“Taiwan’s Literature of Transgressive Sexuality,” in Fran Martin (trans.) Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction From Taiwan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003, pp. 1-28. (original) (raw)

Gay jouissance: Queering the representation of male same-sex desire in 1990s Taiwan literature, in Taiwan Insight (11 May 2021), URL:https://taiwaninsight.org/2021/05/11/gay-jouissance-queering-the-representation-of-same-sex-desire-in-1990s-taiwan-literature/

The intensification of political conflict in recent years bears the imprint of new social developments, intercultural interactions and global influences transforming Taiwan, engendering a highly polymorphous society with different communities vying for their representative cultural voices (Liao 92). The emergent homosexual cultural politics in Taiwan is one such marginalized voice trying to assert itself through literary discourse, commanding focus on complex ethnic and social relationships that exist and interact within the country (Chang 196). Specifically, the development of queer literature () since the 1980s uses cultural representations of homosexuality to reflect a growing sense of identity crisis on the island and address the psychological dilemma of living under rapidly changing global conditions (Martin [1] 4). Queer discourses thus define new social categories that forge resistance to foreign influences but are nonetheless still trapped within an institutionalized network subjugated to a global circulation of ideas. Bai Xianyong’s and Zhu Tianwen’s() are two Taiwanese novels that portray a suppressed homosexual identity to illustrate the complex dynamic arising from a shift in the island’s societal and political framework amidst the emergence of a new globalized cultural paradigm. A

With the humanistic ideals of narrative medicine, the author and two graduate students of Taipei Medical University in 2012 explored a halfway house for AIDS sufferers in Taiwan, and found a man in his late fifties who was eager to set down his story, " Handsome ". Six hours of interviewing produced an 82-page transcript in Chinese. The following oral history in English is a summary of his account, one rich in description of traditional custom and social and economic history. Born in 1958 to an adopted daughter-in-law (a peculiarly Taiwanese custom) in a rich landowner family in Sanchong, west of Taipei, Handsome and his mother were ejected from the family and taken in by a retired military man, a " mainlander " who had fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Communist/Nationalist civil war. Running away from home at age 16, Handsome was molested by an older man he met in New Park, the well-known locus of an emerging subculture of homosexuality in Taiwan. He narrowly escaped being sold by a police inspector to serve as a male prostitute. Later he formed a platonic relationship with a young woman he considered his one pure love, but at age 25 he fled from marriage and abandoned himself to wanton gay sexuality, in which he seemed to hold great charm and power. He was successful in business as well. But turning HIV-positive at age 51, he gradually lost much of his eyesight, and has been reduced to living in a crowded halfway house of an AIDS NGO. All the same, his motto is " Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry, and you cry alone " , and he has put together an extraordinarily popular blog beginning from the interview of his early life transcribed by my students.

Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwan has prided itself on steady progress toward liberal democracy with an ever-broadening understanding of human rights that now allegedly includes the rights of gays and lesbians. Yet at the same time, under the child protection imperative, a series of new laws, litigations, and regulations has been put into place that criminalizes practically all sex-related publications and video images, more specifically any sex-related information, contact, and even inquiries on the Internet. How are we to understand such sexual mass hysteria in Taiwan in an age of seeming social openness and toleration? The present paper demonstrates how the politics of sexual stigma and shame that once made up the oppression of gays and lesbians and other sexual minorities in Taiwan has now shifted its field of operation from the realm of culture to that of law. The emergence of this new form of power deployment works not only in collusion with the populist government’s urgent desire to consolidate its legitimacy and power, but also in collaboration with expanding global governance through which Taiwan’s nation-state status bid hopes to find a promising future at the expense of civil liberties for marginalized sexualities.

"Where was the queer mayor of Taiwan?" Isabella Statham focuses on conflicts between the queer community in Taiwan and their formerly dictatoral government through the medium of cinema. Films, Sino-Taiwanese geopolitics, queer nightclubs, marriage and funeral strippers are brought together to explain the key clashes between queer people and the post-martial law government that ruled them. In her academic debut, Statham unravels what it meant to be queer in a newly-democratic Taiwan, living with the legacy of decades of continuous colonisation. The vibrancy, originality and melodrama of the queer films are not lost on this paper, as Statham attempts to capture the whimsical magic of Taiwanese cinema. This undergraduate disseration gained 85% at the University of Birmingham, History BA (unpublished). Please give credit when citing this paper. Get in touch first before reproducing. I am open to publishing and submitting papers. Acknowledgements to Dr Shirley Ye, a wonderful mentor.

In the past few decads, Taiwanese society has been strugling to integrate a strong Chinese cultural heritage with a unique sense of self-identity and a national history distinct from the mainland. The political conJlict in Taiwan has intensified in recent years, inJluenced by new social developments, intercultural interactions and global influences. It transforms Taiwan and engenders a highly polymorphous society with dffirent communities vying for their representative cultural voices (Liao 92). The emergent homosexual atlture in Taiwan is one such arginalized voice trytng to assert itself. Through literary discourse, the community commands focus on the complexity of the relationships between queer identity and the larger Taiwanese society (Chang 196).

''Zhongxing,'' meaning ''gender neutrality'' in Mandarin Chinese, is the term typically used to describe young women who adopt masculine gender expressions affected by popular Japanese and Korean beautiful-boy styles and who assume a collective and prevalent presence in public space and popular culture in contemporary Taiwan. I examine how this cultural phenomenon evinces multilayered transnational convergence of globalizing western feminist and queer politics, commodified regional flow of Korean beautiful-boy image, and local Taiwanese T-Po lesbian subcultures in the process of Taiwan's modern and international nation building. I also indicate the gender-specific consequences of cultural transnationalization on queer sexuality formation by elucidating how the rise of the zhongxing phenomenon mainstreams the unique form of female masculinity as a chic, politically progressive, and semi-normative gender performance for young women and represents lesbian visibility as a practice of insinuated signification rather than straightforward confession. Finally, I demonstrate how Taiwanese lesbians take advantage of the zhongxing discourse to conceive of a masculine inclination congruent with their female body and identification and to satisfy conflicting desires for queer visibility and social integration, revealing the subtle relations between normative constraints and the exercise of queer agency in a transnational cultural context.