ABSTRACT
The period between the suppression of Taiwan’s opposition movement during the Formosa Incident (Meilidao shijian) in 1979 to the lifting of martial law in 1987 can be described as a period of upheaval in times of uncertainty, characterized by a variety of new social formations striving for dominance (Chang 1993; Fell 2008). During this period, the changing media landscape that increasingly allowed more-often short-lived-publications (“grey journals”) also led to an intense preoccupation with the subject of homosexuality (Rigger 2000, 103-130). A number of medical professionals started to write specifically on the topic of homosexuality. Their stances differed widely, as I will show in more detail later: Peng Huaizhen 彭懷真, for example, considered homosexuality as having different expressions and forms in different societies, while Hu Yiyun 胡亦云 and Er Dong 爾東 tried to essentialize homosexual behavior in medical terms. At the beginning of the 1980s, Taiwan also saw the growing urgency of a feminist movement that would lay the foundations for a different view of gender and sexuality in the decades ahead. Increasingly, a medical theory of homosexuality that was originally formulated in Europe at the beginning of the last century by a small medical “scientific elite” began to construct the reality of “homosexuals” in Taiwan. Most of these medical terms had already been translated into Chinese in the 1920s and 1930s. Their use, however, remained restricted to a small circle of intellectual elites in some urban areas, especially with close connections to semicolonial and colonial parts of China such as Shanghai and Guangzhou (the latter due to its proximity to Hong Kong) (Lee 1991) and did not influence general discourse but, rather, specific works, such as Zhang Jingsheng’s “Sexual History” (xing shi 性史) from 1926 (see Leary 1994; Chiang 2010). These terms were further translated into Japanese, probably some terms came via the Japanese translation into the Chinese language, but did not reach Taiwan, being an island on the margin of
both the Japanese empire and Republican China (Damm 2005; Liu 1999). In postcolonial Taiwan these terms subsequently became part of the everyday language, in which people erotically inclined toward the same sex defined themselves as “homosexuals” (tongxinglianzhe 同性戀者); sexuality began to act as part of one’s “identity,” but the origin of the terms in the European discourses almost half a decade earlier and the earlier attempts of translation were lost. The focus of the subjects in Taiwan had shifted away from Japan, but not so much to Republican China as to the Anglo-Saxon world, especially the United States. Increasingly, Taiwanese authors made a number of references to American professional and popular scientific works, referencing both the more “enlightened” discourses and the more homophobic approaches such as conversion therapy, and often attempted to put these approaches into a Taiwanese-or, as the more conservative authors said, into a Chinese-context.
