State power, prostitution and sexual order in Taiwan: Towards a genealogical critique of ‘virtuous custom’

This paper 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, the paper will conclude by arguing against the current dominant anti-obscenity/prostitution state feminism and the new social/sexual order it ordains in Taiwan today.