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Lesbianscape of Taiwan: media history of Taiwan's lesbians

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Content LESBIANSCAPE OF TAIWAN:
MEDIA HISTORY OF TAIWAN’S LESBIANS

by

Chun-Chi Wang

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2007

Copyright 2007 Chun-Chi Wang

ii

Acknowledgements

It would have been impossible to finish a doctoral dissertation solely on my
own. I am indebted to my committee members for their full support and sage
guidance. Marsha Kinder carefully read the manuscript and provided me with
invaluable comments. Her intelligence helped elevate this project to another level,
and her faith in me allowed me to see possibilities in myself. Priya Jaikumar is a
source of inspiration. She taught me how to be a successful scholar and a dedicated
educator. I am grateful to have her mentorship and friendship all along. I want to
thank Judith Halberstam for her generosity to get involved in this project at a very
late date. Her intellectual acumen not only facilitated this work but also indicates the
direction of its future improvement.
Thanks are due to other faculty at the University of Southern California for
their kindly encouragement and advice, including Tara McPherson, David James,
Michael Renov, Anne Friedberg, and Michael Messner. I also want to thank Lynn
Spigel and Marita Sturken with whom I had an opportunity to work before their
departure from USC.
I owe more than I can say to the comrades in my writing group, Jenny Clark
and Stephanie DeBoer. They unremittingly read my drafts and provided me with
insightful and constructive feedback. Jenny’s intelligence helped me to get my head
out of the clouds and her sense of humor always made the meetings fun and
motivational. Stephanie is my intellectual and emotional companion who helped me
iii

go through some of the most challenging moments on the road to completion. The
solidarity that originated here will continue throughout our whole lives.
I am blessed to have a group of colleagues and friends who inspired me with
their friendship and wisdom, among them Jiwon Ahn, Karen Beavers, Denise Chan,
Eunsun Cho, Terry T.K. Huang, Dong-Hoon Kim, Catherine Ko, Hyung-Sook Lee,
Nam Lee, Elizabeth Ramsey, Hey-Ryong Ok, Priscilla Ovella, Carlos Rosas, Jia Tan,
and Mary Jeanne Wilson. I especially want to thank Catherine Ko for her assistance
on some of the translations in this project.
Friends from Taiwan have been my strongest backups no matter how far and
how long we have been apart. Yan-I Huang, Anita Kao, and Jocelyn Wu have
embraced me all along without asking much in return. Heng-Hao Chang and Grace
Shu-Chin Kuo unselfishly shared their writing experiences and academic lives with
me. Other friends that I am indebted to include Ping-Ying Chang, Chao-Ju Chen,
Wei-Chun Chen, Da-Wei Kuan, Chien-Chi Lin, Shi-Ping Lin, Yi-Fen Peng, Shin-Ju
Shen, Megan Sun, Yu-Wen Sung, Shan-Ching Wang, Chia-Chi Wu, and Hsin-Tai
Wu.
Thanks are due to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International
Scholarly Exchange for their support of this dissertation project. I also want to thank
my interviewees for their enthusiastic participation in my research.
My deepest appreciation is for my mom Hsueh-Chao Huang and my sister
Gi-Chen for their love and support of my pursuit of my passion. Finally, I want to
iv

thank Szu-Pin Wang who comforted me with her love. Together with Chocho, they
made this journey so beautiful and unforgettable.

v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

Abstract vi

Introduction: Discovering a Lesbianscape of Taiwan 1
Endnotes 19

Chapter 1: Yin & Yang Amalgamation: A Primordial Nu Tongzhi Desire 21
Endnotes 58

Chapter 2: Dancing in the Margin 64
Endnotes 108

Chapter 3: Troubleshooting Visibility: Subaltern Counterpublics and Beyond 112
Endnotes 160

Chapter 4: Melodrama Wanted: Contemporary Nu Tongzhi Representations 167
Endnotes 210

Conclusion: Representing Nu Tongzhi and Beyond 216
Endnotes 224

Bibliography 225

vi

Abstract

Lesbianscape: Media History of Taiwan’s Lesbians is a historical and
theoretical study of discourses and media representations of sexuality around female
intimacy, desire, and contemporary lesbian/nu tongzhi identity in the cultural context
of post-war Taiwan. It argues that the subject of nu tongzhi/lesbian identity in
contemporary Taiwan is a hybrid product resulting from constant negotiation and
dialogue with Anglo-American ideologies of homosexuality, as well as contestations
over the disputed national identities of contemporary Taiwan. Addressing the role of
the media in introducing and advocating liberal sexual politics, this dissertation
describes a process both of the reinscription and reappropriation of Western
discourse and representations of sexuality.
The examination that this project undertakes includes, but is not limited to,
the past two decades that have seen the rise of a tongzhi (gay and lesbian) subject in
Taiwan. Engaging in multiple methodologies, including textual analysis, discourse
analysis, and survey research, this study reveals queer moments in the socio-cultural
context of postwar Taiwan that can be of value for nu tongzhi/lesbians to construct
their identities and articulate their desires. Linking these queer moments proposes a
possible Chinese epistemology of nu tongzhi/lesbians that reflects and challenges the
global dominance of Western ideologies and theories of homosexuality.
Furthermore, those queer moments that enable a new way of comprehending sexual
identities outside a Western cultural context have to be understood as tactics
embedded in everyday life practices in order to be perceived. While many critical
vii

studies on non-Western lesbians, gays, and queers focus the spotlight on the activist
perspective, this project proposes another counter-argument against the hetero-
hegemony of popular culture. Exploring the cultural representation of female
homosexuality in Taiwan thus suggests a strategy that goes beyond a series of
binaries, such as East vs. West, local vs. global, and high vs. low, in order to
mobilize dominant powers and ideologies as mediation to re-theorize the experience
of a transnational (or postcolonial) sexual subject.
1
INTRODUCTION

Discovering a Lesbianscape of Taiwan

When compared to other places with similar Confucianist cultural legacies, it
is often asked why Taiwan’s tongzhi (lesbian and gay) movement and culture could
have sprouted so rapidly and become so prevalent in only a decade. This very
question underscores my incentive to do a dissertation project that examines the
phenomenon of a booming tongzhi culture, and more closely that of nu tongzhi
(lesbians), by looking at the dynamic realm of media representations which is of
particular importance to this community. My undertaking to analyze how various
forms of female same-sex bonding, intimacy, and desire are addressed, represented,
and debated in different historical contexts of Taiwan not only explicates the grounds
and contexts of the culture’s surfacing and growth, it also helps us to understand the
evolution of sexual politics in Taiwan.
Lesbianscape of Taiwan is a theoretical and historical study of discourses and
media representations of sexuality concerning female intimacy and nu-
tongzhi/lesbian identity and desire in the cultural context of Taiwan after the Second
World War. It argues that the subject of nu tongzhi/lesbian identity in contemporary
Taiwan is a hybrid product resulting from constant negotiation and dialogue with
Western ideologies of homosexuality as well as contestations over the national
identities of Taiwan and China. Addressing the role of the media in introducing and
advocating liberal sexual politics, this project describes a process both of
“reinscription” and “reappropriation” wherein Western discourses and
2
representations of sexuality are absorbed and adapted into forming and articulating a
nu tongzhi/lesbian identity and desire.
1
Meanwhile, interacting with the West’s
conceptualization and articulation of homosexuality implicitly transforms Taiwan’s
local culture and reshapes contemporary social conditions in Taiwan.
The study of a wide range of representations concerning the identity
formation of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi also poses a challenge to the global positioning of
recent Western conceptualizations of lesbians, gays, and queers for their insensitivity
toward the West’s historically overpowering force in world economy, politics, and
knowledge formation. While it would be a delusion to deny any influence of, and
inspiration from, the Western gay rights movement, women’s movement, lesbian and
gay studies, or queer theory on the rising of tongzhi discourse, the word “challenge”
does not suggest a complete rejection of the West in favor of Taiwanese cultural
authenticity. Rather, it demands that attention be paid to the mutual inflection
between Western theories of gender and sexuality and the particular cultural
examples of Taiwan. In a discussion on Kuan-Hsing Chen’s inspiring article “Asia as
Method,” Ying-Bing Ning points out the significance of Western theory as universal
mediation—similar to English’s role as a common language—which, with its
abstract construction and conceptualization, facilitates comparison of social
conditions in different geographic locations. He goes on to argue,
In the arena of academic production, it is inevitable to incorporate Western
theories. But thanks to the cultural specificity of local issues and their
individual context, our discussions can be more engaging and nuanced as we
constantly create dialogues with scholars in Taiwan and other Asian
countries. This sort of intellectual exchange would ultimately formulate some
innovative insights that are different from Western theories.
2

3
I consider this dissertation project as a scholarly practice that continues the attempt
illustrated in Ning’s remark. Instead of disregarding Western theories, I productively
ask how Western theory influences and/or contradicts our interpretation of media
representations of nu tongzhi culture in Taiwan, and I examine the implication of
adopting (or not) Western theory. This project refuses the East versus West and local
versus global models, which are no longer sufficient to capture the complicated
exchange of information, knowledge, and culture occurring in Taiwan. The coined
term “lebsianscape” in the title hints at this cross-cultural propensity. The suffix –
scape resonates with Arjun Appadurai’s critical addresses of the dimension of the
global cultural flows as fluid, irregular, and “deeply inflected by the historical,
linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors.”
3
Western theory is
not treated as an immutable paradigm but as a mediating vehicle, as Ning advocates.
It is used to unpack the formation and articulation of a contemporary nu tongzhi
identity and its identification and desire, as well as its negotiation with multiple
powers that influence the field of sexual politics.
The nation-state, one of the actors that exert influence on the construction of
a lesbianscape of Taiwan, is here not viewed as an absolute power that has total
control over the politics and discourse of sexuality. On the contrary, the nation-state
is strategically invoked by the nu tongzhi community for political negotiations. This
is made possible in part due to the ongoing crisis of Taiwan’s political status and the
dispute over its national identity. In Taiwan’s nation-building process, the West has
been regarded both as the object of emulation and as a resource to help Taiwan
4
obtain international recognition for its modernization, democracy, and human rights
campaign of late. Politically, the tension between the nation-state and non-
heterosexual people as the sexual other is alleviated by the government’s desire for
recognition from the West. Culturally, the dilemmas between envy of the West and
national pride and between modernity and tradition that specifically configures
tongzhi’s predicament also allows the tongzhi community to effectively capitalize on
some of the conflicts and paradoxes to create a space of its own.
As a discursive arena in which cultural ideas interchange, and a venue that
reflects and provides access to those interactions, media representations serve well as
an apposite entry point to the question of how Western ideologies of homosexuality
impact the formation of contemporary nu tongzhi subjectivity. It is also the major
realm wherein divergent cultural ideologies encounter one another and are
negotiated. Media representations mirror public opinions and society’s value system
on the one hand, and yet act as a force of change for allowing multiple views and
modes of reception to come forth and be in dialogue. Therefore, an analysis of media
representations and the surrounding discourse offers a reference point for
understanding the discursive vicissitudes of public perceptions of female
homosexuality and the formation process of contemporary nu tongzhi identity and
desire.

5
The Rise of Nu Tongzhi as an Identity
In the field of sexuality studies, the scientific paradigms of Western sexology
and psychology have been the dominant discourse since they were introduced to
Mainland China and, later, Taiwan along with full-scale modernization in the
beginning of the Republic in the early twentieth century. After that, same-sex sexual
conduct (tong-xian-ai or tong-xin-lian) was included in medical discourses and
became a major category of perversion, even though they were not considered
pathological in ancient Chinese culture.
The supremacy of heterosexual ideology remained unchallenged in Taiwan
until the mid 1980s when the gay rights movement arose globally in response to the
AIDS crisis. The Taiwanese government at the time participated in this global
fighting of AIDS, but took advantage of it for their own moral purpose – to denounce
gay people by blaming them for spreading the fatal epidemic. To resist this
stigmatization, the gay community rose up to protest. A handful of nu tongzhi
activists also took part in the struggle since the government’s propaganda was to
demonize homosexuals as a group identity, even though nu tongzhi were regarded as
blameless because of the low number of infection cases, along with the public denial
of sex between two women. In the meantime, nu tongzhi activists have collaborated
more closely with the women’s movement as they share the identity of women and
the agenda of fighting patriarchal oppression. Feminist scholars’ rendition of
Western lesbian, gay, and queer theories also helped provide a strong theoretical
ground for these political struggles, and expand the tongzhi community on university
6
campuses. In 1997, members of the nu tongzhi faction of the Awakening Foundation
(Funu xinzhi), the most established base for the women’s movement, split from the
organization, and the nu tongzhi community has since gradually established its
autonomy and distinctive agenda separate from straight feminism.
At the same time, there was a great deficiency in public discourse involving
homosexual people. The strategy of “coming out” has its constraints in a
Confucianist society that traditionally values collectivism and filial devotion as
opposed to individualism. As individuals are caught up in a family/kinship-centered
personal network, individuals are hardly separable from family. In addition to being
labeled a pervert in medical discourse, being a homosexual also morally violates the
most basic principle – filial piety – for being human. The growing production of
lesbian and gay films in the West in the early 1990s became one of the most
important visual sources for the construction of the identity of nu tongzhi in Taiwan.
The sub-section “Gay and Lesbian Film” in the 1992 Taipei Golden Horse
International Film Festival is one of the most widely remembered events as it
initiated a systematic introduction of Western lesbian, gay, and queer cinema to
Taiwan. The high popularity of lesbian, gay, and queer films during the Golden
Horse Film Festivals also fosters a market for Western lesbian and gay films to be
screened through small commercial festivals or theatrical release.
While this account seems to underscore the influence of Anglo-American
lesbian and gay discourses, especially in the realm of media representation, this was
also the moment when the term “tongzhi” emerged and became widely accepted. The
7
prevalent use of the Chinese term “tongzhi” to refer lesbians and gays in the context
of Taiwan illustrates a negotiation that tackles the problematic relationship with
Western notions of gays and lesbians. Edward Lam, a Hong Kong-based theater
director as well as the co-founder of the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival,
inventively used the term “tongzhi” to name lesbians and gays in the context of
Chinese culture. The lesbian and gay communities (in Taiwan) widely applauded
Lam’s subversive reappropriation of the term tongzhi, which has traditionally been
associated with a sense of national pride prompted by the Revolution, to name sexual
deviances. As the editorial of an independent magazine Ai Bao writes: “Tongzhi is
originally the word used by Sun Yat-San during the Republican Revolution. Lam’s
artful borrowing of the progressive and encouraging tongzhi substitutes the
derogatory “tong-xi-lian.”
4
When Lam was invited to Taiwan by the Executive
Committee of the Golden Horse International Film Festival as a guest curator for the
section of “Gay and Lesbian Cinema,” his idea was embraced and the appellation
was translated into “Tongzhi Cinema.”
When the term tongzhi was first adopted, it was used inclusively, by adding a
different adjective before tongzhi to refer to lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender
people, and even gay-friendly heterosexuals. For instance, nu tongzhi for lesbians is
composed of the adjective for female “nu” and “tongzhi,” and so forth. But because
it is mainly used by the nu tongzhi and nan tongzhi (gay) communities, tongzhi
gradually turned into a specific term that predominately describes lesbians and gays
in Taiwan. As argued by Da-Wei Ji, a queer writer, activist, and academic,
8
What tongzhi means is different from the re-appropriation of “queer” in the
context of English. Tongzhi signifies the feeling of a shared rancor toward
the enemy. Despite its confrontation of heteronormalcy, there is a sense of
conservatism in gay and lesbian communities once it calls for solidarity. The
concept of queerness could point out that blind spot to lesbians and gays.
5

(my emphasis)

In contrast to tongzhi’s emphasis on sameness/unification, the construct and
politics of qu-er (phonetically translated from queer) promoted by some scholars and
activists in Taiwan suggests a broadened category of sexuality that includes
homosexuality but is not exclusively about homosexuality. The concept of qu-er,
argued by Ning, advocates “alliance politics that resists heterosexual hegemony by
the coming-together of non-normative sexualities.”
6
Even though the concept of qu-
er seems to be more capable to overcome the limitations of identity categories, it is
important to note, as Annamarie Jagose suggests, “Queer effects a rupture which is
meaningful only in the context of its historical development.”
7
It is crucial for places
like Taiwan to come to terms with “queerness” by comprehending its own history of
sexuality. Just as the evolution and mobilization of queerness in the West is a
culturally- and theoretically-specific response to questions about lesbian and gay
identity, our utilization of the Western-derived “queer” needs to be able to reflect
and address the progression of heterosexual oppressions and corresponding struggles
and resistances.
This project’s concern with nu tongzhi/lesbians and their desire and identity
in representational terms aspires to look at what forbids such identity and desire and
in what ways, and to discover the possibilities that negotiate, remove, or demolish
those obstructions. A nu tongzhi/lesbian vision is a critically poignant and necessary
9
strategy to produce queer readings against the grain in the socio-cultural context of
Taiwan. As Taiwan’s cultural tradition is more tolerant of female intimacy, the
dissenting characteristic of nu tongzhi/lesbian sexuality tends to be effaced and
normalized. While this study is not interested in advocating the political legitimacy
of a nu tongzhi/lesbian identity, it does not disavow the role of such identity and
desire in configuring this particular part of media history.
The two words, nu tongzhi
8
and lesbian, are used interchangeably throughout
this dissertation, as both literally mean women who are sexually attracted to women.
While both share the same meaning, the usage of “lesbian” appears by and large in
the context of theoretical engagement, whereas “nu tongzhi” is applied to the
analyses and discussions of the community in Taiwan. The use of nu tongzhi
emphatically registers the discursive formation of such sexual identity in the
particular cultural context of Taiwan. In some instances, I differentiate between these
two terms depending on whether the issue that I investigate happened before or after
the term “tongzhi” became available. This difference is to highlight the historical
significance of the term “tongzhi,” which demonstrates a synthesis of Chinese
cultural specificity and imported Western concepts. Moreover, it reflects the
circumstances in which the word “lesbian” had been borrowed directly with a
phonetic translation read as “lei-si-bian” in Taiwan before “tongzhi” was re-
appropriated for referring homosexual people. Moreover, the different cultural
connotations suggested by these two terms are also discussed to exemplify the cross-
cultural interplays found in Taiwan’s nu tongzhi culture.
10
The reason for concentrating on nu tongzhi as the object of study is that,
politically, it speaks to the under-representation of nu tongzhi in current scholarship
on tongzhi issues. Moreover, since the developments of nu tongzhi and nan tongzhi
and other sexual minority groups in Taiwan are independent of each other, although
related, analyzing them all together as a collective group risks losing sight of the real
differences in their politics and struggles. As Alexander Doty comments,
“Articulating queer theory fully apart from gendered straight feminist, gay, and
lesbian theorizing becomes difficult within languages and cultures that make gender
and gender difference so crucial to their discursive practices.”
9
This study of the
politics of media representation from the perspective of nu tongzhi engages concerns
such as the roles of the nation-state and the West in formulating liberating sexual
politics shared by different groups of sexual others, but is configured to more
directly address nu tongzhi issues.

