State power, prostitution and sexual order in Taiwan: towards a genealogical critique of 'virtuous custom'

This paper considers, by way of conjunctural analysis and genealogical investigation, the policed culture of sex under the regulatory regime of 'virtuous custom' as sustained by the now defunct Police Offence Law (abrogated and replaced by the Social Order Maintenance Law in 1991) between the 1950s and 1990s. It attempts to trace the historical process whereby the social/sexual order came to be established in postwar Taiwan, thus articulating the cultural specificity of gendered/sexual subjectivities as formed within that particular geo-political terrain. Examining the police technology as well as the official/journalistic discourse of sex, this paper demonstrates that 'virtuous custom', a nationalist ideological construct predicated upon the Confucian sage-king paradigm, operated as a norm of sex whose boundary was secured through the policing of non-familial/non-marital sexualities, arguing further that both female sexuality and male homosexuality have been historically regulated by the state through its banning of prostitution. As the normative regime of 'virtuous custom' has become even more hegemonic due to the rise in recent years of anti-prostitution state feminism, contesting the new social/sexual order on the grounds of its ideological operations and practices represents the most challenging task for progressive sexual and gender politics in Taiwan today.