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Having delineated the contour of state feminism and its normative dimensions, this chapter continues to query the moral-sexual regime of the mainstream feminist culture by considering its emotional and affective make-up. By way of concluding this work of queer historiography in Taiwan, this chapter concerns itself with the analysis of a dominant form of female sentimentality that animates the hegemonic rise of anti-prostitution/ obscenity feminist public sphere since the mid-1990s. By showing how this feeling culture propels a liberal form of state governance, which has intensified the regulation of non-conjugal intimacies and ‘public sex’ under the child-protection imperative of late in Taiwan, this chapter aims to theorise what I term ‘melancholic sexual modernity’. Given the contingency of prostitution as the specific gendered pain in liberal Taiwan, I propose to examine here the anti-prostitution/obscenity feminist public culture by what Lauren Berlant has formulated as the ‘intimate public sphere’. In her study of sexual politics under the hegemonic regime of 1990s US Reaganite neo-conservatism and Clinton neo-liberalism, Berlant makes a powerful case that contemporary US sexual citizenship is constructed through the zone of privacy in the mass-mediated public sphere. This culture of intimacy is fantasmatic, in that it is galvanised by, she argues, a family-orientated national sentimentality that fetishises the figures of the child and the foetus, whose imputed innocence works to redeem the future of the white bourgeois American dream, sullied in the recent past by the rise and challenge of minority identity politics in the public domain. Berlant’s analysis is particularly instructive for this chapter, as she shows how the US intimate publicspherecomestobeorganisedthroughhighlyemotionallychargedissues such as abortion and pornography and, most importantly, how the culture of national sentimentality, premised as it is on pre-ideological suppositions that 6 Mourning the Monogamous Ideal Anti-Prostitution Feminism, Conjugal Sentimentality and the Formation of Melancholic Sexual Modernity Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan 174 cut through social stratifications and hierarchies, works effectively to procure and win over the consents needed for hegemonic ascendancy.1 In analysing the intimate public sphere given rise to by mainstream feminism, I have chosen to focus on analysing the discourse and praxes of Hwang Shuling. A key figure in the anti-prostitution bloc specialising in Taiwan prostitution studies, and Liu Yu-hsiu’s frequent collaborator, the UStrained sociologist has used her extended ethnographic researches on men, women and teenage girls in the sex industry to bolster her feminist claims. Her anti-prostitution feminism has indeed earned her a rather impressive list of credits in public and social services. Previously chair of the Taiwan Feminist Scholars’ Association (2005–2007), Hwang has served on the board of directors of the Taiwan Women’s Rescue Foundation and has been appointed, as a member of both the Commission on Women’s Rights and the Gender Equity Education Committee, among others. (Both groups were set up by the central government in 1997). These positions are cited here to index the institutional context of the gender mainstreaming process wherein her speaking position is situated, as well as to underscore the symbolic power she exercises. In delineating the specific contour of this ‘intimate public sphere’ in Taiwan, I use as a starting point an emotionally charged paper that Hwang delivered at the Third National Women’s Conference in 1998 to mark out her attachment to conjugality, further analysing what she terms ‘compulsory heterosexual male desire’ in her vituperation of the sex industry. Then I proceed to look at how the endemic culture of prostitution is configured through the problematic of traffic in women in Hwang’s sociological imagination, showing how her own subjectivity is entirely imbricated within that very figuration, which is structured through the compulsion to repeat the position of what Ding Naifei calls ‘wife-in-monogamy’. The content of this feminist attachment to the form of conjugal/romantic love is further investigated through my analysis of The Youthhood Tainted by Sex: Stories of Ten Teenage Girls Doing Sex Work (2003), a pedagogical book compiled by the Women’s Rescue Foundation under Hwang’s supervision. Situating the book as a particular product of biopower in Taiwan, I show how gender-equalityminded feminists like Hwang herself, in their attempt to redeem the ‘problem’ teenage girl from her hapless fall, massively sentimentalise her by projecting onto her a pristine feminine sexuality. In particular, I demonstrate that such a self-sentimentalising gesture on the part of mainstream feminism instantiates a fantasy time-space that...

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