研究期間：10108~10207;The goal of this project is to understand how social norms (and challenges to them) for gender and sexuality circulate in culture through the shift from Cold War to neoliberal political economical systems in East Asia. Background readings will include historical, economic and sociological studies on the Cold War and neoliberalism, especially with a focus in Taiwan and East Asia. Although for disciplinary reasons even the most illuminating studies on neoliberalism do not always place a strong focus on culture or representation, I will read these studies as presenting a kind of vocabulary of cultural values as they explore or critique ideas like personal responsibility, privatization, the quest for individual liberty, discipline and happiness, etc. Scholars such as David Harvey have already demonstrated that neoliberalism is not comprised of an entirely coherent, consistent body of thought, but rather is rife with contradiction and is continuously changing. I want to look into how this incoherent body of thought is differently taken up in East Asia in areas with different political histories and nation-state formations. Considering culture as a discursive arena that can allow such contradictions and inconsistencies to come to the surface (Lisa Lowe), I will bring this academic reading and the vocabulary culled from it into dialogue with cultural texts that foreground sexuality in terms of oxymoronic clusters such as discipline, freedom and risk. The focus on sexuality reveals seemingly anachronistic similarities in the normative vocabularies of the Cold War and the present moment. The first year will focus on the representation of queer and intergenerational relationships (perceived as risky) in Taiwan International Workers’ Association activist Ku Yu-Ling’s acclaimed narrative Our Stories: Migration and Labor in Taiwan. I will read this text and its representation of sexuality in particular as a historiographical and ethnological account of the regional (as opposed to simply national) shift into neoliberalism. The second year looks at literature and anime, again for representations of the region, but in a more fictional mode. I will look at how the novel (in translation) and film Paprika foreground the productive binary of discipline and freedom in the representation of the doubled sexuality of the female scientist/therapist protagonist, while troping histories of Japanese imperialism in Asia.