Queer as Method

Rather than simply defining which representations should or should not be
counted as nu tongzhi film, this exploration of the media history of Taiwan’s nu
tongzhi considers the field of representation as a battleground in which different
ideologies of sexuality contest and negotiate. In order to do this, the act of
“queering” becomes imperative for us to see the representations beyond what they
appear on the surface. Only by locating the non-normative moments are we able to
constitute a media history of nu tongzhi that does not rely on a single nu tongzhi film
or TV program. The preoccupation that confines “media representation” to a single
11
text can be observed from my encounters with people’s skepticism about doing a
media history of nu tongzhi, a social group that has just “appeared” over the past few
years. In most cases, people who know nothing about this matter wondered, “Are
there any nu tongzhi films?” Those who are better informed about the development
of tongzhi in Taiwan tended to ask, “Are there enough nu tongzhi films or TV
programs for you to write a history of them?” Tamsin Wilton points out in her
preface to an anthology on lesbians and the moving image that it is obligatory to
explore the moving image concerning the category of “lesbian” using “the catechism
of undecidability: the formula of question and response which problematizes the
definition of ‘lesbian.’”
10
In other words, the definition of what qualifies as a lesbian
film and from which perspective is perpetually in contention. In a similar vein, it is
therefore insufficient and almost impossible to write a media history of nu tongzhi
solely based on so-called nu tongzhi media texts. In my discussion of particular
media representations relevant to the identity formation of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi, my
engagement goes beyond simply considering representations to be a result of an
ideological apparatus that dominates in the text-spectator relationship. I agree with
Annette Kuhn that, it might be more productive to see “representations, contexts,
audiences, and spectators…as a series of interconnected social discourses, certain
discourses possessing greater constitutive authority at specific moments than
others.”
11
My examination of media representations thus addresses the
interconnection of the discursive formation of the social, cultural, and textual to
12
construe nu tongzhi’s struggle for cultural representations and unravel the tensions
along the way.
This project relies on a method of detecting queer moments that can be of
value for nu tongzhi to construct their identity and to find identification/desire. At the
same time, these moments are useful for understanding the overall sexual politics
from which a nu tongzhi identity and desire emerge. Toward this end, my exploration
of the media history of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi community deploys multiple
methodologies, ranging from textual analysis, to discourse analysis, to field research.
While textual analysis allows us to untangle the social and cultural meanings of
visual and literary representations, discourse analysis takes the investigation beyond
the textual level to stress the importance of historical, cultural, and sociopolitical
contexts from which texts emerge. Discourse analysis can also reveal the operation
of complex societal forces, such as democratization, that bring a product into
existence, and suggest the ways in which production and reception discourses affect
the meaning of representations.
The field research of interviews conducted with nu tongzhi
audiences/spectators/readers provides a view of how certain films or television
programs—even mainstream ones—inadvertently create a space of sexual and
gender instability in which the audiences can identify with their own queerness. At
the same time, these ethnographic accounts sometimes suggest a counterargument
against intellectual readings, which begs for a closer look at the gap between popular
and academic accounts. Here, I align with Esther Newton’s caution against
13
producing a theory “without knowing the history of lesbian/gay male relations in the
community and beyond.”
12
Turning attention toward “the people” does not mean
losing or ignoring the critical perspective and blindly embracing a populist approach.
Instead, I suggest that we read the difference, if any, symptomatically to reconsider
what prompts and is inscribed in the gap between different points of view.

Preview
The four chapters of this dissertation are organized chronologically in order
to help readers grapple with the social and political history of Taiwan. Such
arrangement, however, in no way suggests a linear progression of nu tongzhi’s
struggle for cultural representation. Against the popular criticism that the identity
formation of tongzhi subordinates itself to Western discourse, the first chapter,
“Ying-Yang Amalgamation: A Primordial Nu Tongzhi Desire,” attempts to construct
an epistemology of nu tongzhi, and “re-reads the past”
13
to discover new reference
points of same-sex desire in early social and cultural milieus in Taiwan. Drawing
upon the potentiality of theatrical impersonations to unsettle the norms of gender and
sexuality, this chapter closely examines discourses around two legendary male
impersonators, Ivy Ling Po and Li-Hua Yang, and their respective performances in
film and on TV during the 1960s and ‘70s. Reading fan discourse especially by
female fans and newspaper articles to recast Ling Po and Yang’s role as male
impersonators reveals a complex context of reception and fandom within which
homoerotic desire is displayed. At the same time, the type of masculinity embodied
14
by the performances of Ivy Ling Po and Li-Hua Yang, which intermingled with their
femininity in real life, forges a peculiar type of “female masculinity,” in Judith
Halberstam’s famous phrase,
14
that is carried on by contemporary nu tongzhi.
Facilitated by Western theories of lesbian sexuality, this recuperation of the
previously isolated tradition of male impersonation generates a prototypical nu
tongzhzi image and desire. This queer reading of male impersonation exceeds its
original interpretive context of Confucian patriarchy, even as it modifies the
theoretical premise of Western theories of lesbian sexuality.
Continuing with the idea of seeking allegedly heterosexual representations to
locate queer moments, Chapter Two, “Dancing in the Margin,” excavates the
forgotten commercial films throughout the 1980s and the early 90s that explicitly
deal with homosexual issues. In rediscovering this lost history, this chapter proposes
a revised historiography in constituting not only the history of Taiwanese film but
also of tongzhi images. The examination, first of all, unpacks how the writing of a
nation’s film history privileges films with an art film style and a thematic concern of
nationhood and national identity. For example, homosexual films, such as Girls’
School (Mei-Mi Li, 1982) and The Silent Thrush (Sheng-Fu Zheng, 1991) that were
released in the same period as the critically acclaimed Taiwan New Cinema were
marginalized for their tacky and sensational homosexual themes, not to mention their
popular cinematic approach. Secondly, in addition to their absence in the public’s
memory, this chapter suggests that the absence of these films in the history of nu
tongzhi images reflects the thorny debate regarding the effects and the limitations of
15
positive images. This chapter proposes an alternative historiography that reads the
significance of these early homosexual films, so often judged to be pointless and
contemptible, against other discourses of film promotion, film reviews, and public
attitudes toward homosexuality. It argues that these films reveal homosexuals’
struggles particular to the historical context when the notion of perverse
tongxinlian/homosexuality had not been challenged by that of tongzhi/lesbian, gay,
or queer.
In spite of a paucity of domestic recognition, early homosexual films’
popularity in international film festivals seems to predict a complex dynamic among
the nation-state, the West, and the tongzhi community through which the tongzhi
community avails itself of bargaining chips to negotiate with the government. By the
mid 1990s, the Western gay rights movement, lesbian-feminist discourse, queer
theory, and related cultural products such as novels, theaters, film, etc. have been
introduced to Taiwan en masse, and have exerted their influence on tongzhi
discourse. Chapter Three, “Troubleshooting Visibility: Subaltern Counterpublics and
Beyond,” re-evaluates the closeness between tongzhi communities and the West and
explores how tongzhi manipulate Western discourse and theory in their struggles
with political and cultural visibility in the media realm. Here, the idealized West and
Western paradigms have been strategically employed by tongzhi communities as a
“tactics,” an everyday practice which “constantly manipulate events in order to turn
them into ‘opportunities’” according to Michel de Certeau.
15
Tongzhi communities
uses the image of the idealized West and Western paradigms to embarrass the
16
government of Taiwan with its own claim of being as liberal and democratic as
Western countries, as opposed to the repressive People’s Republic of China.
Tongzhi’s capitalization on governmental rhetoric has successfully pushed the
government to endorse tongzhi activities and issues. Moreover, their deliberate play
with unsettling national identities and adulations of Western power grant the tongzhi
community a leading role in the social reform of sexual politics.
While discussing the dilemma many tongzhi face when making the decision
of whether to come out or not, this chapter also points out the ineffectiveness of a
model of subaltern counterpublics, as theorized in Western liberal democracy, that
fail to take into account the social and cultural peculiarities of non-western countries,
in this case, Taiwan. Through an analysis of tongzhi’s screen culture formulated
during the festival screenings, I offer a different model of a subaltern counterpublic
– “a counterpublic of sensibility” – that allows a counterpublic to be formed in an
emotional and private way. Through particular tactics, the tongzhi community is able
to turn powers that are traditionally hostile into supporters. Moreover, this chapter
shows how a simultaneous negotiation with multiple powers can avoid reinforcing
one ideology while fighting another.
The last chapter, “Melodrama Wanted: Contemporary Nu Tongzhzi
Representations,” looks at the contemporary nu tongzhi representation in a television
serial drama, The Unfilial Daughter, and two “quality” television films, A Dance
with Two Girls and Voices of Waves. The argument here is two-fold. First, it suggests
relocating the scholarly debate about romantic friendship within the social and
17
cultural context of Taiwan. The chapter argues that the common trope in Taiwan’s
contemporary representation of nu tongzhi— romantic friendship between two girls
in a girls’ school that is transformed into a nu tongzhi relationship—is both
productive and problematic. On the one hand, its productivity lies in its challenge to
the asexualized notion of romantic friendship that permeates the cultural tradition of
Taiwan. Yet, on the other hand, the very idea of romantic friendship between female
students becomes an easy alibi for not pursuing other possible forms of nu tongzhi
relationships that pose direct challenges or even threats to heteronormative society.
Secondly, through a comparison between the serial drama and the other two TV
films, we return to the question of class and taste that is implicitly suggested in
Chapter Two. Shot in the presumably pejorative genre of melodrama, the
unprecedented popularity of The Rebellious Daughter has not received adequate
critical attention. Emphasizing the subversive potentiality of melodrama as theorized
by feminist film and TV scholars, the chapter argues that The Unfilial Daughter’s
employment of melodrama provides a site of identification that attracts ordinary nu
tongzhi audiences. Also inclined toward a popular aesthetic, the melodramatic
Rebellious Daughter is more capable of fulfilling “a deep-rooted demand for
participation” that Pierre Bourdieu discusses in his important article “The
Aristocracy of Culture.”
16
Through the mediation of the serial drama, a sub-
community of nu tongzhi is formed that digresses from and challenges the dominant
nu tongzhi discourse formulated by nu tongzhi intellectuals.

18
Tactics of Intervention
On the superficial level, this project seems to tell a story of transnational
sexuality from the perspective of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi. But underlining it is an
attempt to complicate the reference point of American-centered Western sexualities
that is used to interpret all stories of sexuality regardless of each story’s cultural
specificity. To address the limitation of a theoretic framework strictly anchored in
Western sexualities, the analysis in this project also undertakes the strategies of
reincription and reappropration to engage with existing critical languages and
concepts in sexuality studies. Contingent on interactions with the cultural examples
that one examines, this strategic application of present critical paradigms pushes
aside the original meaning and challenge them by filling in with alternative
implications and ways of interpretation. In her thorough research on the emergence
of female same-sex desire in China, Tze-Lan Sang emphasizes that the first and
foremost job for studying transnational sexuality is to discover local details to “know
with some certainty the specific features of transnational sexuality in twentieth-
century China.”
17
Echoing Sang’s intellectual project, my excavation of cultural
details of (homo)sexuality in Taiwan further brings such discovery to the theoretical
level. As I will demonstrate in my analysis, the discovery of local details not only
functions to demystify misconceptions about the cultural scene of (homo)sexuality in
a non-Western context, but it also confronts global notions of Western lesbian, gay,
and queer identity and thus alters theoretical premises in the study of transnational
sexuality.
19
Introduction Endnotes

1. See Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1989) and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1991).

2. Ning Ying-Bing, Panel Discussion of “Qu Asia, Qu Taiwan.” The 44
th

Forum of Cultural Criticism, Taipei, Dec 9 2006, http://www.ncu.edu.tw/~csa/
journal/64/journal_forum44.htm (accessed April 5, 2007).

3. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 33.

4. Wen-Huei Xiao, “This Guy is Very Edward Lam,” Eslite Book Review 17
(1994): 54.

5. Da-Wei Ji, Panel Discussion of “Queers and Laughing Medusas, transcribed
in Working Papers in Gender/Sexuality Studies: Special Issue of Queer Politics and
Queer Theory (Chungli: The Center for the Study of Sexualities, Department of
English, National Central University, 1998), 52-53.

6. Ying-Bing Ning, “What is Queer Politics?” in Working Papers in
Gender/Sexuality Studies: Special Issue of Queer Politics and Queer Theory
(Chungli: The Center for the Study of Sexualities, Department of English, National
Central University, 1998), 35-37.

7. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York
University Press, 1996), 75.

8. “La-zi” (abbreviated as “la”) is another common term used by Taiwan’s
lesbians for self-identification. The term first appears in the novel, “The Crocodile
Journal,” written by Qiou Miao-Jin, which portrays the psychological struggles of
the protagonist “Name” when she confronts herself with her desire for women. In the
novel, (the protagonist) labels herself as “la-zi” (phonetically close to “les,” the
English abbreviation for lesbian) and this term was gradually adopted by the nu
tongzhi community along with the popularity of this novel. Compared to nu tongzhi,
la-zi is relatively informal and seldom used in scholarly works.

9. Alexander Doty, “Something Queer Here,” in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian,
and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 75.

20

10. Tamsin Wilton, “Introduction: On invisibility and mortality,” in Immortal,
Invisible: Lesbians and the moving image, ed. Tamsin Wilton (London: Routledge,
1995), 3-4.

11. Annette Kuhn, “Women’s Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory,” in
Home is Where Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film, ed. Christine
Glehill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 374.

12. As cited in Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1998), 242.

13. The strategy of “re-reading the past” is a strategy invoked by many queer
cultural critics to construct gay and lesbian history. For example, Judith
Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, and Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical
Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1999).

14. Judith Halberstam, ibid.

15. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

16. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture,” in Media, Culture &
Society: A Critical Reader, eds. Richard E. Collins et al. (London: Sage, 1986), 176.

17. Tze-Lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in
Modern China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 12.

