The Gay Rights Movement and Its Challenges in Taiwan
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
1:00 pm to 2:30 pm
- Venue
- Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London
- Room
- B103
About this event
The gay rights movement in Taiwan can be traced back to the 1980s when Chi Chai-wei became the first person to come out on television, launch a campaign against the stigmatization of HIV, establish a halfway house for people living with AIDS, promote safer same-sex practices, and advocate for acceptance of the gay community on the island.
The final triumph of legalizing same-sex marriage in 2019 demonstrated that thirty years of activism had established Taiwan as both the most LGBTQ+-friendly country in East Asia and a world-leading nation in queer rights.
This talk intends to provide a sociohistorical view and showcase how gay rights activists and LGBTQ+ people encountered social challenges such as stigmatization, sexual bigotry, media sensationalism, and school violence. It will particularly focus on certain cases such as the death of the rose boy Yeh Yung-chih and the inauguration of the trans woman Audrey Tang as the first Minister of Digital Affairs to show how Taiwan has amended its law and become an inclusive society.
Speaker's Biography
Dr Wen-chi Li
Wen-chi Li is Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the University of Edinburgh. He has received the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Mobility Fellowship and will continue his research at the University of Oxford this July.
He is the co-editor of Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022) and the Mandarin poetry anthology Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for the LGBTQ (Dark Eyes Ltd, 2019).
About 2023 SOAS Taiwan Studies Summer School
The Centre of Taiwan Studies (CTS) at the SOAS, University of London is excited to present a 2.5-day Summer School programme filled with engaging talks, seminars, and roundtables, taking place right after the EATS annual conference from the afternoon of June 28th to June 30th, 2023.
In our commitment to promoting the study of Taiwan, we are pleased to offer free and open-to-public attendance for the Summer School. We highly encourage individuals from all walks of life who are interested in Taiwanese culture and Taiwan studies attend our course.
