The Promise of Legalization? Assessing Taiwan’s Same-Sex Marriage Law from the Perspective of LGBT Families

One year has passed since Taiwan’s legislature passed the “Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748 Implementation Act” on May 17, 2019. Lauded as a progressive milestone that made Taiwan the “first in Asia” to legalize same-sex marriage, the Act has enabled more than three thousand couples to marry and approximately thirty families to establish legal relationships between both spouses and their child(ren). This talk asks what lies beyond these numbers. What benefits has the Act brought to LGBT families specifically and what obstacles or new forms of stigmatization has it created? Based on more than two years of non-consecutive ethnographic research with LGBT parents, families, and NGOs, the talk assesses the promise of legalization and what it has meant for the recognition of diverse kinds of families and intimacies.