21
CHAPTER ONE

Yin & Yang Amalgamation: A Primordial Nu Tongzhi Desire

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations
of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about
what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about
whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues,
albeit in different forms, perhaps.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

During an interview with New York Times reporter Rick Lyman after the
great success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee named The Love Eterne
(Han-Xiang Li, 1963) as the best and the most influential Chinese film to him. The
romantic couple in The Love Eterne, an adaptation of the celebrated folk tale Liang-
Zhu (allegedly a Chinese Romeo and Juliet), is played by two women, one of whom
is a male impersonator. Responding to Lyman’s initial reaction to this as one of the
“most distracting and perplexing things about this film,” Lee attributed it to a
“feminine style,” a common trope in traditional Chinese opera, and further explained
that spectators at that time accepted the film at face value without confusion: “They
saw the man as a man, not as a woman pretending to be a man, although at the same
time they also appreciate that it was a woman pretending to be a man. Part of the
appreciation was watching how well the woman could pretend to be a man.”
1
While
Lee may be right to point out the commonality of cross-dressing performance in the
Chinese cultural tradition, he reiterates a popular view that dismisses the particular
sexual politics of cross-dressing performance and its profound impact through the

22
popular and accessible medium of film. In fact, the star personas of male
impersonators and their popularity among female fans not only disturbs the
conjectural domination of heterosexuality in the 1960s, but also offers an
interpretation of present nu tongzhi politics in Taiwan.
2
This turn to the past
addresses the lack of, and helps to construct, a Chinese epistemology of tongzhi.
In an attempt to address this neglect of the cultural meanings of cross-
dressing performance and to counter the way it has being obscured by “tradition,”
this chapter re-examines the 1960s and 1970s when male cross-dressing performance
in the media was at its high point. Through an investigation of newspaper reports and
fan discourses circulated in Taiwan to recast two prominent male impersonators, Ivy
Ling Po and Li-Hua Yang, who were active in film and television respectively, my
study registers the discursive moments for imagining the existence of nu tongzhi.
Addressing female spectatorship sheds a different light on the relationship between
Ivy Ling Po and her female fans, which calls for a reinvestment of a queer desire that
contains and yet is not limited to a nu tongzhi fantasy. Yang’s confusion over her
gender identity calls into question the definite demarcation between on- and offstage
personae of a cross-dressed performer. Moreover, as my ethnographic interviews
with nu tongzhi in the community demonstrates, Ling Po and Yang’s success in
embodying masculinity offers a prototype for contemporary masculine nu tongzhi of
Taiwan identified as T.
3
An examination of the interpretive context around the
discourses about these two male impersonators allows a nu tongzhi historiography to
be constructed.

23
The primary concern here, instead of proving that Ling Po and Yang (and
their female fans) could arguably be nu tongzhi, is to understand how these two
figures serve as the agents who can guide us through the unsettled and contested
meanings of gender and sexuality and to reformulate hetero-interpretation for
detecting homoerotic desire. This “re-reading the past” questions hetero-dominant
historiography using contemporary queer knowledge and conceptualization, which
emphasizes queering acts rather than subtantiating identity. In some historical studies,
the evidence of same-sex sex acts in ancient Chinese culture remains a type of sexual
behavior separate from the modern concept of “identity” associated with the sense of
one’s self. This evidence therefore does little to challenge the mainstream belief that
considers a tongzhi identity as a modern product emanating from the overall cultural
influence of the West. The development of a tongzhzi identity, starting from the late
1980s and early 1990s, also seems to concur with this public assumption as the
community focuses more on contemporary cultural representations than on histories
that are gender- as well as sexuality-sensitive, such as male impersonation.
This inattention to a history of male impersonation in Taiwan raises two
interesting issues in the development of Taiwan’s tongzhi identity. First is the
asymmetrical emphasis on nan tongzhi issues over nu tongzhi ones. Here the factor
of gender still looms large in this new configuration of (homo) sexuality. In the case
of female to male cross-dressing, because the positive undertone of masculinity in
patriarchal society makes a woman playing a man’s role historically acceptable, the
sexual ambiguity of male impersonators and their interaction with female fans is

24
easily trivialized. Looking at the peak moment of female to male cross-dressing
performance through the lens of lesbianism not only balances the
underrepresentation of nu tongzhi in forming the collective identity of tongzhi, but
also facilitates a linking of a nu tongzhi continumm with the contemporary Taiwan’s
nu tongzhi community.
The second tendency that emerges in the development of tongzhi identity is a
sense of negligence toward past events. This delay in engaging with Taiwan’s past
does not result so much from denying it. Rather, it is because there seems to be no
appropriate langague suitable to understand same-sex desire in the past before the
Western notion of gay and lesbian identity became available to describe and to name,
such desire in the cultural context of Taiwan. In a way that is similar to the role of
language in the colonial process, the technique of knowing comes about through the
function of naming, and thus is highly reliant upon it.
4
The formation and
theorization of tongzhi identity can go only as far as it can be interpreted in the
framework provided by Western gay, lebsian, and queer epistomologies. The
intricacy of dealing with Taiwan’s past is a repercussion of being confined to the
Western epistemology of homosexuality, lesbians, and gays. While the Western
epistemology of homosexuality can suggest homosexual moments in the Western
context before the formation of modern gay and lebsian identity, it is doubtful that
this epistemology would be able to recognize homosexual moments in a different
social and cultural setting outside the West. Thus, cultural nationalists can claim that
such attempts to find and rename these precedents risk overinterpretation and are

25
distinct of tradition. However, because there has not been any accessible Chinese
epistemology of tongzhi to date, a tongzhi moment only becomes identifiable
according to the definition provided by Western epistemology. In consequence,
while the Western epistemology of lesbians and gays is acknowledged for facilitating
the emergence of tongzhi in modern Taiwan, paradoxically there is great reluctance
to use it to look back on the past. It is as if doing so – adopting Western values and
knowledge to interpret Taiwan’s history – would be some sort of self-colonization.
Showing the correlation between male impersonations and the identity formation of
contemporary Taiwan’s nu tongzhi fills in gaps of nation and gender within the
framework of sexuality, which complicates the notion of a Western epistemology.
Examining discourses around Ling Po and Yang through reception and
fandom aspires to free us from the problems associated with the identity framework
imposed by “(ex-) imperial centers.” T
5
The past has to be taken into account
differently than how the aforementioned dominant discourses might have construed
it, in order to construct a historiography for Taiwan’s tongzhi, and, more specifically,
Taiwan’s nu tongzhi. My intervention in the past undertakes the strategy of “reading
against the grain” in a double manner. First, it counters the dominance of
heterosexuality in the cultural history of Taiwan and reveals the fragility and
instability of gender and sexual categories as historical constructs, as Foucault
argues, that depend on language and discursive practices to suppress deviations
including homosexuals. In this case, traditional discourse about the ordinariness of
cross-dressing performance serves as a repressive cultural force to which this chapter

26
aims to correct. Second, it subverts the domination of foreign gay and lesbian images
in the identity-forming process of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi. The screen images of both
Ling Po and Yang help to construct an archetype of a masculine nu tongzhi, which
employs different aesthetics in expressing masculinity and femininity between the
lesbian communities of Taiwan and the West.
This re-thinking process does not preclude an application of queer
scholarship developed in the West. While Western theories of sexuality are
productive for analyzing the fandom of Ivy Ling Po, its limitations become evident
when applied to understand the aesthetics of contemporary Taiwan’s nu tongzhi.
This (in)adequacy generates multiple problems when a non-Western situation is
examined in terms of Western paradigms. Defining a new sense of evidence and
creating a new notion of the archive reveals the impossibility of the universality of
the paradigms, even if Western theory, in this case, is viable for confronting the
nationalistic conservatism announced by a tenacious insistence in national and
cultural distinctiveness.

Ivy Ling Po Mania and Homoeroticism

Ivy Ling Po’s acting is successful because she made a man
look like a woman and a woman look like a man.

Chung Lei (Di Chun-Shi), Screenwriter
Central Daily News 16 June 1963: 7.

27
Cross-dressing performance is a common stage skill in many subgenres of
Chinese theater. While female impersonation has been made familiar to the West
through Beijing opera and a couple of its main figures, such as celebrated Mei Lang-
Fan in the early twentieth century, male impersonation remains relatively unknown.
It is believed that cross-dressing performance for both sexes first appeared during the
Tang Dynasty (617-908 CE) and that male impersonators became very popular
during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 CE). The public performances of women were
not forbidden until the Ming and Qing periods, when an austere implementation of
Confucian ideology brought about the overall oppression of women.
6
This resulted in
men’s monopoly of the public stage while female players retreated to private
settings. In addition, a strict separation between men and women on stage and in
theater troupes inevitably made Chinese theater a cross-dressed one. Cross-dressing
performances in costume films, therefore, inherited this theater tradition and were
perceived as ordinary acting practices. With the introduction of the new medium of
film in the late nineteenth century, there was an attempt in China to integrate
theatrical traditions into film.… . .
7
P In 1920, the Division of the Moving Image of the
Commercial Press invited legendary Beijing Opera performer Mei Lang-Fan to shoot
two of his famous cross-dressing plays, Chun Xiang Nao Xue and Tien Nu Zhan
Hua, on film. Male impersonation has continued to appear in some local theaters,
and film versions of Cantonese operas and huangmeidiao with male impersonations
gained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s.
8

28
Ivy Ling Po was the most legendary male impersonator of the huangmeidiao
films, a musical costume genre produced in great numbers by Hong Kong’s Shaw
Brothers since the early 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Ling Po shot to stardom
after playing the impersonated male leading role of Shan-Bo Liang in the unexpected
huangmeidiao blockbuster The Love Eterne. The film was extremely popular in
Taiwan, as it broke all standing box office records, and millions of people returned to
theaters to see it repeatedly. Because huangmeidiao is a film genre adapted from
traditional local theater, the cross-dressing performance in The Love Eterne would
not have been astonishing to audiences in the 1960s. However, the unprecedented
degree of fervent admiration that Ling Po received from her female fans in particular
aroused some wonder as to whether her intriguing androgyny was the root of the
attention.
9
P
The story of The Love Eterne begins with the female protagonist, Yin-Tai
Zhu (played by Loh Ti), successfully appealing to her parents to allow her to study.
By masquerading as a man, Zhu is able to attend school and becomes close friends
with the male protagonist, Shan-Bo Liang (played by Ling Po). Shan-Bo Liang is
clueless about Zhu’s real gender during the years they spend together. After three
years of studying, Zhu has to return home due to her mother’s illness. Before her
departure, Zhu drops hints about her real gender to Liang. Unfortunately, Liang does
not grasp what Zhu tries to tell him. When Liang finally realizes that his homosocial
admiration for “Brother Zhu” is actually a love for the female Zhu, Zhu has been
forced by her family to agree to an arranged marriage. Liang dies of desperation after

29
learning that he is unable to change their destinies. Zhu then follows Liang by
throwing herself against his tomb on her wedding day. The story ends with a
mythological tone as the couple morphs into two butterflies to signify the eternal
nature of their love.
With the casting of Ling Po, there are multi-layered gender implications that
ironically trouble the heterosexual imperative of this classic romance. Although
women are traditionally prohibited from loving each other in reality, just such a
situation is shown, albeit in reverse, in the story. At both the level of the plot and the
casting, The Love Eterne is unable to provide heterosexual closure. Because the
actress Ling Po impersonates Liang, the affectionate interplay between Liang and
Zhu, in a sense, is women loving each other. On the diegetic level, the first half of
the relationship between Liang and Zhu, who performs a male impersonation to
attend school, is compellingly suggestive of two males falling in love with each
other. It is not until the second half of the film that their relationship is
“straightened.” The mirroring effect of the story enables female spectators to flexibly
position their desire on either side of the heterosexual and lesbian divide. This
reversible position may protect them from having to acknowledge the potential
deviance or subversiveness that their desires for or identifications with the actresses
as well as the characters may imply.
The opening epigram of this section elucidates the charm of Ling Po and,
more interestingly, the ambiguity of feeling often found alongside the mania
surrounding a cross-dressed performer. On one hand, Ling Po’s gender fluidity

30
awarded her the “Most Versatile Talent” prize at the twelfth Asian Film Festival in
Tokyo. It was the first time that the Asian Film Festival granted this award, which
was obviously created for Ling Po’s cross-dressing performance that defied both
Best Actor and Best Actress categories. On the other hand, the hazards of
transgressing gender norms and gender-displaced affections were well
acknowledged. Female legislator Xiang-Xin Mao, also known as a devoted fan of
Ling Po, alarmingly pronounced her disagreement with a statement that attributed
Ling Po’s success to her gender ambiguity. She argues:
Someone said that…men saw her [Ling Po] as a woman and women saw her
as a man. This is non-sense. It could even be insulting to both the audiences
and the performer. Modern women are no longer interested in effeminate
xiao-sheng [junior male role] as they were in ancient times. Women
nowadays only fantasize about masculine male stars…what both male and
female audiences have appreciated is Ling Po’s performance.
10

Mao’s defensive account reflected an anxiety over women’s excessive admiration for
the actress and an urge to rationalize the performance of Ling Po and gender in
public discourse. According to Mao, appreciating a character for same-sex qualities,
though acceptable, was indeed “outdated and regressive,” since in traditional society
women tended to invest a lot in their friendships when they were forced by decorum
to be separate from men. Another implication of her statement was that modern
women should be aware that same-sex attractions are a “perversion.”
11

The policing of sexuality was indisputably predicated on sexual differences.
Compared with male fans in journalists’ accounts, female fans were portrayed as
hysterical, obsessive, uncontrollable, and in need of discipline. During Ling Po’s

31
visits to Taiwan, girls’ high school authorities issued suspensions to students who
skipped classes to see Ling Po,
12
P and there were numerous reports that meticulously
described how hundreds of thousands of female fans flocked to the streets, smashing
cars and doors and injuring people, similar to what happened on Sep 28, 1967:
In order to see Ling Po, a large number of female students, middle-aged
women, and several old ladies pushed over the guarding police and smashed
glass doors, which injured Officer Liao. There was blood gushing from
Liao’s arm, but the frantic fans did not stop from the blood. They have
besieged Ling in the hope to be closer to her.
13

Male fans, on the other hand, were represented in an intellectual and gentlemanly
manner as many of them expressed their fondness through writing.
14
Not only did the
reports frame the story through an emotional/female versus rational/male dichotomy,
but it also contrasted the potential perversity of same-sex attraction with the
normality of heterosexual dynamics. Moreover, the normalcy and legitimacy of this
heterosexual dynamic was reaffirmed along the gender line. While female fans
overtly expressed their attraction to fictional Shan-Bo Liang as incarnated by Ling
Po, male fans focused their compliments on Ling Po for her “successful performance
that represented a positive image of a courtly scholar,” like themselves.
15
P Even
though male fans participated in fan activities, they received less attention and it was
unclear whether any of them desired the character Liang rather than Ling Po, the
female star. This obvious difference in the amount of coverage between female and
male suggests either insensitivity to male-male desire that male fans might have for
Liang, or caution against this possibility, since too much detailed coverage might
unintentionally reveal male homosexual desire. In either case, it is indicative of

32
society’s greater uneasiness toward male homoeroticism than female homoeroticism
in that wide coverage of female homoeroticism between Ling Po and her fans
suggests the ordinariness of such desire that needs not to be censored.
The vilification of women’s affection for Ling Po, on the one hand,
demonstrated how a patriarchal society stereotyped women; yet on the other hand, a
queer innuendo was suggested— a conceivable same-sex desire was ironically
affirmed by public anxiety over female fans’ untamed fever for Ling Po.
16
The goal
here is not to argue that Ling Po or any of her female fans might actually be nu
tongzhi, but rather to show how their interaction parallels lesbian desire and how this
interpretation helps to counter the assumed hetero past. The ways in which female
fans manifested their desire for Ling Po resembled a lesbian desire that becomes
apparent in light of Western theories of lesbian sexuality, and can be woven into the
continuum of lesbian representations in Taiwan, an expansion from Andrienne
Rich’s famous concept of the “lesbian continuum” – a range that “embraces many
forms of primary intensity between and among women” – to counter the assumed
hetero-dominant past.P
17
The fan discourse is approached here as a text open to
interpretations, and a close examination of fan discourses allows us to see a
multiplicity of social configurations of women’s sexuality and female fans’
corresponding modes of address.
In response to different levels of social control of women’s sexuality,
expressions of such desire varied among women of different ages. Traditionally,
women’s and youths’ sexuality are subordinated in patriarchal Chinese society.

