This study examines the subsidization of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Taiwan as a new form of anticipatory governance in response to declining birth rates. The data includes in-depth interviews with 60 stakeholders and archival documents. I identify two waves of "techniques of futuring". The first wave (2004–2020) refrained from explicitly linking ART subsidies to declining birth rates, focusing instead on stratified reproduction. Although the government intermittently considered following Japan and South Korea in viewing ART subsidies as a solution, concerns about high costs and limited population growth benefits delayed its implementation. Demographers, feminists, and public health scholars framed declining birth rates as a social welfare issue, criticizing the government’s reliance on medical strategies. Unlike its East Asian counterparts, Taiwan lacked strong advocacy groups for infertile women, which hindered policy mobilization. The second wave (2021–present) marks the introduction of subsidized IVF as a new policy solution. Amidst widely reported predictions of Taiwan’s potential to have the world’s lowest birth rate, the government reframed the policy to address both health risk prevention and declining birth rates, offering subsidies to women under 45 opting for IVF. The policy's emphasis on limiting embryo transfers resulted in fewer multiple and preterm births, enhancing its legitimacy. Collaboration between the Taiwan Society of Reproductive Medicine and the government framed delayed motherhood as a physiological infertility risk, shaping societal perceptions of low fertility. Assisted reproductive technologies now play a prominent role in Taiwan’s strategies to address declining birth rates.

Although the significance and urgency of studies on energy poverty are rapidly increasing, there is a lack of research focused on the Global South and the most resource-deprived groups, such as homeless individuals in cities. This study aims to address this empirical gap and contribute theoretically by highlighting the interplay between the agency of disadvantaged individuals, infrastructure development, and the destigmatizing efforts of street-level bureaucrats in combating energy poverty. The author draws on fifteen months of relational fieldwork conducted with both the homeless community and frontline social workers in Taipei. The findings indicate that homeless individuals, facing the problems caused by cold winter, hot summer, low-battery phones, take initiatives to access urban public transportation facilities designed to enhance Taipei's status as a top “Smart City” globally. This challenges the notion of a benevolent state plan effectively executed for those in need, underscoring the importance of wisdom and reciprocal relationship on streets. However, individual agency alone cannot ensure the access, as the stigma on homelessness often results in exclusion and expulsion by hostile venue managers. Consequently, empathetic social workers, “the wise” in the Goffmanian term, play a crucial role in facilitating access by extending their professional influence horizontally to other street-level bureaucrats.

The #MeToo movement has raised unprecedented awareness on sexual harassments, assaults, and violence since it went viral across the globe in 2017. Many scholars have studied the impact of the #MeToo movement, particularly how the media and the public perceive and describe the movement. Little is known, however, about how legislators discuss and frame #MeToo and thereby introduce and implement bills that address sexual assaults and violence. Using corpus analyses of speeches and debates taking place in the Taiwan Legislature between May 31 and July 31, 2023, we find that legislators use both the oppressor-blaming frame in which attention is paid to the behavior of the perpetrators and the sexual victimhood frame in which survivors are portrayed as vulnerable victims who are in need of protection and saving. While we also find that legislators have increasingly acknowledged the power imbalances when sexual assaults and violence occur, we also demonstrate that policymakers are solution-driven where they treat combatting sexual violence as a linear process, instead of seeing the multilevel, multidimensional aspects of violence as a by-product of patriarchy. Particularly, by focusing on the neoliberal notion of agency, the findings show that systematic barriers that offer abused women a way out, for example, are still persistent. Therefore, our study offers important implications for the ways in which violence could be dismantled if policymakers focus on the collective agency of survivors with a more comprehensive approach.

When the KMT first arrived in Taiwan, they took this island as a base for counterattacking the mainland China and had no intention or related policies for long-term residence here. The recently highlighted living culture of military dependents originally allowed soldiers from mainland China and their families to reside temporarily, which later developed into a particularly cohesive living style rich in diverse cultural integration. Subsequently, the R.O.C. gradually took root in Taiwan, with various different housing policies being introduced one after another. In 1994, a community development policy was launched to address how to connect land with people. The Housing Law was announced in 2011, and after the revision of the housing law in 2017, provisions for providing social housing were included. Since then, ensuring the housing rights of the people has not only focused on home and land ownership but has also begun to involve the government providing a large number of new housing policies and tools that are for rent only and not for sale. Furthermore, under this policy tool, innovative programs such as artistic interventions, co-housing experimental projects, and the selection of seed residents have been continuously introduced, aiming to form a richer contemporary housing culture in Taiwan. This article intends to explore from a historical perspective and the changes in housing culture how this island responds to an uncertain future and grasps the genuine living conditions of the present under special international relations, providing an understanding of Taiwan through the evolution of housing culture and policies.

In 2019, the Taiwanese parliament legalized same-sex marriage. Hailed abroad as a monumental step, same-sex marriage nevertheless remains a hotly contested issue in Taiwanese domestic politics, with supporters and opponents split along generational and rural-urban lines. While most foreign discussions emphasize the country’s progressive side, taking an implicit or explicit vantage point from cosmopolitan Taipei, the capital, in this presentation I am interested in what political negotiations look like at the grassroots level in a rural township. What role does popular religion play in such processes?

In Taiwan as elsewhere, the rural and the urban are not diametrically opposed but interconnected through a multitude of movements of people and goods, but also deities. In the presentation, I explore these connections by walking with participants walking in mass pilgrimages in honor of the goddess Mazu. What kinds of exchanges do their pathways offer, leading from urban to rural environments? In particular, I follow one group of young Mazu devotees that has made this move to the countryside permanently. What is more, the group started out as an interest group for genderqueer worshipers, many of whom still live in the cities and return regularly. I examine how these members negotiate the different environments and the attitudes each holds of the group’s gendered and sexual identities. I suggest that strategically employed, knowing silences play an important role in allowing fundamentally different opinions to exist side by side, highlighting a wider cultural potential of accepting variation.

This paper explores the intersection between mobility studies and queer studies. More specifically, it examines the linkages between queerness and the diasporic identity through an analysis of the documentary Hebei Taipei (2015) by Taiwanese female filmmaker Li Nien-hsiu. The documentary focuses on Li’s father, Old Li, a native of Hebei province, China, whose family broke apart during the 1920s warlord era. Seeking survival, Old Li first became a monk in a temple and then joined the army at a young age without any political beliefs, going to war for whoever provided subsistence to him. In the early 1950s he was sent to the Korean peninsula to fight in the Korean War but ended up being captured and sent to Taiwan. In Taiwan, Old Li spent several decades trying to fit in. At the age of sixty, he separated from his wife and children and lived alone for 20 years. Only when he dressed up as a woman did Old Li seem to find enjoyment and comfort. An example of a trans subject before the language about transgender was available to him, Old Li was also a diasporic subject who lived in-between places or was constantly feeling out of place. The film thus highlights the conjuncture between queerness and exile, and between transitivity and an imaginary but delayed return to home. Furthermore, his double displacement is reminiscent of similar motifs in several Taiwanese queer classics where queerness is intimately linked to feelings of uprootedness, homelessness, and questions of citizenship and belonging.