A substitute teacher in Tainan said she was investigated by the city’s Bureau of Education for going topless during a parade in support of gay marriage in Kaohsiung last month.
The teacher, Cheng Min (鄭敏), said on Facebook that it was Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Tainan City Councilor Wang Chia-chen (王家貞) who pressed the bureau to launch the investigation.
Cheng, 24, who works at the Tainan Municipal Dongshan Junior High School, said that she felt stressed by the investigation.
The probe could infringe on teachers’ rights to take part in social movements when they are off-duty, and it could affect schools’ willingness to hire teachers known to have participated in social movements, she wrote on Facebook on Monday.
“As a substitute teacher and a citizen, I was fulfilling my duty to care about society by engaging in social movements in my off-hours,” she wrote.
“I sometimes use my experience in social movements as teaching materials, so my students can grasp the pulse of society,” she said.
Cheng, a supporter of the global Free the Nipple movement, said that she was topless at the parade because she wanted society to stop judging women’s bodies and stop treating female breasts as erotic symbols.
“From comments made by Internet users to the female form portrayed by the media, one can tell that Taiwanese society has a narrow view on the aesthetics of the human body,” she said.
“Students’ questions are answered in my classes… I also encourage them to think about whether the remarks they had made about their peers’ bodies have hurt them or were discriminatory,” Cheng said.
“Some people told me that teenage boys can be sexually aroused by women’s breasts, so it is inappropriate to expose them, but we must consider why we always assume that teenage boys become aroused by women’s breasts. Are breasts only good for satisfying people’s sexual fantasies?” she wrote.
Netizens took to Wang’s Facebook page to criticize her shortly after Cheng posted the statement.
Wang issued a statement saying that she had asked the Tainan Bureau of Education to investigate whether Cheng had actually gone topless, because some constituency voters had taken issue with Cheng’s behavior.
Wang said that the information gathered would be used to question Tainan officials at the city council, accusing netizens criticizing her of “cyberbullying.”
Bureau chief secretary Chiang Ming-chuan (蔣銘娟) said that her agency contacted the school to gather information about Cheng at the request of a city councilor, to ascertain whether Cheng works in Tainan.
The bureau was not planning to take further action against Cheng, she said.
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