ABSTRACT
To delineate the transnational complexity, this chapter focuses on how Taiwanese lesbian women choose to name their gender and sexual practices
from myriad identity categories coming into being through confrontation and negotiation among Western progressive feminist and queer politics and local lesbian subculture. Categorical politics emerging from discursive power relations displayed in the production, dissemination, and translation of gender and sexual categories have been central to queer critical inquiry. In the groundbreaking title, The History of Sexuality, Foucault has powerfully argued how “the homosexual” emerges as a categorical label that essentially defines the subjectivity of people who engage in same-sex sexual practice and the urge of modern science to systematically and scientifically categorize and discipline human subjects and bodies in the service of the government of modern nation-states at the turn of the twentieth century (Foucault 1990). Following Foucault, Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet reflects on how different sexual subjectivities are produced through a number of coexistent but contradictory ideologies, proposing “nonce taxonomy” as a conceptual framework to capture a continuous effort of contemporary queer individuals to understand, classify, and distinguish their gender and sexual acts through multifarious ideological discourses in order to map out “the possibilities, dangers, and simulations of the human social landscape” (Sedgwick 1990, 23).4 This chapter draws from the emphasis on the role of discursive knowledges and ideologies in the formation of subjective identification, examining a power-laden taxonomic regime taking shape in the transnational dissemination of Westernized gender and sexual categories translated and mediated by local sexual culture. If, as Foucault insists, subject formation and categorization do not represent an inner truth but inescapable power relations decentered in each node of daily practice and imagination, I posit that the extent to which Taiwanese lesbian women identify with Western-originated and local gender and sexual categories represents the transnational dimension of the working of the power/knowledge system resulting from Taiwan’s particular positions in political and economic global structure. In what follows, I discuss in detail the identity formation processes which manifest the ways in which Taiwanese lesbian women navigate and absorb diverse global and local discourses to shape a culturally intelligible and practicable female same-sex sexuality and subjectivity. I delineate the complexity of transnational categorical politics by exploring an intriguing cultural phenomenon in which locally developed female same-sex gendered eroticism featuring a masculine T and a feminine Po, though having been severely challenged by modern feminist and lesbian politics during the 1990s, continue to thrive and dominate how lesbian sexuality is construed and practiced up to now. The confrontations and negotiations of the seemingly contradictory global-local ideologies result in constant and continuous diversification and hybridization of gender and sexual identity categories as well as the emergence of a trend in which subjective identity formation becomes an ever-changing and never-complete process. Although T and Po appear to remain powerful concepts and identity labels that compel subjective identification, the meaning and categorical definition of T-Po keep on mutating in face of the challenge and hybridization by newly emergent identity categories such as bufen and nutongzhi that signify lesbian desires unaffected by
gendered eroticism. A model of subjective identification that is always in shift and incomplete thus comes into being. I argue that the complicated ways in which Taiwanese lesbian women meander through the contemporary taxonomic labyrinth and opt to acknowledge some categories while excluding others in identity formation reveal the working of transnational cultural politics. Power relations among diverse global and local cultural ideologies and discourses are manifested through uneven individual embeddedness in the intersections of transnational discourses that take shape via the Taiwanese collective pursuit of a modern and sovereign national subjectivity in its particular postcolonial situation.
