Transitional Equality in Transnational Context

Abstract

The legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan in the past few years and emerging legal recognition for same-sex couples in Japan mark important expansions of family recognition in Asia. These developments provide an opportunity to consider the gap between formal and substantive equality in the rights of diverse families in Taiwan, Japan, and other jurisdictions. This essay examines these recent changes in family recognition in Taiwan and Japan alongside experiences of U.S. couples to generate new areas of inquiry into developing equality with full attention to the range of socio-legal experience. This essay considers a framework of “transitional equality” I have discussed in the U.S. context to identify the process of families transitioning into new formal legal status categories. As I have described elsewhere, when a person or class of persons obtains a new status or gains previously denied rights, “the path itself from one legal status to another becomes critically important and may itself be impacted by race, gender, age, and other factors. The process of transitioning to a new status can be complex and burdensome in unexpected ways, and lack of attention to that process can impair persons’ inhabitation of their newly acquired legal rights.” This transitional space is one worthy of socio-legal attention in the effort to build fuller equality for diverse families. Taiwan and Japan introduce further opportunities to examine the role of marriage recognition in reflecting and constructing broader norms concerning national identity, race, ethnicity, gender, age, economic status, access to justice, and what it even means to be a legal subject in the face of legal uncertainty.