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Outside the window it shimmers As if a new world is about to dawn People slay and seize possessions no more They use their hands instead to soothe and console.1 Gender Equality and Sage-Queen Totality With this little poem, Liu Yu-hsiu, Taiwan’s foremost state feminist, commenced her presentation in the Third National Women’s Conference in Taipeiin1998,ayearnamedastheYearofEqualityAction.2 Expressivelyserene, the poem reflects a feminist sense of hope, an optimism gesturing towards a new era when the feminine virtue of love replaces masculine aggression, a future where equality rules. Liu’s presentation begins by situating the women’s movement as a challenge to the progression of modernity initiated since the Declaration of Human Rights, a progression, she argues, that has been characterised by the continual patriarchal and capitalist domination of both women and the workers. In particular, she identifies the causes of gender oppression in Taiwan as rooted in the objectification of women in the private and public spheres: while the patriarchal family exploits women’s labour for reproduction, care and domestic work, the ever-expanding sex market in late capitalist society also massively commodifies women as sex objects. In her usual spirit of scholarly activism, Liu indexes a list of tasks to be tackled — and this characterises her mode of feminism — through state intervention. Thus in addition to promoting the combined public-private Scandinavian welfare state system that provides universal care, Liu asserts the urgent need to deploy more education and legal intercessions to redress the existing relation between the sexes, a relation which is, according to her, profoundly twisted by the very existence of prostitution. ‘De-instrumentalisation’ and 5 Modernising Gender, Civilising Sex State Feminism and Perverse Imagination Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan 144 ‘de-commodification’ thus present for Liu the key to realising a gender equal society, where everyone would be able to have ‘joyful’ sexual intimacy. Significantly, Liu further elaborates the meaning of sexual intimacy in the following passage made with reference to the emergent sexual emancipation/ queer movement (spearheaded by the feminist sex radicals like Josephine Ho and Ning Yin-bin):3 Sex should be seen as one important link that constitutes an intimate relationship. What ought to be emphasised is not the kind of unconditional sex. Rather, what one should emphasise is the positive side, the positive power of sex as well as joyful intimate relations. Hence while it is wrong to repress sex, it is also inadequate [for feminism] to merely emphasise sex or even overemphasise sex … Measures for the purpose of sexual and bodily liberations should be placed within a large framework that takes into account the individual and society as a whole. Otherwise, one would defeat the objective and end up tying more knots, or leading to total disintegration.4 Obviously, Liu’s reservation about sex is greater than her desire to distinguish her feminism from the abstinent kind. While reifying the queer movement as wanting nothing but sex, Liu emphasises that sex must be subordinated to a putative totality that she presumes, a totality by which sexual intimacy is qualified within the context of her feminism. ‘Overemphasising sex’, she warns, would cause the total collapse of civilisational order. In this account, queerness appears to be figured as a kind of negativity, as that which must be radically repressed such that Liu’s optimism for a feminist civilisational order, as conveyed through her poem, can be sustained. The gender and sexual politics of Liu has been pivotal in the establishment of the feminist public sphere as well as of the hegemonic ascendancy of Taiwan state feminism in recent years. A professor of English specialising in feminist psychoanalytic criticism, Liu has been heavily involved in the women’s movement since its inception in the late 1980s and served twice as the chair of the Taiwan Feminist Scholar Association (founded in 1993). While she was chair, the Association published The Women Situation in Taiwan: A White Paper and Women (1995) and State and Care Work (1997) respectively. These books, taken together, can be seen as setting out the agenda for Taiwan state feminism: attributing the root of gender oppression in Taiwan to the immense burden of unwaged housework weighing on the woman in the patriarchal family, strong state interventions are called for in the ‘private’ domain of family to remedy the longstanding gender injustice, with state feminism aiming to take over the state machine and transform the Taiwan patriarchal capitalist state into a ‘maternal’ mode of welfare...

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