33
Young women’s sexuality has been ignored largely due to this double negation. As
pointed out in the introduction of this dissertation, the vague attitude toward same-
sex desire between young female students in the Chinese context signals an
irreconcilable split between Western sexology and Chinese cultural ideology on
gender and sexuality. For the latter, same-sex desire between young women is
caused by a lack of interaction with men (socially imposed separation between men
and women) and thus is merely situational. Having erotic feelings for a girl/woman
is regarded as a common stage that many girls might experience during puberty.
Ironically, the general public’s inattention to young women’s sexuality, because of
their social immaturity, gave young female fans a great deal of freedom to utter their
affections, to the extent that they could physically approach Ling Po in an intimate
way, as described in a news report:
When Ling Po attended the meeting of the Association of Financial Aid for
Orphans, a group of female students jostled toward her as if they lost their
minds; they caressed her hands and even tried to press their faces onto hers.P
18
P

Whereas young women could directly exhibit their passions in a sexual way,
middle-aged or elderly married women, who bore higher moral expectations,
acquired a more inscrutable form of socially approved expression. These elderly
female fans sought to occupy a mother’s position to unleash their desire for Ling Po.
This invocation of a mother was, indeed, something initiated by Ling Po. Born in an
impoverished family in Fujian Province, Ling Po was traded to her foster family by
her birth parents when she was five. This melodramatic personal history was
frequently mentioned in newspapers to solicit sympathy.
19
Following the revelation

34
of her past, Ling Po made her search for her birth mother public. This portrayal of a
daughter in search of her mother helped to sell her overall, good-natured persona
because, in orthodox Confucianism, filial respect is the basis for all good qualities.
Many of Ling Po’s elderly female fans articulated their concerns with maternal
sentiment by being protective and sometimes possessive. Upon hearing the rumor
about Ling Po’s marriage, a seventy-two year old, Mrs. Wang, visited Shaw
Brothers’ Taipei branch to deliver her objection, saying that Ling Po’s marriage
would cause her to sacrifice her career.
20
This concern also belied a fear that Ling Po
could vanquish from the public or her popularity might be lowered, thus eliminating
the availability of the fantasy mother relationship Ling Po’s female fans enacted.
In some other accounts, elderly female fans went so far as to claim to be Ling
Po’s birth mother. After seeing The Love Eterne numerous times, a middle-aged
woman thought Ling Po looked like her lost daughter and was even more convinced
after learning about Ling Po’s personal history from the newspaper. She then visited
the Ming-Hua Film Production Company to claim that she was Ling Po’s birth
mother and asked for an arranged meeting with Ling Po. To avoid further troubles,
the film company responded to the public that this woman actually was a lunatic fan
of Ling Po.
21
P Even though these anecdotes might suggest fan obsession, the
conversations between Ling Po and those female fans concerning her real mother
were all highly emotionally charged. The emotional excess of a daughter searching
for a mother and vice versa culminated with Mrs. Yuan-Xian Yie Li. Mrs. Yie’s
aggressive assertion somehow persuaded the public of her identity as Ling Po’s

35
mother and put Ling Po under pressure. In one interview initiated by Ling Po, in
which she’d hoped to quiet the disturbance, she repeatedly spoke of her craving for
her unknown birth mother:
Ling Po desperately needs someone to rely on. She dreadfully missed her
birth mother and could no longer live her life with such a void. She wanted
[to find] her mother, from whom she could get comfort, to whom she could
cry and act like a spoiled child…”T
22

Ling Po’s desire for a mother, regardless of its marketing aim, manifested a
strong libidinal investment in a “mother.” Her announcement of a “homosexual
maternal imaginary” allowed elderly female fans to cast themselves in the role of her
mother and express their affection in a socially acceptable way. Along with older
female fans’ romantic maternal attachment to Ling Po, this mother-daughter riddle
implicitly connoted a lesbian sensibility in the context of familial attachment.
Feminist psychoanalytic criticism construes the pre-Oedipal relationship with the
mother as the mechanism for lesbianism in which a homosexual factor would derive
from the particular attachment that the daughter has to the mother. Even if the pre-
Oedipal relationship is remodeled to be the negative Oedipus complex as Kaja
Silverman suggests, this theoretical effort is questioned by lesbian cultural critics
such as Teresa de Lauretis, who reacts against this use of lesbianism as a trope to
serve straight feminists’ fantasy of “a women-identified community based on the
imaginary projection of a mother both narcissistically and symbolically
empowering.”
23
Although problematic in its confusion between desire and
identification, the feminist standpoint nevertheless sexualizes the mother-daughter
relationship and allows the mother to be an object of desire. This gives a different

36
reading to this “search for the mother” than the rationale of filial piety provided by
traditional Chinese culture.
Ling Po’s literal separation from her mother under specific social
circumstances further strengthened the enduring attachment to a mother figure.
24

These older women’s claim to own Ling Po through a mother’s position also
arguably ran counter to having that void fulfilled by a heterosexual relationship. It
should be noted that many of them also resisted Ling Po’s marriage. The rivalry
between this mother-daughter fantasy and a heterosexual resolution twisted the
straight version of the female Oedipal fantasy in that it disagreed with the notion that
a heterosexual path to becoming a mother could satisfy the little girl (Ling Po), or
substitute for her love with the mother. In addition, her ultimate refusal to recognize
any of the women as her birth mother made the mother a permanently lost object of
desire. She never found her birth mother. In the same interview quoted above, Ling
Po articulated the agony over the mismatch with Mrs. Yie. She said:
Mrs. Yie is concerned that I am not able to admit the bloodline [relationship]
because of my fans…so what if an actress [Ling Po] does have a mother?
Does everyone love me because I don’t have a mother? Does that mean I
will be less popular when I do have a mother?...Mrs. Yie has given me a lot
of warmth, but I’ve only brought her anxiety while keeping her waiting. I
heard that she’s been ill because of me. Whenever she crossed my mind, I felt
horribly sad for her. I am here all by myself and she is missing me to death
out there.
25

Given her position as the daughter in this telling, Ling Po’s highly emotionally
charged response was quite intriguing. The excessive feeling of compassion uttered
in Ling Po’s refusal to recognize Mrs. Yie suggests an impossibility in rational terms
because no physical evidence could prove that Mrs. Yie, or any fan, was her birth

37
mother; emotionally, however, Ling Po very much wished the opposite would be the
case. Ling Po’s account rhetorically postulated the mother as a permanently lost
object of desire; the mother is located in an absence-structured place as “unknown,
inaccessible, [and] unreachable even through memory.” In another report, she
admitted that she was too young to have an exact memory of her mother.
26
.Ling Po
used the imaginary maternal figure to invite female fans to desire her, and the
mismatches in return continuously reproduced and fulfilled her desire for the mother.
This account parallels the mother figure in a lesbian rather than a heterosexual
perspective and could be seen as an ambiguous invitation to lesbian visions. Again,
instead of establishing an argument for any particular kind of sexual inclination of
Ling Po or her female fans here, the accounts here illustrate that this imaginary
maternal figure resembles a lesbian subject rather than a heterosexual woman, and as
such could be seen as an ambiguous invitation to lesbian fantasy.
What further complicates the commonplace reading of the relationship
between Ling Po and her female fans from a presupposed heterosexual point of view
is the effect of the intertexually constructed star persona.
27
As the fans watched The
Love Eterne over and over, they did not gullibly mistake Ling Po for a man. For all
Ling Po’s female fans, she was not merely a female star but a synthesis of Ling Po
and of the male Shan-Bo Liang that she played. For example, a female reporter who
was also a fan described her as such:
In private, Ling Po is a girl with a beautiful look and attractive figure. When
she changes into male costume, she suddenly becomes a good-looking guy,
how handsome and charming! No one knows what really happened there.”
28
T

38
An overlap between “cinematic” and “extra-cinematic” spectatorship complicates
our understanding of the dynamics between Ling Po and her female fans beyond the
“eroticisation of sameness” that Jackie Stacey suggests; the lover of the (feminine)
ideal contains homoerotic desire in the mode of cinematic identification.P
29
Since
Ling Po simultaneously marks gender sameness and difference, a fascination with
her goes beyond a spectatorial identification that generates homoerotic pleasure.
The male character Shan-Bo Liang, the object of desire for female spectators,
was constantly troubled by the feminine image of Ling Po in real life. Vice versa,
Ling Po is inseparably integrated with the male Shan-Bo Liang on the screen. It was
Liang who attracted female fans in the first place, but what the fans eventually
worshipped was not only Ling Po’s filmic presentation of maleness, but also her
femininity. In fact, the figure of Liang could be seen as being characterized more like
a woman than a man. In a lengthy discussion of the original Liang-Zhu text, Siu
Leung Li notes that “Liang falls short of the ideal scholar, one ideal type of
masculinity in imperial China, for he has shown no concern or ambition to strive for
maximum masculine power through distinguishing himself at the imperial civil
examinations, not to mention gaining top graduate status.”
30
With Ling Po’s
impersonation on top of that, one could argue that the fetishized character of Liang is
no more a feminine male than a female character with male outer appearance.
31
In
other words, what the female fans desired was not an illusory male body incarnated
by Ling Po, but her masculine femaleness represented through Liang. This suggests
that the desire for Ling Po was, in part, based on recognition of her female status.

39
A close reading of the reflections of Xi Xi,
32
P T who later became a famous
writer of modern Chinese literature, shows that the adoration of Ling Po reverberates
strikingly with contemporary theories of lesbian desire in terms of the masculinity
fetish. In her portrayal of Ling Po, Xi Xi intentionally and yet implicitly praises Ling
Po’s masculine orientation. She describes Ling Po’s body extensively, from head to
toe:
Did I ever tell you that Ling Po did not wear any makeup today? I must
reiterate how pretty she was today. There was absolutely no excessiveness on
her face, no powder, no eye shadow, not even eyebrow definer! I never knew
she was born with such gorgeous features, the tall nose, and the double-lid
eyes. She seems different from the movie and movie poster. That’s the
dazzling Ling Po, and what I saw today is the true her who exudes the inner
beauty. The best word to ever describe her plain face is delicate…

I still have to tell you, that she got a new haircut today. She had no updo, no
dressy suit, and no excessive makeup. She had the crisp shorthair with a
touch of French style: straight, but soft. I adore her new hairstyle. I also love
her hair itself. It’s black and shiny, the qualities that define good hair. No
split ends, no coloring, and no perms. She must have combed her hair a
hundred times and nourished her hair with tomato juice and milk on a daily
basis….

She wore a pair of nylon trousers that every American lady is in love with.
The combination of the black trousers in contrast with the subtle red sweater
and the black nearly Charley-Jordan styled flats, topped with the faint lipstick
precisely brought out her elegance. I like this side of her. It almost surprised
me what a fine person she is outside of the silver screen!

I still remembered how elegant Ling Po’s hands are, white and delicate. Her
nail polish is white, no disturbing color, very exquisite…
33

Ostensibly, Xi Xi seems to extol Ling Po’s feminine side; however, her visual
detailing of Ling Po’s body soon digresses to her gender-neutral qualities. Xi Xi
describes Ling Po’s look without feminine accessories and her rather androgynous
clothing: her short, straight hairstyle, Charles Jordan shoes, and nylon pants. On

40
another visit to Ling Po a year later, Xi Xi expresses the same sensitivity, and still
pays extra attention to Ling Po’s androgynous look with her short hairstyle and black
shirt and pants.T P
34
P T The extra attention that Xi Xi invests in Ling Po’s androgynous
attire was apparently an unusual approach, when compared to other narratives in
which Ling Po was portrayed as someone who cared very much about her clothes.
Here, Ling Po’s femaleness signifies a rather “different” female body instead
of offering a site for identification, and that difference is represented by Ling Po’s
appearance and highlighted in Xi Xi’s remarks. Given the general cultural context in
which heterosexual normalcy was emphatic as I discussed above, the detailing of
Ling Po’s androgynous attire is a rhetorical substitute for a discussion of her
masculine qualities. This fetish of masculinity in which a difference between Ling
Po’s body and other female bodies is emphasized, resonates fantasies for masculinity
in lesbianism. It is, as De Lauretis argues, what “lures her [a mannish lesbian’s]
lover, and what her lover desires in her and with her” T P

P T(my emphasis).
35
Xi Xi’s
article reveals a replacement of the fetish of masculinity in a female body, and this
replacement, bewildering in its position between sameness and difference, also
speaks of an anxiety about the presentation of a form of lesbian desire.

Performing Straightness
The suggestive same-sex desire was ironically reinforced when Ling Po
decided to align her career and personal life with heterosexuality. After finishing a

41
great number of productions as a male impersonator, Ling Po herself was extremely
conscious of this pathway to success and wished to return to “her true female self”:
After Love Eterne, I played quite a few male roles, which seems to suggest
that I am on the track of becoming a “pervert.” For me, this is definitely
something to worry about. To be frank, no matter how great the script that
has an impersonating male role is, I still wish that I could follow my real
identity as a woman and play a female character. I’m very reluctant to
continue cross-dressing performance. This is not a sort of performance that is
normal. I even began to wonder whether I am a bit “pervert” after playing
that kind of character for such a long time.
36

The transition came gradually as she began to play female protagonists who needed
to be in male disguise. By taking on these roles, she was able to achieve her goal in
costume films and regular female roles in contemporary drama.
37
Ling Po’s vigorous
declaration of her “real” gender as opposed to her “screen” gender reveals her fear of
erasing her “real” gender, a fear based on the intense sexual energy that her male
impersonations aroused in her female fans. Ling Po’s male impersonation in fact
exhibits the divergence between the performed gender and her gender identity, and
this disjunction further undermines the supposed accord between her gender identity
and sexual anatomy. This is an effect similar to Judith Butler’s argument for drag in
which drag’s subversion lies in this rupture of the naturalized harmonies among the
anatomy of the sex, gender identity, and gender performance.
38
To grapple with the
gender confusion, Ling Po had to forcefully stigmatize her performances as
abnormal, even though public comments as such were actually uncommon.
Besides gradually moving away from cross-dressing, Ling Po also underwent
rhinoplasty and, probably, eyelid surgery so as to cope with her anxiety and reaffirm
her real gender by establishing a more feminine look. It was said that the film

42
production of Journey to the West, in which Ling Po was designated to play the
cross-dressed character of Sanzang in the film adaptation of Journey to the West, was
halted because of the new look of her face.
39
The ways in which Ling Po
consolidated her gender identity exposed the fabricating mechanism of both a
gendered body and gender itself. Artificially altering her face to be feminine proves
that Ling Po, despite her anatomical sex, fails to meet the gender norm “that
produces the peculiar phenomenon of a ‘natural sex’ or ‘a real woman.’”
40
This new
facial configuration started a series of changes in Ling Po’s overall appearance. After
Ling Po’s plastic surgery, several pictures attached to a report featured close-up shots
of Ling Po wearing heavy makeup, dressing up in an evening grown, and posing in
quite feminine gestures, such as slightly parting her lips. This photo series also
manifests how a different stylization of the body produces a different effect of
gender.
Comparing Ling Po’s new feminine appearance with her asexual look that the
reporter had seen two years before, reporter Ai-Na Huang noted:
She looks drastically different than the first time I saw her. What makes her
look different? I can’t tell in an instant. Might this have something to do with
her different hairstyle today… that makes her face more definite? Or maybe
her high tip nose gives her more feminine charm? No matter what, I feel she
looks so different. I just look at her enthrallingly and try to figure out what
makes that difference..
41
(my emphasis)

Reshaping her facial configuration and restyling her body secured Ling Po’s gender
identity. This leaning toward a female gender, however, illustrated the performativity
and the constructedness of gender in the falsely naturalized gender economy. Ling

43
Po’s reclamation of her female gender identity would not have been necessary or
possible if gender, per se, were not performative.
Another way Ivy Ling Po and the press alleviated the potential deviance
implied by her “abnormal” cross-dressing performance and cleared up the
speculation about her questionable sexuality was to forge a series of heterosexual
romances. As Ling Po became a starlet with her male impersonations, the press
began to probe into her various relationships with men, including her previous
marriage with a Chinese-Filipino businessman, to counter Ling Po’s gender and
possible sexual ambiguity. The press coverage of Ling Po’s relationships with men
reached a climax when she married Chin Han, her costar in The Lady General in
1966. One report’s introductory paragraph detailing Ling Po’s rumored affair with
Mr. Leonard Ho Koon Cheung emphatically remarked, “Ivy Ling Po has
impersonated as a man in many of her films, but off the movie screen, she is truly a
genuine woman. Every woman wants a life companion, unless she believes in
celibacy. Ivy Ling Po is no exception.”
42
Interestingly, Ling Po was often
represented as a heterosexual woman and as a woman who followed the female
virtues of traditional Chinese culture—being chaste, obedient, and submissive. This
emphasis on traditional values, obviously contradicting the intended representations
of her heterosexuality, highlights the peril embedded in Ling Po’s cross-dressing
performance that needs to be coated with extreme conformity.
Ling Po had to comply with the social meanings attached to a female in a
heterosexual society – those of wife and mother – in order to represent herself and to

44
be represented as a normal woman. Regardless of some female fans who voiced
objections to Ling Po’s decision to marry, Ling Po’s declaration to have a life “as a
normal woman” was deliberate and cogent. Ling Po’s marriage completed her
gender assertion of herself as a heterosexual woman and created a new star persona
for her. After her marriage, Ling Po appeared in magazines and newspapers as an
affectionate mother and a content housewife. This new image emerged at the cost of
“the disappearance of Shan-Bo Liang’s handsome and romantic disposition,” as the
caption under a newspaper picture of Ling Po and her baby boy described.
43
Xi Xi’s
report on her visit to Ling Po after she married also clearly reflects this change of
personality in Ling Po. Xi Xi’s story opens with a description of how Chin Han
reacted defensively after mistaking her for one of the female fans that stalked Ling
Po outside their home. Instead of meticulously describing Ling Po’s look and outfit
as she previously did, Xi Xi turns the focus away from Ling Po to the interior design
and decoration of the house. In the following piece, Xi Xi depicts Ling Po’s playful
interaction with Chin Han, and direct remarks about Ling Po were notably fewer in
number.
44
This difference suggests that Ling Po’s ultimate conformity with
heteronormalcy substantially reduced her individuality, which was largely based on
her gender flexibility.
Ivy Ling Po’s cross-dressing does carry the potential for being transgressive.
Her performance represented a mixture of conventional masculinity and femininity
and yet was enthusiastically celebrated by people from all social classes. Although
her reported character in real life might lessen the degree of transgression, this

45
immediate framing ironically allows for a juxtaposition of two different
representations that manifest gender as performance, as I have argued so far. The
mania for Ivy Ling Po, especially from female fans, further destabilizes the
definition and demarcation of (hetero) sexuality. Looking at cross-dressing
performance in another cultural context, Clark and Sponsler argue that, “cross-
dressing, it would seem, is transgressive through its uses, not in and of itself.”
45
The
ways in which Ivy Ling Po’s female fans directly pronounced their infatuation in
public manifested a same-sex intimacy and sexual verve between women that could
not be explained by friendship. Sporadic dismissal of or objection to this energy at
the time did not sanitize it, but reflected the precarious transgression embedded in
this sexual desire. The residue left behind by this transgression was later picked up
by contemporary nu tongzhi culture in Taiwan, which I will elaborate further in this
chapter.

