Same-Sex Marriage in Taiwan: Soft Sovereignty, Threat Management, and the Politics of Recognition in Asia
Location
FA-152
Start Date
1-5-2026 12:30 PM
Department
Political Science
Abstract
Why did Taiwan as a contested state with no UN seat, shaped by Confucian conservatism and the world’s longest period of martial law become the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, while other Asian democracies with stronger institutional track records have not? This paper argues that democratic maturity alone cannot answer this question. What explains Taiwan’s 2019 marriage equality achievement is the strategic management of threat, operating simultaneously at the geopolitical and psychological levels, and the utilization of “soft sovereignty” as the “weapon of the weak.”
The paper introduces “soft sovereignty” as an in-progress conceptual framework. “Soft sovereignty” at this stage is described as the strategic performance of Western-defined democratic legitimacy not merely to attract international goodwill, but to constitute the basis of statehood and resist superpower interference. Taiwan’s “First in Asia” title was not incidental, but a sovereignty signal directed at a specific audience. The paper argues that this logic applies not only to unrecognized contested states but to any democracy in Asia whose sovereignty is structurally pressured by regional superpowers. Thailand’s contrasting bottom-up path to marriage equality, referenced in comparative footnotes, tests the framework’s boundaries and suggests that the sequence of cultural versus institutional action determines the durability of the legal outcome.
This paper pursues two research questions. First, how did the Taiwanese BL drama franchise HIStory adapt its management of symbolic threat (ST), intergroup anxiety (IA), and negative stereotypes (NS) across three political phases, and what does its systematic avoidance of realistic threat (RT) reveal about the functional relationship between cultural producers and the state? Second, in what ways did same-sex marriage legalization function as a “soft sovereignty” strategy for Taiwan, and does this logic extend beyond contested states to any democracy navigating superpower pressure in Asia?
Applying Integrated Threat Theory (ITT) I argue that activists and the state executed a “threat Inversion” strategy, amplifying the external RT of the PRC (People's Republic of China) to override the domestic ST weaponized by the Taiwan’s Christian Right, while the HIStory franchise managed the ST, IA, and NS that institutional action could not reach. A qualitative content analysis of three franchise installments which are the pre-2018 warm-up, the post-referendum recession, and the post-legalization normalization phases reveals that the shows did not merely reflect public opinion but actively compensated for a top-down judicial bypass that outpaced social acceptance. The systematic absence of RT across all three waves is the paper’s most significant finding, suggesting a functional complementarity in which the state and cultural producers operated on separate but mutually reinforcing threat components without explicit coordination.
Faculty Sponsor
Bae Sangmin
Faculty Sponsor
Emily Esposito
Same-Sex Marriage in Taiwan: Soft Sovereignty, Threat Management, and the Politics of Recognition in Asia
FA-152
Why did Taiwan as a contested state with no UN seat, shaped by Confucian conservatism and the world’s longest period of martial law become the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, while other Asian democracies with stronger institutional track records have not? This paper argues that democratic maturity alone cannot answer this question. What explains Taiwan’s 2019 marriage equality achievement is the strategic management of threat, operating simultaneously at the geopolitical and psychological levels, and the utilization of “soft sovereignty” as the “weapon of the weak.”
The paper introduces “soft sovereignty” as an in-progress conceptual framework. “Soft sovereignty” at this stage is described as the strategic performance of Western-defined democratic legitimacy not merely to attract international goodwill, but to constitute the basis of statehood and resist superpower interference. Taiwan’s “First in Asia” title was not incidental, but a sovereignty signal directed at a specific audience. The paper argues that this logic applies not only to unrecognized contested states but to any democracy in Asia whose sovereignty is structurally pressured by regional superpowers. Thailand’s contrasting bottom-up path to marriage equality, referenced in comparative footnotes, tests the framework’s boundaries and suggests that the sequence of cultural versus institutional action determines the durability of the legal outcome.
This paper pursues two research questions. First, how did the Taiwanese BL drama franchise HIStory adapt its management of symbolic threat (ST), intergroup anxiety (IA), and negative stereotypes (NS) across three political phases, and what does its systematic avoidance of realistic threat (RT) reveal about the functional relationship between cultural producers and the state? Second, in what ways did same-sex marriage legalization function as a “soft sovereignty” strategy for Taiwan, and does this logic extend beyond contested states to any democracy navigating superpower pressure in Asia?
Applying Integrated Threat Theory (ITT) I argue that activists and the state executed a “threat Inversion” strategy, amplifying the external RT of the PRC (People's Republic of China) to override the domestic ST weaponized by the Taiwan’s Christian Right, while the HIStory franchise managed the ST, IA, and NS that institutional action could not reach. A qualitative content analysis of three franchise installments which are the pre-2018 warm-up, the post-referendum recession, and the post-legalization normalization phases reveals that the shows did not merely reflect public opinion but actively compensated for a top-down judicial bypass that outpaced social acceptance. The systematic absence of RT across all three waves is the paper’s most significant finding, suggesting a functional complementarity in which the state and cultural producers operated on separate but mutually reinforcing threat components without explicit coordination.