英文摘要 |
One of the ways that the institution of marriage generates gender inequality is to subordinate the group status of the wife to her husband’s. In postwar Taiwan, there were two kinds of laws that mediated women’s group statuses through marriage and rendered a wife her husband’s subordinate: the marry-out rule or marital expatriation, which deprived a woman of her membership due to her marriage with an outsider, mainly in the case of an indigenous woman marrying a non-indigenous man; and marital naturalization, which mandated that a woman became the member of her husband’s community, primarily in the case of a foreign woman marrying a male citizen. Through the lens of feminist legal theory and critical race theory, this study investigates the feminist legal history of marital expatriation and marital naturalization from 1945 to 2001, reviewing how the government had made the institution of marriage a medium of women’s citizen and Indigenous status through legal and administrative means in mandatory and voluntary ways, and reveals how laws and policies enforcing the subordination of a wife to her husband underwent a choice-oriented reform toward gender-neutralization. It also demonstrates and explains the remaining intersection of race and gender discrimination after the abolishment of the marry-out rule of Indigenous status law in 1991, the marital naturalization clause in the Nationality Act in 2000, and the legislation of the right to restore one’s Indigenous status in 2001. This study finds that laws of marital expatriation and marital naturalization had functioned to faciliate women’s subordination by making an out-marrying Indigenous woman a non-member of her racial group and a foreign woman a citizen of her husband’s country. Indigenous and migrant women were marginalized in the legal reform process. It also finds significant differences between the legal reform of nationality and Indigenous status. The formation of the marry-out rule for Indigenous peoples concerned the controversy over women’s political participation, the anxiety over Indigenous men’s lack of marriage opportunities, and the material distribution of lands and resources. The Indigenous movement’s advocacy for group survival has led to the abolishment of the marry-out rule. In contrast, the abolishment of marital naturalization was associated with the collective anxiety over sham marriages, the gender equality movement, and the foreign son-in-law’s rights movement. As a final thought, this study suggests that resolving the dilemma of self-determination and consent is the key to combating the intersectional discrimination of race and gender. |