Li-Hua Yang, Koa-a-hi, and Contemporary Nu Tongzhi
While Ivy Ling Po seems to be aware of her “real” gender identity, another
larger than life male impersonator, Li-Hua Yang, who performed in another folklore
theater genre, koa-a-hi, admitted how her cross-dressing performance affected her
gender identity. In a short autobiographical article in the United Daily News, Yang
wrote:
For fourteen years, I have played the role of a charming “sio-seng” T P
46
P T on stage
and TV. After so many performances, I sometimes feel bewildered. I cannot
be certain if I am a cha-mo (woman). Often people ask if I like to be a man or
a woman. My answer is I am a man on stage and return to a woman when

46
getting off stage. Up to this point, half of my life is male and the other half is
female.
47

Yang’s career began when she was a child growing up amidst an outdoor
stage troupe to which her mother belonged, and reached its peak when koa-a-hi was
broadcast on TTV, the only television station in Taiwan during the 1960s. Yang was
immediately compared to Ivy Ling Po as “Taiwan’s Ivy Ling Po” or “koa-a-hi’s Ivy
Ling Po.”
48
Several parallels can be drawn between Ivy Ling Po and Yang. Both
were raised in abject poverty, and saw being an actress as a way out. Most
importantly, they both obtained their fame by cross-gender performance as male
impersonators and had a nearly all female fan base. Instead of reiterating similar
points about how the dynamics between Yang and their female fans reveal an
archetypical mode of same-sex desire, this section focuses on the ramifications of
Yang’s particular embodiment of masculinity and how the connection made by the
contemporary lesbian culture further complicates the dichotomy of tradition and the
modern.
Yang’s cross-dressing performance on TV koa-a-hi, often regularly broadcast
daily in early evenings, has influenced contemporary nu tongzhi in Taiwan. Teri
Silvio’s “Reflexivity, Bodily Praxis, and Identity in Taiwanese Opera” is the rare
article that explores the gender and sexual practices of koa-a-hi actresses in relation
to contemporary lesbianism in Taiwan from an anthropological perspective.
49
She
suggests that the mode of constructing selves and experiences of gender and
sexuality varies between koa-a-hi actresses and Taiwan’s nu tongzhi. Her argument
points out that the body manipulation of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi, such as breast binding,

47
is akin to that of drag theorized by Western queer theory, but differs from koa-a-hi
actresses, for whom gender is indicated through gestures (on stage) and habits (off
stage). This viewpoint lays a foundation for her to comment on Taiwan nu tongzhi’s
lack of concern for koa-a-hi when comparing it to the weight of Western queer
theory. Silvio’s critique, however, dismisses the effect of the different sites of
performing koa-a-hi, namely, the distinction between stage and TV koa-a-hi,
although she does briefly discuss that many Taiwanese nu tongzhi have been koa-a-
hi fans since childhood.
50
This dismissal prevents her from fully comprehending the
essential connection between Taiwan’s nu tongzhi and koa-a-hi. As opposed to
identifying with outdoor stage koa-a-hi that is emphatically addressed in Silvio’s
essay, contemporary Taiwan’s nu tongzhi are more likely to follow TV koa-a-hi, and
the actresses who predominantly worked in the television setting, such as Li-Hua
Yang. This new insight allows us to draw a different set of relationship between
contemporary nu tongzhi and koa-a-hi actresses.
Although TV koa-a-hi follows the same theatrical principles as outdoor stage
productions, the two are structured in very different ways. With respect to
characterization, TV koa-a-hi actresses started in outdoor troupes, are trained in all
types of roles, and have less flexibility to switch roles between male and female.
This is especially true for the main leads. Moreover, when operating in the television
industry, koa-a-hi follows the marketing model of entertainment businesses in which
particular actresses are paired as the identifiable screen couple over and over again in
almost every series; for example, Yang often partners with the sio toaⁿ (female)T P

48
P Tcharacter Siu-Ni Ko (Xiu-Nian Xu).
51
This fixity in roles consolidates the audience’s
identification with and emotional investment in major actresses. Unlike outdoor
stage koa-a-hi—especially in Silvio’s case of Opelia koa-a-hi—which carries a
strong sense of reflexivity on the performance itself through the narrative, theater
space, and improvisational performance, TV koa-a-hi, often an adaptation of
traditional folktales, rarely makes direct reference to the play itself or contemporary
cultural products, and is relatively self-contained in its historic, fictional world. As
TV audiences cannot look through to the backstage/TV studio setting while watching
the show, this helps maintain their fantasies regarding the actresses.
Actresses on TV koa-a-hi provide a recognizable form of female masculinity,
a mode of embodying masculinity to nu tongzhi audiences through representation.
One of Silvio’s critiques of the disengagement between koa-a-hi and contemporary
lesbianism is their variance in body politics, but her emphasis on outdoor koa-a-hi
makes her underplay the particular effect that TV koa-a-hi delivers. Silvio comments
that the women of koa-a-hi undermine the formal aspect of the body and convey
masculinity through gender gestures and comportment in place of distorting the
bodily figure. This observation is only partially accurate, and it is surely too limited
to insist on the divergent techniques of presenting masculinity in a female body
between koa-a-hi actresses and contemporary nu tongzhi. For cross-dressed koa-a-hi
actresses, the needlessness to alter their body shapes is attributed to the cut of
historical costumes that rely less on exposing the body to make them gender specific
than modern clothes do. Other than the convenience of the custom, however, sio-

49
seng (junior male) characters still have to wear shoes with thick heels to make them
look taller than the sio-toaⁿ (female) characters. Silvio’s argument that a feminine
body curtails the popularity of a male impersonator, therefore, is fallacious. In effect,
women with “full” figures would often look more muscular and more masculine than
their slimmer counterparts might under the cover of the layered costumes. Following
her own fascination with the synergy of maleness/femaleness within a body, Silvio
goes on to argue that “a visible distinction between the actress’s body and the
character’s is crucial to the pleasure of watching koa-a-hi.”
52
T For nu tongzhi viewers
however, this distinction means more than a pleasing representation. The distinction
between the actress’ symbolic and material bodies indeed represents an eccentric
harmony between masculinity and a female body. Here, the ontology of gender (and
sexuality) rendered in the performance of koa-a-hi, and masculinity and the female
body, meet on the common ground in which biological sex is irrelevant to gender.
By overstressing the deviation between nu tongzhi and koa-a-hi actresses in
terms of conceptualizing the body in relation to masculinity, Silvio overlooks the
influence that the masculine comportments of koa-a-hi actresses has on
contemporary nu tongzhi culture in Taiwan. Yang had been voted by the tongzhi
community as one of the “Best Dream Lovers” consecutively in 1995, 1996, and
1997 and was considered a T prototype in a study on the emergence of contemporary
Taiwan’s nu tongzhi written by a nu tongzhi activist Jia-Xin Jian.
53
In my survey
research conducted in 2003 with twenty-five nu tongzhi who are Taiwanese natives,

50
a considerable number of interviewees recalled their viewing experience of koa-a-hi
as their first encounter with gender ambiguity and faint homosexual feelings.
In her TV koa-a-hi performance, Yang is often characterized as genuine and
virtuous, charming and amiable, but not too daringly handsome. She always
protected the sio-toaⁿ character (the female lead) and had the virtue of righteousness
and dogged determination. According to my interviews, this screen persona, rather
than Yang herself, has often been embraced by masculine-oriented lesbians in
Taiwan, known as “Ts,” as their idealized self-image, as a role model for being a
masculine lesbian. For example, one of my interviewees Fallstream, shared her
experience: “I wanted to be like Yang [in her character] – have a sense of
righteousness, be able to protect my girlfriend and amuse her.” Similar to male
impersonators in the Takarazuka Revue in Japan,
54
Yang represents a particular kind
of dashing elegance, through her female body, that is inaccessible to biological males.
According to nu tongzhi cultural critic Juan-Fen Zhang, this temperament, which
oscillates between male and female, best describe the aesthetics of contemporary
Ts.
55

In addition to Yang’s portrayal of maleness that is widely identified by Ts,
her long-lasting partnership with Siu-Ni Ko in almost every series also suggests a
sort of homosexual relationship for nu tongzhi audiences to identify with. Yang
herself exudes a strong sense of masculinity, and her attraction as a male figure is
heightened when she is paired with Ko. Even Yang herself acknowledged such
dynamics. When attending a panel discussion at TTV with college students, Yang

51
demonstrated her famous sio-shen (male) gesture and eye expressions, but was
teased about not being seductive enough. She immediately ascribed this to Ko’s
absence.
56
Their couple image offers viewers an outlet for fantasizing about quasi-nu
tongzhi relationships in the heterosexually dominant popular culture. Some
interviewees relate to Yang on account of their desires for the sio-toaⁿ character (Ko)
as they envisage putting themselves in Yang’s position. Another interviewee, Song,
talked about her interest in TV koa-a-hi, “It is Ko (Yang’s partner) that keeps me
tuned in. I enjoy watching the way she interacts with [the character of] Yang.” A
similar mechanism works for feminine-identified nu tongzhi, known as “Ps,” who
were drawn to watching television koa-a-hi when growing up. In their
acknowledgement of the determining effects of television koa-a-hi, P interviewees
recalled how they fell for the unique masculinity that sio-seng (male) characters
incarnated, and how they saw sio-seng (male) characters as objects of desire without
necessarily identifying with the sio-toaⁿ (female) characters.
By analyzing Yang’s representation of masculinity, it is possible to
conceptualize the particular kind of masculinity embodied by T nu tongzhi in Taiwan.
In contrast to the characters that Ivy Ling Po played, Yang’s characters range more
broadly, from scholars to military roles, but both Yang and Ling Po’s male
incarnations seem to distance themselves from traditionally defined male roles.
Despite the fact that they played male roles, their impersonations were not praised
for being more mannish than men; rather, they were deemed “gorgeous, sweet,
beautiful, and thus appealing,” all adjectives for evaluating feminine qualities. Male

52
critics often painstakingly identify the effeminate sides of male impersonators and
their characters as something archaic, in order to minimize the threat aroused by
female fans’ embracing these cross-dressing performances.
57
T Nonetheless, these so-
called imperfect emblems of masculinity still trespass into the terrain of masculinity
secured by patriarchy and heteronormalcy. Their remnants are subsequently
transmitted to contemporary nu tongzhi, and allow nu tongzhi to appropriate
masculinity without being overwhelmed by the exclusive conceptualization of
heterosexual maleness based on gender binarism. This historical marker of
masculinity, inscribed by Ivy Ling Po’s and Yang’s performances, helps to constitute
T’s stylization that is less manly when placed along the spectrum of masculinity
wherein Western “butches” are on the opposite end.
The formation of the term T has its specific cultural and historical context in
Taiwan. Antonio Chao’s ethnographic research on the older generation Taiwan’s nu
tongzhi indicates that the categories of T and P first appeared in the 1960s when
American defense forces were still stationed in Taiwan. A group of lesbians led by
the singer Xiao-Ning Huang often hung out in American GI clubs and began to refer
themselves as T (tomboys). One of Chao’s interviewees jokingly called it a result of
“cultural exchange.”
58
Ever since the term T was appropriated, it has been
assumingly seen as similar to “butch” lesbians. Chao’s research, though constructing
a genealogy of the typification of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi, does not investigate further
why the term “tomboy” was chosen over “butch,” nor do other scholarly works about
Taiwan’s nu tongzhi pay attention to this issue. While the conflation of T and butch

53
might be convenient for cross-cultural communication, this move overlooks the
specific configuration of Ts in Taiwan who are marked by this particular naming.
Given that the term “butch” has been used to refer to mannish lesbians in the United
States since the ‘40s, what made masculine lesbians in Taiwan in the ‘50s and ‘60s
choose the term “tomboy” over “butch” to describe themselves, if both words were
borrowed from American culture?
59
According to the interviewees of Chao’s
research, it is logical to infer that Americans who were acquainted with this group of
lesbians might have introduced the term “tomboy,” and yet this use of “tomboy”
seemed to suggest a variance between the image of those Taiwanese lesbians who
first applied a descriptor to their identities and the existing concept of “butch” in the
American context. Whether Taiwanese women had petite physiques that made them
look less masculine than most Americans, or whether lesbian practices between
Asian women were inconceivable to Americans, all indicators point to a tangible gap
in masculinity between Taiwanese Ts and American butches.
Taking into account the cultural tradition of male impersonators such as Yang
and Ling Po, it is appropriate to argue that they helped to preserve an alternative
masculinity in popular culture that influences masculine nu tongzhi and makes them
tomboys rather than butch. To put it another way, the relatively feminine-oriented
masculinity that old generation Ts possessed does not emanate from any conscious
insertion of feminine elements. Ts’ rather feminine masculinity, again in relation to
American butches, is because the general concept of masculinity had already been
implicitly undermined, and thus altered, by the performances of cross-dressed Yang

54
and Ling Po. Therefore, even if Ts practice breast binding and penis improvising to
render their bodies more masculine looking, the masculine disposition that Ts radiate
is one of a kind. The seeming disconnection between contemporary Taiwan’s nu
tongzhi and koa-a-hi male impersonators, argued by Silvio as anchored in their
different concepts about bodily form, could actually be bridged if one understands
the aspects of masculinity that Taiwan’s nu tongzhi have traditionally inhabited.
Recent discourses on lesbianism in Taiwan, with its challenge to the
naturalized connection between men and masculinity, denounce the traditional idea
that considers cross-dressing characters that Yang and Ling Po played as effeminate
men. With extra attention paid to cross-dressing performance’s obvious gender play,
nu tongzhi studies enable a different, proactive reading of traditional cross-dressing
performance and celebrates cross-dressing characters as prototypes of Ts—the
emblem of female masculinity formulated in the cultural, social, and historical
context in Taiwan. This advanced appropriation that treats male impersonated
characters as Ts purposely blurs the line between reality and the cinematic or
televised worlds that are responsible for preventing any gender confusion. Classic
cross-dressing texts, therefore, have been transformed into direct lesbian stories.
Meanwhile, the masculinity that Yang and Ling Po embodied ceased to be an
alternative in the domain of heterosexual masculinity and have become a kind of
lesbian masculinity specifically belonging to Ts as the references when formulating
their identities. Such a conversion was further publicized when the first Gay and
Lesbian Awakening Day Festival, held at National Taiwan University in 1995,

55
included a performance of Liang-Zhu by the Koa-a-hi Student Club. This
arrangement illustrated an appropriation of classic cross-dressing texts situated in the
context of tongzhi.
As male impersonators are posited as the archetype of T, their female screen
partners could be argued to be the exemplar for their P counterparts. While the
archetype of T represented by Yang and Ling Po digresses to the feminine end, the
couple dynamics between male impersonators and their screen partners instill more
masculinity into the female leads after which many Ps model themselves. In many
historical romances, such as Liang-Zhu and another frequently adopted folklore tale,
Fan Li Hua, the female protagonists are not submissive, or conservative, but
extroverted and audacious. The female protagonists in both stories initiate the plots
by masquerading as men to partake in activities forbidden to their gender and break
the social restraints placed upon women. These characters also dare to stand up for
their own desires, even though the results might lead to tragedy. For example, Zhu,
the female protagonist in The Love Eterne (the huangmeidiao film version of Liang-
Zhu) manifests this spirited striving for freedom and was considered the catalyst for
the success of the film besides Ling Po’s striking performance. The valiant and
persistent characteristics of many female screen partners of male impersonators, like
Zhu, powerfully resonate with Ps’ peculiarities, as summarized by Zhang in her
ethnographic study. According to Zhang:
Some people think P is “meek though intrepid.” They are meek in front of
women but intrepid when confronting biased social norms…In Ps’ self
narrations, I hear them talking about “the impossibility with men.” The
doughty part of their characteristics—bravery and willfulness—entails a

56
sense of disrespect for and ignorance of social norms. Translating that to their
relationships with men, it means that they are too self-defensive and too
feminist.
60

Unlike a T who is recognizable from her outer appearance, Zhang argues that the
only possible way to discern a P from a heterosexual woman is to see how her desire
is directed toward women. Not only do cross-dressing performances provide Ps a
place to fantasize about masculine women, but the new interpretation of male
impersonators as Ts also creates a way to reify their position as a P in this lesbian
fantasy. As one of the few popular forms of cross-dressing performance in modern
times, male impersonators like Yang appearing on television fulfilled nu tongzhi’s
fantasies in daily life.

