The Perfect Lie: Sandee Chan and lesbian representability in Mandarin pop music

Abstract

Framed by this understanding of recent transformations in musical and sexual cultures as a function of globalization, the paper situates Sandee Chan’s music within the local context of its production and consumption in Taiwan and works toward a “microscopic” perspective on experiences of the music by nu¨ tongzhi fans. In particular, it asks about a possible relationship between how nutongxinglian (female homosexuality) is spoken (or unspoken) in Sandee’s music, and the conditions of nutongxinglian representability within Taiwan’s contemporary public culture more broadly. The paper considers both the rhetorical figuration of nutongxinglian as subtextual reticence in the texts of Sandee’s song lyrics and music videos, and the activity of Sandee’s nutongzhi fans who find material here for the elaboration of oppositional meanings. Such a hybrid methodology — a combination of textual analysis and fan ethnography —represents the union of two approaches whose conceptual bases are sometimes taken to be discontinuous or incommensurable, if not opposed. The 1990s high moment of “queer theory,” for example, was frequently criticized for its supposedly narrow emphasis on the textual at the expense of the more broadly social (Seidman 1995). While one might respond effectively to this charge with the observation that representation is nothing if not thoroughly social, historical, and political, nevertheless it is instructive to combine the insights garnered through textualist close-reading strategies with understandings of the lived consumption of texts by their audiences.