This article develops an approach to cross-national research on the status of women that merges theoretical and methodological concerns. The approach consists of understanding the concept status of women within three dimensions—political, economic, and cultural. The article differentiates between a public and a private domain within each dimension. To understand and compare the status of women in different countries, it is argued that it is imperative to study the interrelationships among the dimensions and domains of status of women. Contrasting the approach taken here with that of extant research on gender inequality and with efforts to locate a universal measure of women's status provides an illustration of the complexity involved in analyzing the status of women, the meaninglessness of talking globally about a single measure of status of women, and the necessity to go beyond male-centered measures of status to capture more fully women's status and experiences.

Legal recognition of same-sex partnerships and marriages has been at the forefront of media attention in East Asian societies. For our comparative study, we carried out qualitative in-depth interviews with 31 gay men and lesbians to investigate the nuanced understanding of marriage, family and sexual citizenship within the context of debates on marriage equality across Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan. Expanding on the theoretical concepts in Chen’s ‘Asia as method’, Iwabuchi’s ‘inter-Asian referencing’ and Yue and Leung’s ‘queer Asia as method’, we aim to understand how the act of marriage is defined, conducted and rationalized amidst a web of social relations within each research locale. We argue that despite the variations in the structure and practice of kin relations, same-sex unions cannot be detached from the kinship institution in the three research sites. Our study points to a different perspective on same-sex marriage that goes beyond the binary of assimilation to/dismantling of the heterosexual marriage institution by attending to the structural and symbolic significance of the family and community.

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