A Socio-Legal Analysis of the Regulations on Foreign Spouses in Taiwan

This paper focuses on legal discourse to analyze how legal regulations have been altered to respond to the foreign spouses phenomenon. In particular, it employs a socio-legal analytical perspective to discuss how amending, executing, and manipulating the legal regulations on foreign spouses reflects an ideology of gender, patriarchy, social stability, and national security in Taiwan. The issue of the high rate of marriage with Mainland Chinese spouses involves unique complexities of nationality identity, terrain threats, and political-social climate changes between Taiwan and Mainland China. This paper explores how the intimacy regulation is different between Southeast Asian foreign spouses and Mainland Chinese spouses (with a primary focus on the former rather than the latter). It concludes by summarizing that, from a social perspective, cross-border marriages are promoted by multiple hierarchies (e.g., class, gender, culture, etc.) and are casting the female foreign spouse as an obedient wife, qualified mother, and dutiful daughter-in-law in order to profit the family/state. From a regulatory/legal perspective, the enforcement of various acts, rules, laws, and regulations may create a backlash originating from the nostalgia of patriarchy and stereotypical gender roles in marriage.