ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s, a new performance genre for male cross-dressing, the fanchuanxiu (反串秀, male cross-dressing show), emerged and swept across Taiwan’s entertainment industry. Fanchuanxiu, as a popular entertainment genre, provides a distinct outlet for the collective memory and public imagination of gender and sexuality in a Chinese-speaking society evolving into late capitalist modernity. Among many fanchuanxiu troupes, the Hongding Yiren (紅頂藝人, Redtop Arts), established in 1994 in Taipei, was the hottest showcase in Taiwan’s entertainment industry in the late 1990s. One hour of a Redtop show consisted of thirteen to twenty skits: drama, dance, and music material, selected from around the world, ranging from local to global, East to West, and traditional to contemporary. In a Redtop show, audiences listened to Chinese opera excerpts, old Shanghai tunes, Japanese enka (演歌), Taiwanese folk songs, theme songs from Taiwanese melodramas, and various popular songs and movie soundtracks from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the US, and other Western countries. Such a variety of theatrical and musical settings illustrated Redtop’s enthusiasm for negotiating and conciliating indigenization and internationalization. Their hybridized programs formed a small quasi-global village, with the Taiwanese at the center. The aesthetic characteristics of Redtop’s fanchuanxiu included pastiche and hybridity and, as the troupe leader Dr. Tsai proudly pointed out, “only in the Redtop Arts show can you hear various types of music ranging from the 1930s to the 1990s.”1
