Rescuing Women, Building the Nation: The Sexual Politics of Rescuing Foster Daughters in Postcolonial Taiwan.

This paper explores the sexual politics of Chinese nationalism in Taiwan by studying a rescue campaign for a particular group of women, so-called foster daughters. It concerns the politicisation of female fosterlings’ problems, particularly their involvement in prostitution, in relation to the reproduction of postcolonial nationhood during the 1950s. Tracing the nationalist rescue discourses and tactics around foster daughters via pro-official and journalistic materials, this study investigates how foster daughters’ physical and sexual suffering was constructed and governed as a social and national problem, articulating the cultural specificity of rescue in a particular geo-political terrain. It argues that the rescue campaign for foster daughters embodied the (de-)colonisation struggle rather than a moral enterprise at individual and social levels, and that it established the political, cultural and gender foundations for Chinese nation-building in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]