Conclusion
This chapter reconsiders the predominant account of cross-dressing
performance deliberately, hoping to locate, as Ruth Vanita describes in the
introduction of Queering India, “the button that could be pressed to trigger a
performance of same-sex desire.”
61
It pushes the social anxiety concerning female-
to-male cross-dressing to the extreme to highlight the subversive potential of
homoeroticism as it crosses the line into homosexual practice and resituates
traditional cross-dressing performance as more than a text that contains cross-gender
role-play.
In this analysis, Western theories of sexuality on the one hand are widely
applied as a starting point and methodology for recovering alternative sexual

57
histories covered by the idea of female friendship or mother-daughter contact in
Chinese culture. Informed by transnational queer scholars such as Vanita, the
insistence on using “indigenous” terms to discuss the past fails to take into account
the vicissitudes of all terms and concepts as well as their constructive connotations
developed along with the flux.
62
On the other hand, specific cultural examples pose
challenges to the supremacy of Western theory and revise its hypothesis about the
missing link between cultural tradition and identity formation of nu tongzhi, a
discourse that reinforces contemporary tongzhi identity as a colonial effect of
Westernization. This retrieval of the history of male impersonation in Taiwan firstly
displays the neglectful homoerotic desire in the context of reception and fandom, and
secondly initiates a first step in constructing an epistemology of nu tongzhi that is
influenced by but not confined to Western epistemology of homosexuality.
Traditional cross-dressing performance, revived in popular culture from the 1960s to
the 1980s in Taiwan, historically laid the ground for a gender- and sexuality-
ambiguous public sphere. The historical evidence and analysis presented thus far
indicates a postcolonial response that complicates the Western history of sexuality by
showing how the practice of traditional cross-dressing performance helps to cultivate
a different meaning of “lesbian” or “homosexuality” in general, for people who live
within the cultural context of Taiwan.

58
Chapter One Endnotes

1. Rick Lyman, “Watching Movies with Ang Lee; Crouching Memory, Hidden
Heart,” New York Times, 9 March 2001, Edition E.

2P. Tongzhi is a collective term that refers to lesbians and gays in the Chinese
language. A Hong Kong theater director, Edward Lam, reappropriates its original
meaning of “comrade” from the last word of Dr. Sun Yet-Shan, which says, “The
revolution has not yet be done, comrades need to continue to struggle.” The use of
this term to refer to lesbians and gays first appeared in the program book of 1992
Taipei Golden Horse International Film Festival where Lam was the consultant.
Afterwards, the term has been widely recognized by the local gay and lesbian
community. With an explanatory adjective adding in the front, this term can also
refer to bisexuals, transsexuals, and people who are friendly to LGBT people.
Therefore, gays are also named nan tongzhi (male tongzhi) and lesbians are nu
tongzhi. In this chapter, nu tongzhi refers to contemporary lesbians in Taiwan but is
used interchangeably with the term lesbian.

3. The interview was conducted in 2003 in Taiwan, mainly in Taipei and
Kaohsiung City. Twenty-two self-identified nu tongzhi people were interviewed.

4. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Triffin, “Introduction” (of Part IX
Language) in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gerath Griffiths,
and Helen Triffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 283.

5. Kuan-Hsing Chen, “The Decolonization Question,” in Trajectories: Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1994), 3.

6. Hui-Ling Chou, “Striking Their Own Poses: The History of Cross-Dressing
on the Chinese Stage.” The Drama Review 41, no. 2 (1997): 130-152.

7. For example, Ding Jun Shan (dir. Ren Jing-Feng, 1905).

8. Huangmeidiao can be literally translated as “the tune of Huang-Mei
County.” Another translation of this genre found in other sources is “yellow plum
opera,” but since “huangmei” refers to the county of Huang-Mei in An-Hui province,
I chose to use its phonic translation, “huangmei diao.”

9. For example, in the year when The Love Eterne was released in Taiwan,
Chengsheng Radio Broadcasting Corporation invited renowned cultural critics to
form a panel to discuss the popularity of Ivy Ling Po and the film The Love Eterne.
The first panel titled “Reading The Love Eterne from Multiple Perspectives” was

59

held on June 16, 1963. The second was “Why I like Ivy Ling Po,” held on Nov 2,
1963.

10. Xiang-Xin Mao, “See Liang Zhu, Talk about Ivy Ling Po,” United Daily
News, 24 Jun 1963, Edition 8.

11. Tze-Lan Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern
China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 26.

12. United Daily News, 27 Oct 1963, Edition 3.

13. United Daily News, 29 Sep 1967, Edition 4. Other examples can also be
found in reports in United Daily News, 21 Oct 1963, Edition 3; 16 Jun 1964, Edition
3, and in Central Daily News, 1 Nov 1963, Edition 7, and 15 Jun 1964, Edition 3.

14. For example, Professor Fu-Guan Xu at Dong-Hai University published an
article titled “After Watching Liang Zhu” (kan liang zhu zhi hou), Zhen Xin Xin Wen
Bao, 28 May 1963. Professor Meng-Wu Sa at National Taiwan University published
another article titled “Thoughts after Watching Liang Zhu” (guan liang zhu dianying
yougan), Central Daily News, 5 Jun 1963, Edition 6. These articles were also cited
by Shaw Brothers’ official magazine, Southern Screen 63, published in August 1963.

15. Meng-Wu Sa, “Thoughts after Watching Liang Zhu,” Central Daily News,
5 Jun 1963, Edition 6.

16. I am aware of the problem of simplifying “lesbianism” as lust or desire
between same sex women, and yet, as I argued in the beginning of this chapter, it is a
conscious act to counter the idea that “lesbianism” was something available only
after it was “provided” by Western discourses. In the meantime, I agree with queer
scholarship’s idea of the role of a lesbian historian in which, as Sally Newman
argues, “it is the collision of temporalities in the body of the lesbian historian which
marks a site of desire and which is inscribed in the work she produces,” Eras 5
(November 2003), http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/eras/edition_5/newmanarticle.
htm.

17. Andrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèl Alan Barale and
David. M. Halperin (London: Routledge, 1993), 239.

18 . Central Daily News, 29 Sep 1967, Edition 4. The administrative body of
the organization was run by fans of Ling Po. As this was a public event, fans who
were there were not necessarily orphans in particular.

60

19. Feng-Pan Yiao, “The True Story of Ivy Ling Po,” United Daily News 24
Oct 1963, Edition 8. Its opening gambit said, “If one made Ivy Ling Po’s real life
into a film, it would be more tragic than the story of Liang Zhu.”

20. Central Daily News, 21 Feb 1965, Edition 8.

21. United Daily News, 27 Oct 1963, Edition 3.

22. Yang Zhi, “Where to Repay?—Talking about Mother with Ivy Ling Po,”
Central Daily News, 27 Nov 1963, Edition 6.

P23. De Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 183.

24. Silverman claims that the Oedipal Mother phenomenon occurs when “the
girl’s libidinal investment in the mother may continue after the resolution of the
Oedipus Complex…except that then the female subject would be split between the
desire for the mother and the desire for the father” (De Lauretis, 180).

25. Central Daily News, 27 Nov 1963, Edition 6.

26. De Lauretis, 200. This parallels what Judith Roof finds in Rita Mae
Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and Jane Rule’s This Is Not for You, as de Lauretis points
out in her analysis.

27. Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian
Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 111.

28. Liu Qiou-Niang, “Do You Like Ling Po?” Southern Screen 76 (June 1964),
Thttp://www.amychan.info/ying/lingboh/lingpo/lingpo18.htmT (accessed March 6,
2006).

29P. Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship
(London: Routledge, 1994).

30. Siu Leung Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2003), 126.

31. As the text is by all means impossible to engage any bodily representation
in its socio-cultural context, the remarkably fragile personality of the character Liang
can be the allegory of the physical quality.

61

32. Xi Xi is a Hong Kong writer, who wrote TV screenplays and columns in
newspapers and magazines along with her productions in the 1960s. Her literary
works, including A Lady Like Me, won her several literature awards and became
quite famous in the literary circles of Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan.

33. Xi Xi, “Impression, Ivy Ling Po,” Hong Kong Movie News 1 (1965), 22.

34. Xi Xi, “Revisit Ivy Ling Po,” Hong Kong Movie News 5 (1966), 28.

35. De Lauretis, 243. The lesbian body is inscribed in a fantasy of
dispossession, which is an original fantasy of castration.

36. Ivy Ling Po, “Ivy Ling Po and Chin-Han,” Central Daily News, 17 Oct
1967, Edition 6.

37. For example, The Lady General (Yueh Fung, 1963), The Female Prince
(Zhou Shi-lu, 1964), and The Perfumed Arrow (Gao Li, 1965). The last time she
played a male role was in 1969’s The Three Smiles, directed by Yueh Fung.

s38. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), 174-175.

39. United Daily News, 05 Nov 1964, Edition 8.

40. Judith Butler, 178.

41. Ai-Na Huang, “How Is Ling Po Different?” in T Southern Screen T 85 (1965),
4.

42. United Daily News, 25 Feb 1964, Edition 8.

43. United Daily News, 22 Apr 1967, Edition 6.

44. Xi Xi, “Ivy Ling Po, Chin Han, and a Sketch of Their New Home,” in Hong
Kong Movie News (1966), http://www.amychan.info/ying/lingboh/lingpo/
lingpo60.htm (accessed January 05, 2006).

45. Robert L.A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, “Queer Play: The Cultural Work of
Crossdressing in Medieval Drama.” New Literary History 28, no. 2 (1997): 332.

46. Taiwanese dialectic of “sio-seng” in Mandarin means junior male role.

47. .. United Daily News, 16 Feb 1972, Edition 3.

62

48. United Daily News, 30 Mar 1967, Edition 9. Hong Kong Movie News
53(1970).

49. Teri Silvio, “Reflexivity, Bodily Praxis, and Identity in Taiwanese Opera.”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 4 (1999): 585-604

50. Silvio, 586. The group of “Taiwanese lesbians” referred in Silvio’s essay is
very likely to be the generation who were born when outdoor stage koa-a-hi was in
the dwindling phase while television koa-a-hi was booming.

51. There were rumors about Yang and Ko as a homosexual couple. A poster
for Babies’-breath shared this information in her post on TTV’s discussion board:
“And for some unknown reason, these two have great tacit understanding of each
other. At the time, they were even misunderstood as lesbians,” (13 May 2003),
http://bb.ttv.com.tw/BB/viewtopic.asp?forum=1&topic=141045&Page=4&total=
112&TP=6 (accessed January 18, 2006).

52. Silvio, 589.

53. Jia-Xin Jian, Bring Out Taiwanese Lesbians: The Lesbian Discourses and
Movements in Taiwan (1990-1996), Master Thesis (Taipei: Graduate School of
Sociology, National Taiwan University, 1997), 94-95.

54. Takarazuka Revue began in Japan in 1913, founded by Ichizo Kobayashi,
who had the idea to boost sales by staging Western-style musical shows using only
unmarried women. The women who play male parts are referred to as otokoyaku and
those who play female parts are called musumeyaku.

55. Juan-Fen Zhang, Free-Style of Love: Nu Tongzhi Stories (Taipei: China
Times Publishing Corporation, 2001), 94-95.

56. United Daily News, 10 Sep 1982, Edition 2.

57. Yun-Zhi Du, “Xiao-seng Characters in Chinese Film History: From Chu-
Fei to Ling Po,” United Weekly, 17 Apr 1965, Edition 5.

58. Antonio Chao, Traveling with a Straw Hat: Gender/Sexuality, Power, and
Nation (Taipei: Chu-Liu Press, 2001), 63.

59. Especially in the condition in which sexual orientation was known by
people.

60. Zhang, 122-127.

63

61. Ruth Vanita, “Introduction,” in Queering India: Same-Sex Love and
Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (London: Routledge, 2002),
3.

62. Vanita, 4-6.

64
CHAPTER TWO

Dancing in the Margin

As I sat on the floor in a corner, surrounded by book stacks in the cramped
library of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, flipping through piles of old newspapers
and film magazines, I was surprised and excited to learn of a few Taiwanese films as
early as the 1980s that explicitly pertained to homosexual issues. As this group of
homosexual films has been totally neglected and is extremely peripheral, I realized
that my discovery only raised more questions than answers. Public knowledge and
written discourse about ‘80s Taiwanese film are replete with acclaim for the film
movement known as Taiwan New Cinema.
1
For example, in the section of “History
of Taiwanese Cinema” on Taiwan Cinema Note, a website co-founded by the
Chinese Taipei Film Archive and the National Council of Cultural Affairs, the 1980s
is configured along the lines of the commemorative launch of Taiwan New Cinema
in 1982 and its controversial cessation in 1986. By contrast, there are very limited
reports or discussions surrounding contemporary homosexual films. These films are
also poorly preserved in both commercial and national archival venues. Unlike the
films of the Taiwan New Cinema, most of the earlier homosexual films that I
discovered in my research have not been remade into the DVD format to be publicly
available. Even in the archive, they are either missing or stored in an almost-ruined
VHS format where one has to bear with constantly jumpy strips when watching.
2

The significance of Taiwan New Cinema can certainly be attributed to its
prestige as a national cinema, a long established yet contentious concept in film

65
studies that is commonly applied to define particular cinemas made by countries
outside Hollywood, often as a reaction against it. As the main constituency of the
national cinema of Taiwan, New Cinema has been positioned as the epicenter of
Taiwan’s film history. This predominance casts a shadow over films that are
contemporary with Taiwan New Cinema yet fail to overtly enunciate the national
agenda. This has resulted in a dismissal of non-Taiwan New Cinema films in the
history of Taiwanese film. In her insightful re-examination of French national
cinema, Susan Hayward reminds us that in privileging certain types of cinema,
primarily those that emphasize auteurs or major artistic film movements, the
problematics of historiography is often overlooked.
3
P
The uneven attention given to Taiwan New Cinema and the homosexual
films signals a troubled historiography of Taiwanese cinema rooted in a problem of
binarism and hierarchy. Similar to most national cinemas, Taiwan New Cinema
abandons the cinematic conventions employed by Hollywood and domestic
commercial films and exercises alternative styles that lean toward art cinema,
including non-linear narratives, non-professional actors, and open endings. Its
thematic concern lies in the search for a Taiwanese lost self, a discovery that is
partially inspired by the political democratization movement that boomed in the late
1970s and early 1980s. The groundbreaking and yet ephemeral new wave movement
defines the history of Taiwanese cinema in the 1980s and continuously shapes
ensuing developments.
4
More contemporary figures like Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-
Liang, though relatively distant from Taiwan New Cinema’s cultural campaign, are

66
considered to have inherited the legacy of Taiwan New Cinema and are even
credited with creating the second wave of Taiwan New Cinema.
5
P While national
matters are deemed to be public concerns worth recording, sexual issues are
denigrated as private and too personal or trivial to be included in a national history.
Moreover, within this “national cinema” context, the topic of “homosexuality” is
easily regarded purely as a source of sensation for making profit. Stylistically, art
film direction, which in the case of Taiwanese cinema uses down-to-earth realism
and authorial expression, is overemphasized, whereas popular and commercial
cinema is ignored.
Addressing the problematic binaries of national/public/central versus
sexual/private/peripheral in constructing a history of Taiwanese cinema, this chapter
studies forgotten homosexual films to explore the politics of homosexuality in the
1980s and early 1990s, before the rise of tongzhi discourse. It challenges the hetero-
dominant film history that is structured by the national cinema of Taiwan New
Cinema. The use of “homosexual” in place of lesbian, gay or tongzhi in describing
these films indicates a particular moment in time when American lesbian and gay
discourse was barely known and the identity of tongzhi was not yet available. I
combine readings of film texts, production, critical, and state discourses that revolve
around three landmark films of the period, to comprehensively examine the politics
of representation and exhibition concerning homosexuality. This examination reveals
complicated and polemical views of homosexuality in the 1980s that counter the
presumption about the conservatism of the era, and discovers new and alternative

67
references to lesbianism that have not been recognized by contemporary tongzhi
scholarship. Lastly, these early homosexual films’ active participation in and wide
acceptance in international film festivals worldwide contrasted their unimportance in
the domestic market, which indeed exported a different kind of image of the nation
that contested the one presented by New Cinema.
From different vantage points, recent scholarly critiques of the national
cinema paradigm have questioned the meaning and viability of national cinema as a
categorical concept. They question the mythologized concept of nation and the
“national,” point to economic aspects of filmmaking in which multi-national capital
and talent are imperative, and emphasize the role of gender, race, class, or sexuality
in films that are labeled as a national cinema. Nevertheless, not many scholars have
yet investigated the problem and implications that arise when the corpus of national
cinema structures an exclusive and prejudiced film history. Informed by Hayward’s
framework, my examination of the film historiography of Taiwan sets out to confront
the supremacy of the art film in the representation of a national cinema. Yet, it
extends Hayward’s critical concern for class and gender by adding a new dimension
of sexuality to challenge the dominant configuration of film history. Addressing the
disregarded and suppressed homosexual films, this intervention also hopes to
complicate the history of Taiwanese cinema by attending to the ways in which a film
history is written, circulated, and promoted.
Since these homosexual films are also absent from tongzhi’s history, perhaps
as a chain reaction to their overall exclusion from film history, the discovery and

68
placement of these earlier homosexual films fills a void in the historiography of
tongzhi. Other than shedding a different light on homosexual discourse in Taiwan in
the 1980s and at the turn of the 1990s, the ways in which these films approach,
engage, and negotiate issues of homosexuality also help to build a different
genealogy of tongzhi images that aspires to be inclusive. Despite the potential
critique that these films might be culpable of delivering a negative, stereotypical, and
prejudiced image of homosexuals, their relevance cannot and should not be
determined by judgments as to whether they are “good” representation or whether
their production quality is sufficient or not. These films, instead, need to be
contextualized and perceived as indicative of a particular struggle of homosexuality
at a specific historical moment.

