ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Taiwan queer cinema vis-à-vis the marriage equality campaign accelerated in the mid-2010s. Highlighting the recent synergy of the tongzhi/queer movement and the strengthening Taiwanese consciousness through what has been coined homo(trans)nationalism, I choose Dear Tenant (2020) and Your Name Engraved Herein (2020), the two best-known tongzhi films from the immediate post-gay-marriage era, to address how the Chinese queer diasporic paradigm is negotiated. Rather than overtly celebrating gay marriage, they foreground the lived experiences of being tongzhi in earlier time periods. While Dear Tenant focuses on the socio-familial issues pertinent to the contemporary tongzhi rights movement, Your Name gravitates to an unrequited gay love drained by the socio-political ambient of the time. The latter notably also features a dual temporal structure that reshapes queer temporality while gesturing at a belated redemption enabled only by the recent marriage equality. Aside from the tongzhi movement/politics that helps rewrite the family definition to include tongzhi, both films also underscore varied aspects of Taiwanese identity/experience, which manifests the Taiwanese awareness at once underpinning the changing public opinions about the statehood and merging through homo(trans)nationalism to challenge the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary.
