Baby Steps—The “Baby Business” and Queer Chinese Families in Taiwan

• In Event: East Asian Queer Cultures Part II: LGBT Politics, Queer Lives, and the Rainbow Market

Abstract

Like most other Asian countries, same-sex couples in Taiwan do not have the rights to get married. Nevertheless, numerous queer families have been formed in different ways. And while it remains illegal for same-sex couples to access artificial reproduction in the country, the rise of the transnational market of artificial reproductive technology has seen an increasing trend among Taiwanese queer couples to purchase sperm, ova, and surrogacy from other countries. This forms a new and highly mobile market of queer Taiwanese “parents-wannabe”; and yet, this group of “Queer and (ethnic) Chinese” consumers has not been accounted for in current studies on the “pink economy”. Therefore in this presentation, through a textual analysis of Barney Cheng’s 2015 feature film, Baby Steps, I will discuss the “baby business” in Taiwan and explore how queer Taiwanese parents navigate between the spheres of being a child and parent in a Chinese/Asian family, and that of being an autonomous queer consumer in the transnational market of artificial reproductive technology. I argue that the male protagonist’s reconciliation with his mother in the process of finding a suitable surrogacy in the film suggests the potentiality of commercial market participation in destabilizing and overcoming the confining heteronormative parent/child hierarchy in Chinese families.

Author

• Chieh-Hsi Lee, University of Melbourne