemplary wife-in- monogamy envisions continuous battle. To the extent that this cultural and psychic battle is ongoing in Taiwan today, I would argue that wife-in- monogamy feels as if it can never be fully installed as a structure of feeling, and that the very installment of such a structure of feeling entails reactivating in different ways an imagined concubinage (imagined to the extent that it is no longer viable as a legal institution, although is it not extinct as practice in both privileged and nonprivileged forms), against which an embattled wife-in- monogamy is sculpted in relief. The wife-in- monogamy in such a cultural-social milieu is thus constitutively produced as always at risk.

The 1990s in Taiwan precipitated social and political changes with far- reaching effects. With the lifting of martial law in 1987, social and political movements gained momentum to effect an electoral change of government in 2000. Then-elected Democratic Progressive Party President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Lu Hsiu-lien, one of the authors I address, concluded their second term of office in 2008. Among social movements, the women’s movement and feminism, more or less in tandem with the political opposition movement and party, achieved nationwide recognition for many of their concerns, particularly in the fields of equal pay for equal work, family law, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and educational reform.³ If the eighties were a culmination period for women’s writings on marriage and domesticity (in the cultural field) and early women’s groups and feminist organizing (in the social field), the nineties marked a series of high-voltage exchanges and an eventual standoff on the newly emergent topics of female sexuality, pornography, and prostitution/sex work. Sex and sexuality arose as an issue within major feminist groups in the early nineties in part because of emergent lesbian and gay movement forces in the shadow of feminist organizations and women’s movement issues, and in part because of the concurrent...