WIFE-IN-MONOGAMY AND ‘THE EXALTATION OF CONCUBINES’

Abstract

This paper queries the establishment of legal equality among women of different social status in contemporary nations like Singapore and Taiwan. At issue is the supremacy of the modern wife-in-monogamy (with which feminism in the region has identified) and how this has installed a new hierarchy among women in the aftermath of varied practices of ‘Chinese polygamies’. The paper adopts the method of juxtaposing two different moments and sites for reconsidering such differences among women, with a focus on shifts in the feminist politics of marriage and sexuality. The first part of the paper rereads together Gayle Rubin's two essays (of 1975 and 1984) in order to demonstrate the process by which gender oppression in marriage in Western capitalist countries becomes transcoded as sexual oppression. The second part of the paper focuses on Singaporean legal studies. How has the colonial encounter with ‘Chinese custom’ in marriage and the subsequent creation of laws been interpreted and questioned by scholars? Through a located analysis of specific historical moments, the paper brings together a Western feminist self-critique of sexual moral hierarchies and a reading of how Singaporean feminist and legal scholars, in their very attempt to redress inequalities between and among women and men, have nonetheless produced new forms of sex-class injustice.