Retrieval of Voices of Dissent
Possibly one of the first Taiwanese films to explicitly deal with the
controversial issue of female homosexuality, the largely ignored Girls’ School (dir.
Mei-Mi Li, 1982) was released less than a year before New Cinema’s first film, In
Our Time. On the surface, it seems to share similar ideological motivations with New
Cinema in many ways. The movement of New Cinema burgeoned during the period
when the democratic opposition movement had matured, with its goal to challenge
the authoritarian regime of Kuomintang (KMT) and its self-claimed legitimacy of
representing China. New Cinema corresponded with the social ethos that reckoned
with issues of cultural nativism and often conveyed that idea through the vision of

69
youth. It reacted against the escapism that prevailed in the commercial genres of
Qiongyao romance, lurid gangster films, and propaganda films, and adopted a
realistic approach instead. Unlike popular genres that were alienated from the social
and political changes in Taiwanese society, New Cinema emphatically attended to
stories that critically addressed the social, cultural, and political state of Taiwanese
society. Examples include films such as The Sandwich Man (1983) or Edward
Yang’s The Terrorist (1986), which reflected the impact of Taiwan’s rapid
modernization.
Likewise, Girls’ School also deliberately disagreed with the escapist
approach adopted by popular genres and concerned itself with contemporary social
phenomena—here, ambiguous same-sex intimacy in girls’ schools. Both the director
and screenwriter, on different occasions, expressly told the press that they refused to
make the film in the style of gangster films, presumably an apposite choice for the
seemingly sensational topic of female homosexuality. According to the renowned
film critic Xiong-Ping Jiao, Girls’ School follows the generic conventions of drama
with some variation akin to art cinema, such as “simplistic mise-en-scène and laconic
dialogues.”
6
Nevertheless, as the political climate slanted towards a reexamination of
the Chinese nationalism promoted by the Kuomintang government, the priority of
concern was given to nationally related issues. Here, we see a mechanism similar to
R. Radhakrishnan’s critical inquiry into the relationship between women’s politics
and the politics of Indian nationalism: “Why is it that nationalism achieves the
ideological effect of an inclusive and putatively macropolitical discourse, whereas

70
the women’s question—unable to achieve its own autonomous macropolitical
identity—remains ghettoized within its specific and regional space.”
7
The “micro-
politics” of sexuality is subordinated to the advent of the politics of nationalism.
Despite Li’s endeavor to also contest the ubiquity of escapist genres, Girls’ School
was pushed into the background for its concern with the assumedly less significant
issue of sexuality and the priority was given to concerns of nationalism.
Produced by a private studio rather than the state-owned Central Motion
Picture Company (CMPC), Girls’ School was remote from the government, which,
in addition to its interest in “trifling” topics, also contributes to its omission from
film history. Even though New Cinema is considered to be a cultural movement that
negotiated with the state ideology constructed by the KMT, its emergence was a
result of the implementation of the KMT’s movie policy in the 1980s, which treated
film “as a serious art form and a medium for cultural expression.”
8
The unexpected
success of In Our Time and The Sandwich Man, two omnibus films directed by
young novices, had persuaded the CMPC to continuously support productions by this
group of young directors. Here, the purpose of identifying the close connection
between New Cinema and the state government is not to deny New Cinema’s
milestone accomplishment in filmmaking, but to complicate its historical eminence
beyond its achievements in thematic exploration, stylistic innovation, and technical
sophistication. In her book, Envisioning Taiwan, June Yip argues that the New
Cinema movement partially contributed to the formation of “Taiwanese nationalism”

71
as it inherited the spirit of the Hsiang-t’u literary movement in the 1970s with its
solid commitment “to making Taiwan the center”:
In this regard, Taiwanese New Cinema marks a clear departure from the
island’s mainstream commercial cinema, which either concentrated on “the
development of Taiwan as the Republic of China or escaped into romantic
fantasy. Like its literary predecessor [the Hsiang-t’u literary movement],
Taiwanese New Cinema is animated by a nationalistic impulse in its
development to capturing, with sociocultural specificity, the lived
experiences of change.”
9

On the thematic level, Taiwan New Cinema went against the sense of Chinese
nationalism implanted by the KMT; however, it still corresponded with the KMT’s
moviemaking policy that opted for an art film aesthetic and benefited from the
KMT’s loosened cultural policy in general. Therefore, New Cinema, as a revolution
from within, can be, and has been, easily incorporated into the national discourse and
converted into a cinematic symbol of the national culture and history of Taiwan. In
comparison, Girls’ School, as a product not of the state’s cultural policy but of the
commercial film industry, did not have a substantial relationship with the
governmental agency. Together with its lack of latitude to experiment with film style
for the sake of box office,
10
Girls’ School was lodged in the much-criticized and
cheapened category of commercial films and was doomed to be ignored and
forgotten, to the extent that the film is very likely to be lost permanently.
Reinstating Girls’ School helps to restructure a film history that subverts the
privilege of national cinema and to reconfigure a different genealogy of nu tongzhi
images. New Cinema’s hegemonic position impacts not only the film history of
Taiwan, but also its overall social and cultural history. Girls’ School was not

72
included in the list of “homosexual films that are available in Taiwan from 1980 to
1991,” summarized by the famous critic Tian-Xiang Wen in 1991.
11
It was also
missing from the outlined history of Taiwan’s tongzhi for the second annual Taipei
LGBT Civil Rights Movement Festival in Taiwan (tong-wan-jie), written by Ke Fei,
an activist and council member of Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association.
12
The
absence of Girls’ School in both Wen and Ke Fei’s accounts suggests the
overarching power of New Cinema that erases/submerges the popular memory of
Girls’ School. Moving away from the historical viewpoint that revolves around the
concept of the nation-state allows marginal films that have been buried in traditional
film history to be rediscovered and reassessed.
Even though Girls’ School is reserved in its portrayal of a homosexual
relationship, especially by today’s standards, the film, and most importantly, the
written discourse surrounding it, marked a rather contradictory view about
homosexuality and even ushered in heretofore-repressed underground dissident
voices against heterosexual hegemony. Similar to Michel Foucault’s argument
against the repressive hypothesis about sexuality in Western society, in which
Western society’s obsession with sexuality since the seventeenth century has created
a discourse of sexuality, public discussions about Girls’ School regarding the
controversy of homosexuality also reveals a similar dynamic. The discourse reflects
a repressive mechanism, on the one hand, and yet on the other hand, it reveals its
liminality as it also propagated inconsistent and paradoxical discussions on
homosexuality.

73
The idea of homosexuality in Girls’ School mirrors discussions of
homosexuality in Taiwan in the early 1980s, which appeared mostly in the fields of
consulting and clinical psychology and psychiatry. Mindful of the changing attitudes
towards homosexuality in the West, reflected in its removal from the American
Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders, most of the discussions were
equivocal; they recognized the Western liberal view of homosexuality but
meanwhile meticulously annotated the particular circumstances in the West that
affect such a view and emphasized that homosexuality was still considered a
perversion more often than not. For example, in Li-Juan Chen’s essay, “How to
Preclude Children from Becoming Homosexuals,”
13
she refers to Gerald Davison’s
Homosexuality: The Ethical Challenge and points out that Davison “regards that
homosexuality is a normal sexual behavior, and the psychological struggles of
homosexuals in effect come from social bias towards homosexuality.” Immediately
after this citation, however, Chen becomes reserved and stresses that, “In spite of the
polemic, the majority agree that homosexuality is deviance, absolutely
abnormal…Even if some societies accept homosexuality, it is still against nature and
should not be encouraged in any event.”
14
Attempting to demystify the cause of
homosexuality, psychologists and educators at that time tended to argue that a
defective family was one of the primary factors of homosexuality. In another
scholarly article by Xian-Qun Li that accounted for homosexual behavior among
high school students, a defective parent-child relationship was one of the key

74
variables that generated homosexual desire, along with formative earlier homosexual
experiences and traumatic heterosexual relationships.
15

The story of Girls’ School and the discourse about its production reinforces
the contradictory view of homosexuality frequently presented in the fields of
psychology and educational philosophy. Depicting a suspected homosexual
relationship between two girls’ school students, Girls’ School fluctuates between
progressiveness and traditionalism on the levels of production, representation,
promotion, and reception in its handling of homosexuality. Girls’ School is part of
Director Mei-Mi Li’s radical engagement with modern gender issues in Taiwanese
society, which also includes the themes of unmarried single mothers and
nonconformist strongwomen. The debut of her first feature film, Unmarried Mother
(1980), established her status as a female director “who is willing to explore
contemporary social taboos,” as film curator and critic Xing-Hong Lin has
remarked.
16
Girls’ School portrays a tragic incident between two female high school
students, played by Niou Tian and Yian Shen, who are rumored to be involved in a
homosexual relationship, a rumor started by a jealous fellow student, Lin. Horrified
by the possible repercussions, Shen retreats from the friendship and refuses to see
Tian. Consumed with sorrow and indignation, Tian gets into a car accident and loses
a leg. The film closes with a happy ending in which the jealous instigator apologizes
for her malice, and the seeming homosexual relationship between Tian and Shen is
justified as a misguided accusation. Furthermore, to account for Tian’s obsession
with Shen, the narrative relies on a psychological explanation of homosexuality,

75
citing that Tian comes from a broken family. Tian lives with her irresponsible
gambling-addicted father, and this deprivation of attention and love occasions her
excessive investment in her friendship with Shen.
Unsurprisingly, this choice of the subject of female same-sex intimacy, if not
homosexuality, aroused considerable public attention, as evidenced in the sensational
title of Min Sheng Bao’s report on the launch of the production, “Niou Tian and Yian
Shen Fall In Love in Girls’ School?” with the second part of the title that inferred a
homosexual story highlighted in a larger font size.
17
Initially, the production of
Girls’ School seemed to advocate a radical probe into female homosexuality. Yet,
the film eventually compromised with heteronormativity, both within the film itself
with its conservative ending, and outside of it – when the film engendered public
curiosity after its release, the production crewmembers constantly denied that the
film was about homosexuality. Upon the film’s release, the celebrated film magazine
Today’s Movie Magazine published a special issue devoted to Girls’ School,
including an interview with the screenwriter Xiou-Juan Chu, a prolific popular
novelist for writing women’s stories. Similar to the film’s overall compromising
posture in which the take on homosexuality was neutralized by its morally sound
resolution at the end, Chu also adopted a soft and conciliatory position when asked
about the theme of homosexuality in Girls’ School. In her response, Chu avoided
responsibility and claimed that,
I do not know anything about homosexuality, or let me put it this way—I just
don’t get it. I‘ve seen films on this subject matter when I traveled overseas,
but I cannot understand or appreciate this kind of behavior. I believe in the
magnetic effect where people are attracted to the opposite sex and repelled by

76
the same sex. How can same-sex people fall in love with each other? The
whole idea [about homosexuality in this film] is the director’s.
18

After hearing Chu’s defensive clarification, the interviewer continued to ask what
Girls’ School is all about, if not about homosexuality. Chu then explained that the
alleged homosexuality in Girls’ School is really a representation of the intimate
friendship between two close confidantes that is quite ordinary in Chinese society,
especially for those who study in sex-segregated schools. Chu said,
Tian and Shen in Girls’ School are not involved in a homosexual relationship.
That’s not true. The relationship is misunderstood and taken to the wrong
direction by the other student [Lin]. If we truly want to explore homosexual
issues, it would never pass the censorship of the Government Information
Office [GIO], and I probably wouldn’t know how to write it in the first
place.
19

In order to avoid plausible controversy, Chu’s answers apparently reduce the film’s
concern with sexuality to a matter of interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless, her
conjecture about what is permissible and what is not by referring to censorship
implicitly unveils a policing of sex on both the official and personal levels.
Placing side by side the fundamentally contradictory discourses of the
screenwriter and critic concerning homosexuality in Girls’ School allows contested
ideas about the definition of homosexuality to surface. While the screenwriter Chu
took pains to differentiate same-sex friendship from female homosexuality, for most
film critics this mode of affection and intimacy represented in Girls’ School clearly
refers to homosexuality. In the same issue, all three critics who wrote commentaries
on Girls’ School directly pinpointed that Girls’ School dealt with “homosexual issues
in female high school.”
20
Contrary to Chu’s circumvention, critics apparently were

77
more receptive to the film’s concern with homosexuality. Among them, Xi-Ba Zeng
even expected that this story “would incite resonance among young audiences.”
21

This prediction that young audiences would easily identify with the story implicitly
suggests that same-sex desire is quite common as close friendship for adolescents.
Chu and the critics’ divergent opinions about the signification of the
Government of Information Office’s censorship also exhibited split attitudes towards
the censoring mechanism of heteronormativity. Here, censorship is simultaneously
recognized, from different perspectives, as a tool of discipline and a prospect of
resistance. In Chu’s conformist account, censorship proves that the film is not about
homosexuality, but film critic Liang Liang disagrees:
It is a shame that the idea of homosexuality is too controversial and thus
draws extra attention from the GIO. Because of that, the director is unable to
fully and profoundly dig into this common social phenomenon so as to
underplay some worth-exploring scenes. Only if GIO realizes this problem
and loosens its censorship, things could be different.
22
(my emphasis).

Whereas Chu considers censorship to be an endorsement from the authority that
acknowledges the film’s normalcy, Liang addresses the constraints of censorship as a
conservative regulation.
Despite the fact that both the film and the production team retreated from
making a statement about female homosexuality, this withdrawal did not extinguish
the circulated discussions about homosexuality instigated by the film. In addition to
the differing accounts of the content between the production team and film critics,
spectators’ reaction to Girls’ School also formed a discourse that contested the
conservative public attitude toward homosexuality and challenged the cinematic

78
portrayal of same-sex homosexuality, or romantic friendship, in Chu’s terms.
According to Min Sheng Bao’s report on November 13, 1982, a day after the release
of Girls’ School, the distribution company Tai Rueng had already received “many
anonymous phone calls” that “blamed the screenwriter Chu for making the student
who is homosexually-oriented [Tian] to end so tragically.”
23
The report also points
out that the director herself had got quite a few anonymous phone calls from female
students who “asked her whether homosexual-oriented people are destined to only
have miserable lives,” or “complained tearfully about their experiences.” The blunt
protestations from anonymous female students stridently punctured the seemingly
apolitical fictional world by identifying that Tian’s loss of her leg may well be a
metaphor for moral punishment for her unspoken homosexuality.
Even though Girls’ School performed poorly at the box office, this anecdote
indirectly proved Xi-Ba Zeng’s prediction that Girls’ School would attract young
audience’s identification with such emotions and even suggested that their empathy
might come from their personal experiences with such passions. Considering the
pervasive intolerance of homosexuality at the time, the comments about this popular
film from anonymous female students produced a discourse that upended the
dominant homophobic discourse buttressed by psychologists and educational
authorities. The surfacing of this voice of dissent, which has long been lost, along
with the disappearance of Girls’ School in film history, allows us to see the
contentious perception of homosexuality in Taiwan before Western gay rights
discourse was systematically introduced in the 1990s. Moreover, a retrieval of these

79
voices helps to establish the cultural significance of Girls’ School in the history of
Taiwanese film as it functions to stimulate debates about homosexuality in popular
history.

