Law’s imposition of a heteronormative timeline in a rapidly ageing authoritarian state

Abstract

This article discusses how China, an authoritarian state with a rapidly ageing population, uses its laws and regulations to impose a heteronormative timeline on its citizens to get married and give birth. I use the pressure felt by China’s ‘leftover’ women to get married according to a heteronormative timeline to discuss law’s role in shaping and reshaping our understanding of age, ageing, and time. These women’s experience reveals law’s seemingly invisible role in imposing and sustaining dominant timelines, especially in authoritarian states that actively use law and media to depict those who are different from the majority as deviants. This article explores and exposes law’s invisibility and hegemonic nature in everyday life, in an effort to explain how different laws work among themselves and with other normative orders to set a timeline that eliminates differences and imposes pressure on those who ‘fall behind’ to catch up with the mainstream. Using legal pluralism as an analytical tool, this article further examines how state laws depend on and work with other normative orders to sustain dominant timelines. It is my hope that this article could invite law and society scholars to rethink how state law violently eliminates diverse ways people organise their everyday lives by imposing dominant timelines on them.