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“He Is Still Your Father”: Tetherings, Social Welfare, and Troubled Parental Maintenance Litigation in Taiwan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2024
Abstract
This article is a story about tetherings, a concept that illuminates the power of law in the relational dynamics of individual-family-state. The concept emerges from my qualitative study of parental maintenance litigation in Taiwan over the provision of financial support to troublous parents, who mistreated their children when they were young. Troubled parental maintenance litigation arises when nobody wants to look after these elderly people, and the state restricts their access to social welfare by holding their estranged children financially responsible. Such litigation leads to empowerments and disempowerments for litigants, as well as legal reform and detriments for the state. Bridging sociolegal scholarship on continuing relations with feminist vulnerability theory, “tetherings” is both an empirical and a normative concept concerned with the relational nature of power, and the openness of humans and institutions to harms and other changes. The concept is empirical, being the paradigm through which I trace disputes and other relational processes of individual-family-state; it is normative because my empirical analysis aims to expose the state’s workings and detail how people respond to law and power that binds them to one another and the state. “Tetherings” advances feminist vulnerability theory and offers a circumspectly optimistic view on the potential of law.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation
Footnotes
The author thanks the reviewers and Catherine Albiston, Renée Cramer, Eve Darian-Smith, and David Engel for their comments on earlier drafts; Chien Hsin-Jo, Elizabeth Lan Lan Ko, Lu Zhao Boyu, Wu Lingxin, Xie Yihui, and, most of all, Ye Zuyin for their research assistance on Taiwan; Chang Wen-Chen, Lillian Hsu, Carol Lin, and Wang Hsiao-Tan for providing Taiwanese contacts; Wendy Wee and Kris Zhao for their help with grants and budgetary matters at Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS Law); and the interviewees for their time and support. She is also grateful for feedback from panelists, moderators, and audience members at the NUS Law Faculty Research Seminar; the NUS Law Centre for Legal Theory Roundtable; the NUS Centre for Family and Population Research Seminar; the University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law, Feminist Legal Research Group Seminar; and the Law & Society Association 2022 Annual Meeting. Funding for the research and writing came from the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier II (MOE2018-T2-1-101).
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