同性婚姻相關論述中「母親」身份的建構

In May 2019, Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. The legalization process, however, was far from smooth; it involved not only legislative moves, but also large-scale political demonstrations, constitutional interpretation, national referendums, and, inevitably, heated debates in the media. This project explores the Taiwanese same-sex marriage (hereafter SSM) debates from a specific perspective, that is, how the identities as mothers are constructed and employed as stancetaking moves in both the supporting and opposing discourses, and how such identity construction and stancetaking are manifested through intertextual links among the SSM-related discourses (whether supporting or opposing), on the one hand, and those between such discourses and the larger discourses concerning motherhood in general. This project has three sources of data: (1) a corpus compiled in my previous research projects concerning SSM, (2) a google search of news reports or commentaries with keywords ‘mother’ or ‘parent’ and ‘same-sex marriage’, and (3) posts by well-known mother bloggers, Eliza Tseng and 2KidsMommy. Drawing on sociolinguistics literature in identity construction, stancetaking, motherhood, and ideologies, this study seeks to reveal the various ways mother identities are constructed to take stances, and how intertextuality serves as a fruitful theoretical and methodological point of entry to explore the interwoven relationship between identity, stancetaking, and larger cultural ideologies.