Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity inTaiwan

3. State Power, Prostitution and Sexual Order: Towards a Genealogical Critique of ‘Virtuous Custom’

It is necessary to establish the police force before the building of the nation. Chiang Kai-shek1 What kind of political techniques, what technology of government, has been put to work and used and developed in the general framework of the reason of the state in order to make of the individual a significant element for the state? Michael Foucault2 Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in finding ways of being queers … Because the logic of the sexual order is so deeply embedded by now in an indescribably wide range of social institutions, and is embedded in the most standard accounts of the world, queer struggles aim not just at toleration or equal status but at challenging those institutions and accounts. Michael Warner3 The Police Offence Law and the Sage-King State This chapter concerns the state regulation of sexualities and the formation of gendered subjectivities in postwar Taiwan. It considers, by way of genealogical investigation, the policed culture of sex under the regulatory regime of ‘virtuous custom’ (shanliang fengsu) as sustained by the now defunct Police Offence Law. By analysing the police and journalistic discourse of sex between the 1950s and 1980s, it traces the process whereby a particular segment-line of contemporary Taiwan dominant social/sexual order came to be established through the state’s banning of prostitution. As this genealogical project is motivated by an immediate political concern for the historical present, this chapter will conclude by showing how the regulatory regime 3 State Power, Prostitution and Sexual Order Towards a Genealogical Critique of ‘Virtuous Custom’ Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan 84 of ‘virtuous custom’ has greatly expanded since the 1990s due to the rise of anti-prostitution state feminism. While the ascendancy of this feminist public culture will be examined in detail in chapters 5 and 6, I offer here a preliminary critique of state feminist politics by looking at its intervention in legal reforms in light of the genealogy traced above. The Police Offence Law, modelled on prewar Japanese Police Offence Law, was promulgated originally by the Qing government in 1906.4 Finalised after an overhaul in 1943, it remained unconstitutionally sustained by the Kuomintang (KMT) government in Taiwan until 1991 when it was abrogated and replaced by the Social Order Maintenance Law.5 This administrative law, which enabled the state to actively intervene in the course of social formations, played a pivotal role in nation-building in postwar Taiwan. Its regulatory realms encompassed virtually every aspect of public and, as this chapter will show, private life. It conferred on the police the prerogative to discipline and punish the deviant individual: interrogation, jurisdiction, adjudication, and the execution of punishment were all to be carried out within the police station. While the offender’s true intent in the alleged crime did not preclude punishment, the police also had discretionary powers to impose harsher punishment on ‘habitual’ offenders. Penalties included confiscation, forced labour, admonition, detention of up to fourteen days or a fine as well as the shutting down of a business either temporarily or permanently.6 To legitimise the operation of the Police Offence Law in Taiwan, the KMT government promulgated in 1953 the Police Law, enlisting ‘redressing the customs’ (zhengsu), among others, as part of police administration. While ‘redressing the customs’ included getting rid of ‘backward’ social practices such as foot-binding and breast-binding, it was the political management of sex that constituted the most significant part of this particular domain of police administration.7 Thus, in the name of maintaining ‘virtuous custom’, the police not only had the mission of rectifying individual sexual misconduct but also the task of administering the leisure/pleasure businesses associated with fostering sexual immorality in general and prostitution in particular in accordance with the Police Offence Law. Of particular interest and significance here is the role assigned to the police by the architect of the modern police apparatus in China and Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek, that of moral guardian of the population.8 Maintaining that ‘the aim of police administration is the practising of “the government of benevolence (renzheng)”’,9 Chiang upholds that the essential task of the police is to reform society and to ‘enable all the people to become good national citizens (guomin)’.10 To undertake such a task, the police must, as Chiang expounds in an admonitory speech he gave to students of the Central Police State Power...