ABSTRACT

In turning Taiwan studies into a more formalized, respectable, and institutionalized discipline around the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars began to track something that can no longer go unnoticed: the flowering of tongzhi (同志, gay and lesbian) literature, culture, communities, politics, and media representation in the 1990s. The initial upsurge of academic interest in the development of this tongzhi movement coalesced around the detailed attention of pioneering scholars such as Antonia Chao (2000; 2001), Fran Martin (2003a; 2003b), and Tze-lan Sang (2003). Rich in anthropological, historical, and literary details, their pathbreaking work provides theoretically sophisticated perspectives on the globallocal tensions within the uneven formation of nonnormative gender and sexual identities in late twentieth-century Taiwan. It has become a standard view that the lifting of martial law in summer 1987 paved the way for the liberalization and democratization of Taiwanese society. It was within this evolving sociopolitical context, for instance, that a certain echelon of cultural elites passionately introduced Western queer theoretical discourse to the Taiwanese public (Lim 2008; Lim 2009; Chen 2011; Liou 2015). Juxtaposing this against the Tiananmen Square incident, which shook the mainland (and the international community) two years later, many critics have highlighted the queering of Taiwan in the 1990s as a promising turning point for tongzhi activism. Yet a recent cohort of scholarship has yielded new interpretive strategies beyond a singular fixation on the liberal tendencies of the 1990s. Hans Tao-Ming Huang’s Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan (2011), for example, argues for a kind of historicization that traces the origins of Taiwanese queer modernity to the immediate post-World War II era. Only with such a view deeply grounded in the past, Huang shows, can one begin to appreciate the ways in which such classic queer fiction as Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys (1983) had been reworked by tongzhi activists to suit their new ambition in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the work of Jen-peng Liu and Naifei Ding (2005), Josephine Ho (2008; 2010), and Petrus Liu (2015) sheds light on the darker side of the liberal democratic order in the immediate post-martial law era, which, according to them, further exacerbated rather than improved the lives of stigmatized subjects dwelling at the social margins of gender and sexuality. This volume builds on this growing body of literature in order to reorient our impression of queer

history and culture in late capitalist Taiwan. Specifically, it argues for a revisionist account of what we call “perverse Taiwan” by reframing its genealogical roots in distinct historical periods, by redefining its nested subject positionalities along different axes of global epistemological renditions, and by refiguring its cultural modes of embodiment amidst the ever-shifting intersections of social and temporal coordinates.