Gendering Masculinity: Taiwanese Households and the Japanese Colonial Courts

This talk examines the construction of Taiwanese masculinity in the Japanese colonial courts from 1919 to 1936. In the early 1920s, new Taiwanese elites emerged against the backdrop of preexisting male elitism and women’s subordination to men and began envisioning new manliness within and outside the household. While not directly communicating with the new social vision of masculinity, the colonial courts applied the 1898 Japanese Civil Code concerning family and marriage to civil cases on ordinary Taiwanese litigants, enacting the more equitable roles Taiwanese grooms, husbands, and fathers performed in relation to wives and daughters. However, this judicial transformation moved beyond the dismissal of household patriarchy to entail the changes and continuities of male roles in the boundaries of family relationships such as marital rites and daughter adoption. Thus, Taiwanese men and Japanese judges centered the treatment of women and children in the reform and reinforcement of marital obligations and domestic authority, performing gender-based masculinity.

Speaker

Organizers

• David See-chai Lam Centre
  
• Taiwan Studies Group, Department of History