| dc.description.abstract | How are queer subjects in Taiwan (the Republic of China) and mainland China (the People’s Republic of China) formed under colonization that comprises both racialization and civilization, through imagining the West in different but relevant ways? To answer this question, I adopt textual analysis as my primary method to read two cultural texts, namely Taiwanese writer Chiang-Sheng Kuo’s tongzhi novel, People of Confusing Homeland, and the life story of Qiuyu, a gay elder in mainland China. My analyses of these two texts respectively respond mainly to the imagination of transnational queer intimacy and the imagination of a global hierarchy of queer human rights.
For me, Chinese queers’ imagination of the West is a material existence: It is decided by the material base, and can react against the material base. To illustrate its materiality, in the Introduction, I deal with the imagination of the West and the ethic of imagination. The ethic of imagination, developed from my reading of the tale of visiting Tai in a snowy night, is what I call “intimate distance”: In the relation of attachment, on one hand, the subject has to objectify and instrumentalize others to establish their own subjectivities; on the other hand, the subject can respect the feeling and agency of others, by deliberately maintaining a distance—an undetermined and changing boundary—from others.
In Chapter Two, “The Desire of (Sub)Empire: Transnational Intimacy and Cold War Reconciliation in Chiang-Sheng Kuo’s People of Confusing Homeland,” I use Lisa Yoneyama’s arguments about the cold war reconciliation in Pax Americana as my theoretical framework, to explore the imagination of the West, which is covered by Taiwan-Japan intimacy in this Taiwanese novel. This novel creates various queer figures with hybrid identities, whose interactions convey the sub-imperial desire of Taiwan, manifested as a dialectic of humiliation and conquest. Meanwhile, this desire is also replicated by the extant scholarship on People of Confusing Homeland, which advocates for the hybridity based on national reconciliation that ignores the exclusiveness of hybrid identity. In this regard, I argue that the “real confession” in this novel distances the criminal from the reconciliation procedure to explore the influence of the victim and the third party represented by the nation state on the forgiving discourse: By stipulating the non-repeatability of forgiveness, the real confession tries to avoid the collusion between the victim and the third party that seeks profits, to guarantee the sanctity of reconciliation, with a transcendence of the principle of utilitarianism and of the framework of nation state. This is a queer reconciliation that regards Taiwan as a method.
In Chapter Three, “‘Black Soul Under Red Sun’: A Chinese Gay Elder and His Imagination of Global Queer Rights,” I use Heather Love’s politics of queer history “feeling backward” as my theoretical framework, to probe queer potentials buried in gay senior Qiuyu’s backward imagination of global queer human rights—a hierarchy with the West at the top, the Islam at the bottom, and China at the middle. Existing research on elderly gay men can be generally divided into two modes: the vulnerability mode focusing on structural violence and the agency mode concentrating on individual resistance. According to these two competing but complementary modes, Qiuyu’s imagination should be viewed as a kind of defensive othering. However, I try to understand this imagination in his living experience. By analyzing his life story, I argue that the interconnection of nation state, market economy, neoliberal globalization, and homophobia in Chinese society causes his continuation of suffering from the Maoist era to the post-Mao era; in the interplay of multiple forces, culture plays a crucial role as an intermediary for economic normativity and heteronormativity, and as a link between the national body and the individual body. I demonstrate that the national backwardness of China is embedded in Qiuyu’s personal history, with his backward imagination of global hierarchy as a symptom. His continuation of suffering provides an alternative narrative of the continuation of national history, which is different from the official version, reminding us of im/possibility of transnational LGBT activism that challenges national borders.
The relation between these two chapters lies in my exploration of how national desires are embedded in daily desires, and how queer subjects can keep a distance from national desires while pursuing their daily desires, within the structure of division system in Taiwan and mainland China. My presentation of the multiple contexts of two texts can be understood as an effort to maintain an “intimate distance” between the self and texts, between Taiwan and mainland China, and between Chineseness and queerness. | en_US |