ABSTRACT
In 2019, the government of Taiwan legalized same-sex marriage, the first to do so in Asia. Yet, despite its celebration as a sign of liberal progress, legalization appears at odds with the results of referendums that show a majority of Taiwan citizens oppose LGBTQ acceptance, following a steady decline in tolerance for LGBTQ people in Taiwan. To explain this, this article adopts a Goffmanian micro-sociological approach to interrogate LGBTQ experiences of stigma and discrimination in their networks. Using narrative and go-along interviews with LGBTQ people in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 2019, this article shows (1) latent forms of discrimination in families and at workplaces, (2) the intensification of discriminatory scrutiny within these spaces in the wake of legalization, (3) mental health consequences, and (4) social enclaves that offer some reprieve from discriminatory pressures. This article identifies a need for greater resource allocation to create safe spaces for members of the LGBTQ community and anti-discrimination policies to combat the capillary forms of discrimination that have arisen after same-sex marriage legalization.
Acknowledgments
I thank Robert J. Shepherd for his assiduous editorial work and insightful suggestions, as well as two anonymous reviewers at Critical Asian Studies. I also thank Tong Lam and discussants at the 2018 Big Ideas research conference for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The vote by the party was as follows: Democratic Progressive Party (DPP): fifty-four in favor, one opposed, and thirteen abstentions; Nationalist Party (KMT): seven in favor, twenty-three opposed, and four abstentions; the People First Party (PFP): three opposed; the New People Party (NPP): five in favor. Three other Yuan members abstained.
3 Chung Citation2018. The referendum was first proposed by conservative Christian groups in Taiwan in February 2018 in response to the May 2017 Constitutional Court ruling about same-sex marriage legalization within two years. The referendum proposal was accepted by the Central Election Commission and administered alongside local (county- and municipal-level) elections on November 24 2018.
6 Pettinicchio Citation2012. Declining marriage rates typically indicate the declining significance of marriage as a social institution. This correlation has been cited to explain more favorable attitudes toward the legalization of gay marriage in countries like the United States.
22 See also de la Fuente and Walsh Citation2021. Maciejewski et al. (Citation2022) most recently vindicate the merits of a Goffmanian micro-sociological approach in their study of grief, finding that the most nuanced consequences of bereavement are generated by attention to the micro-level (and, in their case, that bereavement comprises a form of social disconnection that aggravates the deleterious mental health consequences of loss).
46 DeNora Citation2013. Drawing on Goffman to theorize how music is an interactive space that provides comfort to individuals, DeNora delineates this concept of a sanctuary as that which “ … may be physical, as in a sanctuary or safe place … [or] temporary shelter by simply changing a topic of conversation, by shifting the lighting in a room.” DeNora Citation2013, 47.
72 Giroux Citation2017. United States hate crime statistics for 2017, as reported by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), showed an increase of almost twenty percent following Donald Trump’s electoral victory. This is likely an underreported figure. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Citation2017; Lopez Citation2017.
80 Where the affection for a friend derives from a fetish for a status characteristic such as race, class, or sexual identity.
94 A poll by Taiwan ThinkTank in 2016 revealed that 78.9 percent of people under the age of thirty supported marriage equality, but this percentage decreased as age increased, to a low of approximately seventeen percent for people over seventy.
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Funding
This research was partially funded by the Asian Institute in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
Notes on contributors
Anson Au
Anson Au is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research examines social networks, economic sociology, and professions and organizations, with a regional focus on East Asia.
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