CHAIRPERSON
Prof Chua Beng Huat, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
Seventeen years after the Taipei licensed prostitute turned sex worker movement of 1997 (in protest against the city government’s revoking of licenses), television serial Monga Women (2014) figures historical relations among prostitute, concubine, and primary wife. The relations are represented in ways that speak to 1970s Taiwan feminist fables on revenge and reconciliation, as well as to 1990s women’s movement debates over the impossible feminism of sex as work – how is sex work feminist? I look at local and international forces that impede alliance in 1997 between working class ex licensed prostitutes, some of whom cohabited with married men, and urban, mostly professional, women in late nineteen nineties Taiwan. I read Monga Women refracted through feminist housework debates and ethnographic and socio-legal histories of concubinage in Chinese households. A fictional continuum of the figures of prostitute, concubine, and primary wife could yield understanding of divisions in sex work towards possible feminisms.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Naifei Ding teaches in the English Department at National Central University, Taiwan. Her current research interests are politics of feminisms and its effects. Her published work include Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Duke, 2002), and Penumbra Query Shadow: Queer Reading Tactics (in Chinese, Center for the Study of Sexualities, 2007), co-authored with Liu Jen-Peng and Amie E. Parry. She is presently working on a book manuscript on the relations among women’s movement, sex work, and feminisms in Taiwan.
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