“He Is Still Your Father”: Tetherings, Social Welfare, and Troubled Parental Maintenance Litigation in Taiwan

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 mi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLaw & social inquiry Vol. 49; no. 4; pp. 2213 - 2244
Main Author Chua, Lynette J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.11.2024
Subjects
Children
Children & youth
Disputes
Families & family life
Family relations
Fathers
Feminism
Feminist theory
Financial support
Law
Legal reform
Litigation
Older people
Openness
Optimism
Parents & parenting
Power
Social welfare
Social workers
Society
Vulnerability
Taiwan
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Summary: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.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
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ISSN:0897-6546
1747-4469
1545-696X
DOI:10.1017/lsi.2024.3