School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemVive L’Amour: eloquent emptiness(British Film Institute, 2003)Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994), winner of the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice International Film Festival, is the second part in a three-part film-cycle by Tsai Ming-liang, the Malaysian-born art-house director working from Taiwan. Following Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai Ming-liang, 1992) and preceding The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1996), Amour contributes to Tsai’s ongoing filmic exploration of the conditions of human subsistence in millennial Taipei. His films’ settings amid the city’s dismal concrete and neon streetscapes, their minimalist stories of the aimless days and nights of drifting, marginal characters and their austere cinematic style have earned Tsai his name as filmic philosopher of existential anxiety in post-‘economic miracle’ Taiwan.
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ItemIntroduction(Hodder Arnold, 2003)Before you begin reading this book, take a moment to think about its title: Interpreting Everyday Culture. What kind of project does this title suggest? What’s the definition of ‘everyday’, and what sort of ‘culture’ might characterize it? And, whatever definition we agree on, is ‘everyday culture’, in any case, amenable to interpretation? Or does the very ordinariness and taken-for-grantedness of the culture of our day-to-day lives make it inherently resistant to academic elucidation? Evidently, since you hold in your hands an entire book written by us on this subject, we’re going to try to convince you that there is indeed much to be gained from subjecting everyday culture to intellectual scrutiny. But we want to start out by drawing your attention to what a strange, slippery, and paradoxical concept ‘everyday culture’ is, despite its deceptive obviousness. Consequently, the interpretation of everyday culture is often a counterintuitive -even unsettling- endeavour. But in the pages that follow, we hope to show you how it’s also a very rewarding project, one that can lead to unexpected and illuminating insight into the surprisingly complex significance of all the things we do, day after day, while barely noticing that we’re doing them.
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ItemChen Xue's queer tactics( 1999)In recent years, "queer" (e.g., tongzhi, ku’er, guaitai, or xie) has become the focal point for discussions about sexuality in Taiwan, alongside the older terms lesbian and gay. Queer also appears in Taiwan in queer theory, a literary-political movement to draw on poststructuralist identity theory as a means of breaking down essentialized sexuality and gender categories, and advocating a sexual-identity politics on the basis of difference and multiplicity. Like any theory, queer theory emerged from a specific epistemological context, in this case the Anglo-American academy. Like other signs, queer can move from one conditioning context to another conditioning context, where inevitably it will take on different meanings. This article maps some of the different conditions queer is encountering in contemporary Taiwan, in order to illustrate how rewriting queer under new conditions shows up the earlier projects' very limits. My hope in discussing how queer is being reproduced in Taiwan is to make the limits more apparent and thereby to contribute to the project of queering globalized queer theory. The less globally circulated text I consider here is Taiwan lesbian writer Chen Xue's 1995 story "Searching for the Lost Wings of the Angel".
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ItemSurface tensions: reading productions of Tongzhi in contemporary Taiwan( 2000)It is probably impossible to think about the English term homosexuality in a contemporary context without addressing at some point the shadowy enclosure of “the closet”; in Taipei’s tongzhi activist and academic circles it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the presence of “the mask.” While it would be difficult to argue simply that the mask operates in Taiwan where the closet does in Europe, the United States, and Australia—since, for one thing, the language of the homosexual closet [yigui] coexists with and interpenetrates that of the mask [mianju] in Taiwan—I nevertheless hope to hold the tropes analytically distinct to a certain degree. This essay, then, considers the mask and the closet and is particularly concerned with some specific questions, which include the following: If the closet is organized around an irresolvable tension between secrecy and disclosure, how does the mask operate in relation to these terms? Is it possible that the mask has other, different investments instead of or alongside them? What perverse relationships might there be between the tongzhi mask and the idea of tongzhi “identity”? What kind of subject and what kind of “homosexuality” are projected by the trope of the tongzhi mask in its various deployments? My project is to chart some of the logics of the tongxinglian/tongzhi mask, not necessarily in decisive distinction to those of the homosexual closet, but nevertheless to take account of the mask’s cultural and historical specificity. I am aided in these speculations by a consideration of Ta-wei Chi’s 1995 novella The Membranes, which appears in the final section of this essay as a text inhabited by a logic and a subject analogous to those suggested by the mask.
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ItemFrom citizenship to queer counterpublic: reading Taipei's New Park( 2000)This paper focuses on the ways in which official narratives of the 'global city' in 1990s Taipei project models of sexuality which are negotiated and contested by gay and lesbian (tongzhi) activist practices and discourses. Analysing the densely symbolic site of Taipei's New Park and particularly the Democratic Progressive Party City Government's plans for its redevelopment (1995-96), the paper considers the tense relation which the liberal male homosexual cruising which traditionally takes place in New Park and the surrounding city block. Examining the City Government's liberal rhetoric on homosexuality (tongxinglian), the paper contrasts this rhetoric with the more conservative and overtly homophobic sexual policies espoused by other regimes in the region. It also attempts to unpack the logic that enables such a self-consciously 'tongzhi-friendly' administration nevertheless to continue harshly to discipline men who practise homosex in the newly 'public' spaces of the park and the street. Finally, the paper discusses some critical responses by tongshi writers and activists to the City Government's rewriting of the 'public' and the 'private' for the new Taipei.
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ItemIntroduction: Taiwan's literature of transgressive sexuality(University of Hawaii Press, 2003)This collection presents ten key texts of 1990s tongzhi wenxue for the first time in English translation. Like the commentaries that accompany the translations, this Introduction attempts to position tongzhi wenxue in relation to its role within the broader transformation in public discourse on sexualities in 1990s Taiwan.
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Item"Comics as Everyday Theory: The Counterpublic World of Taiwanese Women Fans of Japanese Homoerotic Manga"(Oxford University Press, 2008)
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ItemWomen on this planet: globalisation and girl rock in Taiwan( 2006)Pop music culture in Taiwan has undergone a striking metamorphosis over the past decade. Industrial reorganisation in the second half of the 1990s following the advent of the ‘Big Five’ global music corporations has occurred alongside a series of cultural shifts resulting from the localisation of global flows of musical styles and movements. In this paper I analyse some of the local effects of a particular cluster of globalising movements: those of musical ‘girl cultures’. I discuss Taiwanese manifestations of globally mobile configurations of ‘girl rock’ and ‘girl power’ through analysis of two examples with which I became familiar following extended periods living and researching in Taipei in the mid to late 1990s: all-girl punk band Ladybug and independent folk-rock singer-songwriter and producer Sandee Chan. These examples were not chosen with the aim of offering a representative overview of women in Taiwanese popular music, but rather as a pair of case studies interesting to consider together in the light of the way in which they each draw upon globalising musical and cultural trends. By considering these case studies I aim to explore three sets of interrelated questions. First, I consider how to conceptualise the complex cultural interchanges between globalising musical girl cultures and their local instances in Taiwan. Through what channels are movements like Riot Girl or the ‘girl power’ of the Spice Girls translated into Taiwan’s local contexts, and what effects do they produce for Taiwanese women musicians? Second, I reflect on how best to figure the relations between a musical ‘mainstream’ and its ‘alternative’ in the context of the changing configurations of Taiwan’s music industry today.