Love with exploitation: monogamy, prostitution and concubinage

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ABSTRACT This essay reads a Taiwan prime time television series on the making-good of a widowed wife-concubine pair (Monga Woman, 2014) in the series’ indirect indexing of a licensed prostitute movement turned squatters’ struggle on the one hand, and the representation of a residual form of domestic cohabitation (concubinage), incidentally part of public discussions of marriage equality reform before the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019. The essay argues for a feminist historiography that re-connects monogamy-adultery/concubinage-licensed prostitution as a historical continuum (bianxuti) divided in moral and economic opposition rigidified in post-cold war epistemological re-alignments. A feminist story about history that forgets monogamy-prostitution-adultery as a continuum mediating processes of enforced political change might harm as much as help, at the ground (subsistence) level. Considering prostitution, monogamy, and concubinage/adultery on a marriage spectrum would help show the connection between legal regulation in transition and changing forms of moral and economic exploitation. Such connections make for sexualized peoples and vulnerable communities, with lives rendered more difficult in moving or not, in between, along the spectrum in time. In proposing a relay of feminized intimate labors in a regime of married coupledom, I suggest that holding concubinage in long view as mediating and mediated by a changing marriage form allows us to see concubinage and prostitution in living connection to coupled marriage and/as housewifization process.