| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 法律學研究所 === 101 === By analyzing three different cases, this thesis depicts the dynamic process of becoming a citizen through telling oppressed narratives, forming collective consciousness and eventually changing judicial and legislative structures.
Narrative sociology shows how telling stories can construct self identity and collective consciousness, whilst legal narratology movement asserts the importance of telling stories of the oppressed and revealing and criticizing the mainstream ideologies in legal structures. Feminist legal theory combines these critical theories with its emphasis on consciousness raising, which points out that sharing experience could turn isolated powerless persons into one oppressed group, and its concept of “partial agency” reminds us that oppressed people are not just victims, but also actors fighting against structure.
In the much-publicized Dapu expropriation case, farmers fought against the farmland expropriation through actions of telling their experience. At the first, they told stories about unjustice expropriation process. With assistances of Taiwan Rural Front and other farmers who also want to keep their farmland from unnecessary expropriations, they began to tell stories about their life experiences in rural area. When lawyers turned their stories into legal arguments, these stories not only affected our imagination of agricultural land, but also changed Land Expropriation Act. The recent amendment claimed special agricultural zones are not subject to expropriation. The Supreme Administrative Court''s decision also requires decisions of the expropriation must complete due process.
In the case of RCA''s occupational injury, female electronics worker and the labor movement organizers of Taiwan Association for Victims of Occupational Injuries told stories about being injuried by transnational corporations. The same experience of working and illness got these workers togather. They asked the government to face their injuries, and sued the corporation, who was responsible for poisoning RCA’s workers. They also made some legal reform, for example, the labor insurance paid women who had mastectomy after an RCA worker with breast cancer showed her scars to the officers of the Council of Labor Affairs. Their stories earned partial justice for all female workers. Their lawsuit still continues, and the justice is yet to come.
In the case of card debtors, these debtors told stories about being stuck in the poverty trap to resist the oppression. They owed credit-card debt for different reasons, but all devoted to the legislative movement of Consumer Debt Clearance Act after sharing their own experiences on the Internet. Using their stories, they tried to end the stigma of debtors, and reveal the fact that card-debt problem is the result of banks manipulating the law, not that of the debtors. Consumer Debt Clearance Act was legislated andamended to accomplish justice in accordance with their stories.
From the stories of farmers living in Dapu resisting land expropriation, women worked in RCA claiming compensation for their occupational injuries, and the card debtors demanding legal changes as resolutions to their difficult position, we see how people in these three different oppressed groups under Taiwan''s neo-liberal economic development became citizens through actions of telling stories, and making changes in our social and legal systems.
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