ABSTRACT
For many, perhaps most men in Taiwan, an evening of entertainment in the company of friends or associates entails a set of behaviors, interactions, and self-representations that, while they may vary slightly from place to place-from south to north, foothills village to urban downtown-are nevertheless remarkably stable in composition across Taiwanese cultural space. This chapter describes, in distilled form, observations during participation in carousing sessions in the cities of Taichung and Taitung. It also describes specific actions and utterances of actors for whom carousing requires a major investment of time and labor. Carousing in Taiwan is by no means limited to the category of male, heterosexual, twenty-to-fifty year-olds with plenty of disposable income. Nevertheless, modes of social performance comprising carousing are clearly premised upon collective assumptions about—and practice directed toward the production of—normative gender identity and difference in Taiwanese culture.
