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Host of the first gay pride in the Sinophone world, Taiwan is well-known for its mushrooming of liberal attitudes towards non-normative genders and sexualities after the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. Perverse Taiwan is the first collection of its kind to contextualize that development from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its genealogical roots, sociological manifestations, and cultural representations.
This book enriches and reorients our understanding of postcolonial queer East Asia. Challenging a heteronormative understanding of Taiwan's past and present, it provides fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from queer criminality and literature in the 1950s and 1960s to the growing popularity of cross-dressing performance and tongzhi (gay and lesbian) cinema on the cusp of a new millennium. Together, the contributions provide a detailed account of the rise and transformations of queer cultures in post-World War II Taiwan.
By instigating new dialogues across disciplinary divides, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies and queer studies, especially those interested in history, anthropology, literature, film, media, and performance.
List of contents
- Perverse Taiwan
Part I: Turning Queer in Straight Times: Reframing Genealogies
- Archiving Taiwan, Articulating Renyao
- Plural Not Singular: Homosexuality in Taiwanese Literature of the 1960s
- From Psychoanalysis to AIDS: The Early Contradictory Approaches to Gender and Sexuality and the Recourse to American Discourses during Taiwan’s Societal Transformation in the Early 1980s
Part II: Orderly Subjects of Disorderly Conducts: Redefining Positionalities
- ‘Are you a T, Po, or Bufen?’: Transnational Cultural Politics and Lesbian Identity Formation in Contemporary Taiwan
- Patrilineal Kinship and Transgender Embodiment in Taiwan
Part III: Normal Nation and Deviant Narrations: Refiguring Embodiments
- Performing Hybridity: The Music and Visual Politics of Male Cross-Dressing Performance in Taiwan
- Market Visibility: The Development and Vicissitudes of Taiwan Tongzhi Cinema
- Defacing Shame
- A Canvas of Foreign Characters: Post/Colonial Modernity in Lai Xiangyin’s ‘The Translator’ and Thereafter
About the author
Howard Chiang is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Yin Wang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan.
Summary
Host of the first gay pride in the Sinophone world, Taiwan is well-known for its mushrooming of liberal attitudes towards non-normative genders and sexualities after the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. Perverse Taiwan is the first collection of its kind to contextualize that development from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its genealogical roots, sociological manifestations, and cultural representations.
This book enriches and reorients our understanding of postcolonial queer East Asia. Challenging a heteronormative understanding of Taiwan’s past and present, it provides fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from queer criminality and literature in the 1950s and 1960s to the growing popularity of cross-dressing performance and tongzhi (gay and lesbian) cinema on the cusp of a new millennium. Together, the contributions provide a detailed account of the rise and transformations of queer cultures in post-World War II Taiwan.
By instigating new dialogues across disciplinary divides, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies and queer studies, especially those interested in history, anthropology, literature, film, media, and performance.
Additional text
"An illuminating and provocative read. Perverse Taiwan is the first collection of essays to trace the development of unruly sexual bodies, communities, and cultural imaginings in Taiwan from the immediate postwar era to the present. A welcome addition to the bourgeoning field of queer Asian studies, the volume is especially impressive for its combination of geographical focus, historiographical depth, interdisciplinary breadth, and theoretical vision. Drawing on fields as diverse as the history of science, literary studies, sociology, medical anthropology, performance studies, and cinema studies, the volume compellingly establishes Taiwan as a fascinating transit point in East Asia where multiple modernizing regimes intersect and produce ever-shifting meanings of normality and transgression." Tze-lan D. Sang
"Examining the multiple genealogies of queer cultural politics in Taiwan and teasing out how transnational sexual modernities intersect on this island as it has been subjected to the forces of imperial China, colonial Japan, Cold War US, the neoliberal Asia Pacific, and the transcolonial Sinophone world, Perverse Taiwan offers fresh critical angles to look at the emergence of queer Taiwan in transnational cultural circuits. A must read for anyone interested in gender politics, global queer studies, East Asian history and culture, Sinophone studies, and Taiwan studies." Kuei-fen Chiu
