‘I’m not surprised’: The sexual subjects and emotional communities in Taiwan’s #MeToo movement

2024 ANU TAIWAN UPDATE
‘I’m not surprised’: The sexual subjects and emotional communities in Taiwan’s #MeToo movement

Taiwan is one of the few countries that equips legislation to regulate sexual harassment both in schools and in the workplace. However, women and men who reported sexual harassment are still considered as ‘troublemakers’, and victim blaming is also prevalent. Sexual harassment cases therefore are underreported and even dismissed without proper procedure. Nonetheless, the unique writing style of Taiwan’s #MeToo posts, always detailed the sexual misconducts of the perpetrators, and how victims were shocked and failed to move their bodies, also let women who read the posts could revisit the memories and emotions (e.g. anger, anxiety, fear, pain, and shame) surrounding sexual harassments, and thus strongly felt that they ‘have to do something’ for themselves and for helping other women. Therefore, they shared these posts, attended #MeToo forums, created the name-and-shame lists of perpetrators and organized #MeToo march. In this sense, the #MeToo movement serves to build up an emotional community in which women not only speak for themselves but also take collective actions to make the perpetrators accountable.

Speaker
Mei-Hua Chen (陳美華) is Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Professor of the Department of Sociology at National Sun Yat-Sen University. She has published articles on issues such as sex work, sexual migration across the Taiwan Strait in well-known journals both in Chinese and English. Her research interests including women’s work in body work, and non-conforming intimacies in Taiwan. Recently her research has concentrated on migration and sexuality. She is particularly interested in sexual migration for commercial purposes across Taiwan Strait, and queer migration which involves transnational same-sex marriages.

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The ANU Taiwan Update is an initiative under the ANU Taiwan Studies Program 2022-25, which a partnership between the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University and the Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan).

Photo Credit: Photo courtesy of The Garden of Hope Foundation, Taiwan.