Title：Fugitive Subjects of Secret Doctors and Un/seen Laboring Intimacies of Illegal Alliances
Time：12:30-14:00, Thu. Apr. 15, 2021
Venue：Room 318, Department of Sociology, NTU
Speaker：Chien-Ting Lin (Associate Professor,Department of English,NCU)
Moderator：Chia-Ling Wu （Professor, Department of Sociology, NTU)
Abstract：
In this talk, I juxtapose historicized cultural texts including a collection of ethnographic stories, “Zhaonandong,” by Chen Yingzhen and Our Stories by Ku Yuling to analyze how they reflect upon miyi (secret doctors) informal labor and how it is produced within epistemic categorizations and periodization within historical transitions, including structural changes in family and social relations. I pursue a genealogy of the miyi alongside a reading of my ethnographic materials, observing an engendered tension and contradictions in the process of Taiwan’s postwar medical modernization. I maintain that this tension relies upon the outsourcing of care work for professionalized labor divisions as well as the medical institutionalization and legalization of care practices to establish the hierarchies within medical professionalism. I argue that this occasions a threshold space for undocumented miyi migrant and laboring subjects within a progressivist historicization. I hope to propose an alternative genealogy and methodology to understand the queer secrecy and the intimacies of illegal alliances within vertically structured historical relationalities, thereby offering a renewed understanding of contemporary Taiwan’s transnational care modernity.