Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: WhoDYo/WikiCommons/CC BY 2.0
FORMER SUNFLOWER MOVEMENT participant Johanne Liou is to be deported from the US next month, facing charges related to drug trafficking and fraud. The arrest was conducted by ICE, with Taiwanese authorities stating that they requested Liou’s extradition. Liou did not appear at the New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office in 2023, which resulted in charges against her.
This is not Liou’s first run-in with the law, as Liou faced charges related to introducing women in the US to sex work in 2015. As a result of these charges, Liou was barred from leaving Taiwan.
Even so, Liou entered the US in May 2019 on a temporary visitor’s visa. Liou did not leave the US when that visa expired in August 2019 and she is thought to have remained in the US since then.
Liou is primarily a figure of public interest because of her participation in the Sunflower Movement. During discussion of the movement on the CtiTV talk show News Tornado, talk show host Peng Hua-Gan commented on a photo of Liou at the moment, referring to her dress in the photo as “super hot” and miming unbuttoning Liou’s shirt while moving his hands over an image of Liou. Peng claimed that why many individuals canceled their tickets to the Spring Scream Rock Festival to continue to participate in the movement was because the Sunflower Movement offered more sexual sights.
Liou was nicknamed “Sunflower Queen” after the incident, though she was not a major figure of the movement, and was not part of the leadership or a key participant in any way. At the time, Peng’s commentary was widely criticized for sexism and objectification of female participants in the movement.
Photo credit: MrWiki321/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
Nevertheless, Peng’s commentary was par for the course, in that many media depictions of the Sunflower Movement sexualized youthful student protesters–particularly women, who were prone to being sexualized despite their young age in the news media. Such media coverage suggested that young protesters only participated in the movement because of a desire to exhibitionistically be looked at, rather than because of wanting to stand for any political values. Otherwise, the suggestion was that student demonstrators were promiscuous and motivated by hormones more than anything else.
A decade later, such sexism still persists when Liou is discussed in the news media, and she continues to be subject to public interest on this basis.
For one, with a movement on the scale of the Sunflower Movement, which saw 2.5% of the Taiwanese public participate in its largest mobilization on March 30, 2014, there were many involved individuals. When individuals who were present for the Sunflower Movement are involved in crime, the news media often fixates on their link to the Sunflower Movement.
More to the point, even with Taiwan having seen a wave of #MeToo cases and increased discussion of digital violence against women, as in deepfakes of female politicians, there has scarcely been any improvement of the media culture in Taiwan. Indeed, although the series of #MeToo cases that took place in Taiwan after the hit television series Wave Makers has led to some rethinking of social mores, it continues to be the case that casual sexism is still prevalent in the news media–as seen in the many headlines about celebrity gossip, or how news incidents involving women are often framed in a sexualized light.
It is still unclear what will lead to lasting changes in Taiwanese news media culture, then. Recent coverage of Johanne Liou proves no different.