The Displaced Gender, the Right Body
The frequent absence of The Outsiders (Kan-ping Yu, 1986) in the written
history of Taiwanese films again illustrates the exclusion of sexual issues and
popular films from constructing a national film history. An examination of the
discourse surrounding The Outsiders not only reveals this biased history, it also
excavates a different way of looking at this film that will revise the genealogy of
tongzhi images in Taiwan. The Outsiders (1986) is a film adaptation of Xian-Yong
Bai’s eminent novel, Crystal Boys, portraying underground gay life in Taipei in the
1960s. Compared to Girls’ School, it has been better known, especially recently
when the same novel was made into a highly popular TV series. The revival of The
Outsiders has appeared in the history of tongzhi cinema, but not in the history of
Taiwanese cinema as a whole. Even if it is acknowledged and included in the
cultural history of tongzhi, there is no more than a brief mention of it. The meager
interest in discussing The Outsiders—other than simply recognizing it as one of the
earliest Taiwanese films that dealt with male homosexual characters and their lives—
is ascribed to its relatively conservative representation of male-male sexuality. Take
film critic Tian-Xiang Wen’s aforementioned list of homosexual films, for example;
The Outsiders is described as “circumscribing the representation of homosexuality in

80
order to emphatically portray the relationship between father and son.”
24

Nevertheless, a close examination of the neglected effeminate gay character, Xiao-
Yu, who is actually played by a woman, reveals a subversive queerness that
collapses the limited binary of gender and sex. At the same time, the reconfiguration
of sex and gender in casting the character of Xiao-Yu reveals a gender inversion that
invites the viewer to perceive the character also as a T lesbian (a subcategory of
lesbians in Taiwan whose masculine physique and disposition range from the type of
tomboys to stone butch in the American context).
A new reading of the character Xiao-Yu as a T, facilitated by the
disorganization of the sex and gender accordance, helps to locate a T image in the
history of Taiwanese film that has been thought missing until very recent films and
TV dramas such as The Unfilial Daughter (TTV, 2001) and Blue Gate Crossing
(Chih-Yen Yee, 2002). Before the current appearance of T characters that aims at the
maturing nu tongzhi audiences, previous media productions that dealt with (quasi-)
lesbianism had largely favored conventional feminine characters over a T-oriented
character.
25
The lack of a T image implies the inaccessibility of masculinity outside
male bodies, as Judith Halberstam pinpoints in her theorization of female
masculinity: “masculinity tends to manifest as non-performative” and as exclusively
“the property of male bodies.”
26
T’s absence in the representation of lesbianism also
serves to secure hetero-patriarchy and curtail the threat posed by lesbianism. Similar
to the butch body that Ann Ciasullo delineates in her article “Making Her (In)visible:
Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s,” a T

81
body is underrepresented mainly because she is heterosexually undesirable and
cannot be “de-lesbianized” to be consumed by mainstream audiences.
27
The
alternative interpretation of Xiao-Yu’s image as a T contributes to amend the
genealogy of tongzhi image in which the image of T has rarely been taken into
account for its assumed infertility. A careful re-examination of The Outsiders and its
discourse generates an alternative meaning of the character Xiao-Yu, which allows
us to reconsider The Outsiders. Instead of the film merely being an outdated and
stereotyped representation of male homosexuals, it becomes a queer text that pertains
to lesbian identification as well.
Under rigid social scrutiny, The Outsiders relied upon various compromising
strategies for its oblique treatment of male homosexuality. Paring down the length
and complexity of the novel, The Outsiders begins its depiction of gay lives in 1980s
Taipei through the character Li, who is expelled from school and removed from his
family after he is found having sex with a male lab manager at school. Li takes
shelter in the Taipei New Park, the illicit ghetto for the underground gay community,
and is looked after by Yang, an elderly guardian of young gay vagabonds. The story
continues with two intersected storylines of Li’s family trauma and his desire for a
destructive man, Lueng-Zi, and supplements them with subplots of the lives of Li’s
companions in this intimate community. The strict censorship imposed by the GIO
actually required The Outsiders to cut “inappropriate” scenes three times, and the
visual depiction of sexual interaction between men is considerably limited in The
Outsiders. For example, in a supposedly crucial scene in which the narrative

82
suggests Li is finally having sex with Long, the shot places two male characters
against the background of a city skyline, both naked above the shoulder and facing
forward. Throughout the film, the same-sex act between men is modestly represented
in an obscure and sometimes unrecognizable way. The film’s indication of male
homosexuality, instead, is reinforced in three ways: first, by constantly having the
characters be identified as “bo-li,”
28
a common term referring to male homosexuals
in Taiwan in the 1960s until the word “gay” became widely popular in the 1990s;
secondly, by portraying a gay environment and lifestyle that is recognized by the
public; and thirdly, by featuring male femininity only in certain characters without
offending the norms of heterosexuality.
While these three strategies all seem to depend upon evoking the public’s
common sense and stereotypes about gay people, the third one in effect reveals a
disruption of the gender fixity. Among all the gay characters, an effeminate quality
can be clearly detected in the guardian character, Yang, and in the character of one of
Li’s companions, Xiao-Yu, the most effeminate character in the novel. As the spark
plug of the small gay circle, Yang is one of the central characters in the film, and
thus is played by the established actor Yue Sun.
29
People’s knowledge about Sun as a
male heterosexual actor who rose to stardom by playing villains gives him
legitimacy and freedom for “performing” effeminate gayness. For the secondary and
more feminine character Xiao-Yu, the director was concerned about the public’s
perception of the actor’s sexuality. As the director put it, “Casting an effeminate man
to play Xiao-Yu would put the actor under huge pressure since such an arrangement

83
would excite the public’s curiosity about whether the actor is gay in real life.”
30
To
keep intact the naturalized correspondence between sex and gender and to foreclose
this potential hazard, the director decided to cast a young female actress, Wei-Wei
Tian, to impersonate the male character, Xiao-Yu, which he believed would
“produce a similar effect [as an effeminate gay character would].” Wei-Wei Tian
masqueraded as a man by “cutting her hair short, wearing an oversized shirt and
man’s pleated trousers, and putting on sneakers.”
31

The decision to have a female interpret male femininity, however, ironically
exposes that gender is a kind of “cultural/corporeal action”
32
that does not
necessarily reflect or express sex. As a biological female, Tian’s persuasive
impersonation of the male character, Xiao-Yu, complicates the correlation between
these two categories in which sex is defined by biological conditions and gender
refers to the quality of masculinity and femininity in one’s cultural and social role.
Pushing further Simone de Beauvior’s famous maxim that “one is not born a woman,
but rather becomes one,” Judith Butler argues that “if gender is not tied to sex,
gender is a kind of action that can potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits
imposed by the apparent limit binary of sex.”
33
Tian’s impersonation of Xiao-Yu in
The Outsiders reflects a disrupted gender and sex relationship on two levels.
Diegetically, the character of Xiao-Yu defies the accordance between
male/masculinity and female/femininity. On the extra-cinematic level, Tian’s gender
performance crosses the boundary set by her biological female sex. As Tian
impersonates a gay man of the least degree of masculinity as opposed to a straight

84
man with definite masculinity, there is an ever-greater and more perplexing gender
ambiguity. Xiao-Yu/Tian seems too feminine to qualify as a man, but s/he seems not
feminine enough to qualify as a woman either. In other words, although Tian is to
personify a feminine man, her impersonation has already distanced her from the
common criteria of what it takes to be a woman.
Tian’s gender performance reduces physical features’ absolute power in
substantiating sex. Blended with the fictional character of Xiao-Yu, Tian’s sex and
gender can hardly be recognized correctly and Tian’s body becomes the last resort to
figure out the truth. Yet, the process of finding the truth also reveals that even
physical features are a misperceived fact. The unusual casting of Tian makes the
spectators wonder whether it was a male or female who played Xiao-Yu.
Alternatively, people tried to identify Tian’s physical features as the ultimate
indication of her/his sex, but Tian’s physicality appeared to violate the intuitive
perception of sex—what Monique Wittig has described as “an immediate given, a
sensible given.” In Min Sheng Bao’s report about the casting of Tian, whether s/he
has an Adam’s apple was considered to be the key to unearth the “truth” about
her/his sex. The report described this puzzle-solving process as such:
Nobody knows why he [Xiao-Yu] would have such brightened skin and
slender figure… In the photo, s/he looks like she has an Adam’s apple. Of
course she does not have that! If she ever looks like having one from certain
angles, that’s because she is way too slim. As tall as 167 cm, she only weighs
47 kg!
34

Although the confusion is eventually clarified with an explanation of the shooting
angle and Tian’s excessively slim figure, this momentary bewilderment shows the

85
social and cultural constructiveness of the body that reifies the fictive category of sex.
In her article “One is Not Born a Woman,” Wittig argues, “What we believe to be a
physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an
imaginary formation, which reinterprets physical features… through the network of
relationships in which they are perceived.”
35
Here, the physical feature of the
Adam’s apple, supposedly an absolute attribute of sex, is invalid for figuring one’s
sex. Ironically, it is those contingent and performable references—a male hairstyle,
male attire, and the fictional character in the original novel—that mislead people to
recognize Tian as a man, as opposed to a woman “becoming” a man. Put differently,
because Tian’s gender performance convinced people that he is a man, the Adam’s
apple becomes imaginable and even palpable.
Tian’s gender performance as a man obscures her biological sex as a woman
and makes the according physical features doubtful. Her sexless body also fractures
the artificial unification that the categories of sex impose upon the body. A parallel
case to the imagined Adam’s apple can be drawn from the public silence about
Tian’s physical features of the female sex. The dismissal of the outwardly visible
physical features of the female sex, such as breasts, suggests that those features are
not sufficient to determine Tian’s sex. People’s (mis)perception of Tian as a man
through her male impersonation causes the difference in weighing male and female
physical features. The logic of a unified sexed body makes people believe that Tian
has the Adam’s apple but not the female physical features because s/he is believed to
be a man. Following the same idea, if Tian is proved to be a woman and does not

86
have the Adam’s apple, she ought to have physical features belonging to women. But
after Tian was inferred to be a woman because of the missing Adam’s apple, Tian’s
female physical features were not brought into the discussion. The constant
overlooking of Tian’s breasts is indicative of their inefficacy in substantiating her
sex. Tian’s overall slimness renders her breasts invisible and unable to work together
with the lack of the Adam’s apple to verify her female sex. When the Adam’s apple
becomes the sole evidence to discern Tian’s sex, her body displays “a discontinuous
set of attributes” T P
36
P T that fragments the false unification and can no longer signify the
category of sex. Here, the consistency of physical features of a particular sex is
broken, which debunks the artificiality of the presumed unification of a sexed body.
Ironically, it is Tian’s sexually indecisive body that made possible the gender
performance, as the director was convinced that he could maneuver gender more
freely to not offend heterosexual norms and underplay the perverseness of the film.
But all his attempts only expose the misperceived naturalness of gender. The
strategies to “remake” Tian’s gender as male are employed firstly on the extra-
cinematic level and secondly on the cinematic level. When Tian was first introduced
to the press on the occasion of the pre-production promotion, she was named with a
pseudonym. The pseudonym was changed from her original name that is marked
with a feminine character ( ) to another slightly different character ( )
predominantly used for male names. This tactic is based on the awareness that
people’s names are gender-specific and often function as the first sign to distinguish
men and women. With this newly assigned male name, Tian’s gender is thought, at

87
least in the mind of the director, to be changed from female to male. Unfortunately,
the strategy proved a failure as this male name did not preclude people from
questioning Tian’s sex. Here, the practice of naming lost its function in signifying
gender when it was found incongruous with other references to gender.
On the cinematic level, Xiao-Yu is pushed toward the pole of maleness of the
gender spectrum in spite of his exceeding femininity when juxtaposed with the
hyperbolic femininity of the female characters in the film. The hyperbolic gender
performance on the one hand keeps the character Xiao-Yu within the range of
maleness; yet, on the other hand, it defies, rather than consolidates, the conventional
gender ideology when the hyperbolic femininity is understood in the context of gay
film, as suggested by theories of gay spectatorship. Li’s unruly mother and the fading
female star, Auntie Man, are the only two female characters in this male-centered
narrative space, and both are very sensual and feminine. The mother figure’s
excessive gender performance and overflowing sexual energy could be read as a
rejection of the patriarchy’s regulation of her body, sex, and social position, which
resonates with gay men’s contravention of the patriarchy hegemony. Li’s mother is
visually depicted as young, beautiful, and seductive, shown through her particularly
revealing clothes and coquettish demeanor throughout the film before she is
diagnosed with cancer. Narratively, she is a failed mother who abandons her family
to meet her sexual desire that cannot be satisfied by her impotent husband, an elderly
veteran of the Kuomintang army. When we first encounter the character, she is
already flirting with a vendor and immediately gets beaten by her husband for this

88
licentious interaction with men. In the subsequent scene that centers on her, she is
wearing a man’s hat and a loose top falling off her shoulder, singing with a trumpeter
of an erotic dance troupe, with whom she later runs away. Against his father’s
resentment towards his mother, Li’s abiding relation with her implies a repudiation
of the father’s patriarchal authority, representing what Brett Farmer terms “gay
matrocentrism”: “a homosexual refusal of this [paternal] identification in preference
for a continuous primary identification with the maternal [that] may be read as a
politically resonant refusal, or at least disruption of patriarchal hegemony.”
37
The
impairment of patriarchy caused by a homosexual son is underscored within the
heterosexual economy by the mother’s excessive, and thus deemed indecent, gender
performance.
If the hyperfemininity of the mother character offends patriarchal hegemony,
that of Auntie Man confirms the theatricality of gender, which also characterizes gay
men’s problematic relation to the “naturalness” of gender. Once a famous singer,
Auntie Man lives together with her tenant, her personal photographer, Yang, and
helps to look after those homeless gay youths that Yang encounters in the ghettoized
New Park. In order to signal her past glamour, Auntie Man is represented as a
woman whose figure, heavy make-up, garments, and coiffed hairstyle all work to
complement her femininity that is traditionally ascribed to a female star in the
entertainment industry. Auntie Man’s excessively feminine star persona is frequently
reinforced, firstly by the oversized posters that feature her in extreme close-up in the
main setting of her house, and secondly by two musical numbers in which she is

89
fully dressed up and performs on the stage, as in the past. The tactics used to
establish the character of Auntie Man reveal a sense of artificiality in her femininity,
especially when contrasted with her aggressive personality with the traditionally
masculine dimensions of power, control, and authority. This can be seen in the scene
wherein Li’s father comes to Auntie Man’s house to look for Li. After Li’s father
receives a letter from Li, he comes to Auntie Man’s place to look for Li. To his
surprise, he is greeted by Yang in a female bathrobe with a facial mask on his face.
When he insolently gets up to leave, as if making a protest that Yang’s queerness is
too strange to be endurable, Auntie Man harshly confronts the father, the symbol of
patriarchy, to defend the humiliated homosexuals. In this momentary replacement of
patriarchy, Auntie Man’s excessive feminine appearance contradicts her
uncompromising personality. The ambiguity of Auntie Man, a character that is
constructed through the plotline of her stardom, could invite a gay camp reading that
“highlights and articulates queer experiences of gender incoherence.”
38
The
hyperbolic gender performances of Li’s mother and Auntie Man give a clear sense of
gender performativity that also footnotes the redeployment for creating a space for
Xiao-Yu, a sexually deviant man with inappropriate masculinity.
Alongside the excessive femininity embodied by the female characters of
Li’s mother and Auntie Man, the representation of Xiao-Yu can be unambiguously
categorized as male in the gender spectrum of this film. Yet this assurance is
sustained only when the information that Xiao-Yu is played by a female (Tian) is
excluded. This may well explain the director’s initial decision to withhold details

90
about Tian when he was asked whether Tian is male or female. The director’s
deliberate manipulation of the discourse and representation of Xiao-Yu/Tian reveals
his compliance with the binary gender economy, but the multifarious techniques of
securing the sex and gender congruity are themselves incoherent and thus
foreshadow a disintegration of the regulatory practices that allow other readings of
Tian/Xiao-Yu to emerge. His decision to not to cast a feminine man as Xiao-Yu
shows his attempt to safeguard the binarism in which masculinity belongs to men
and femininity belongs to women. But after he cast Tian as Xiao-Yu, he strove to
keep this arrangement—one that could best illustrate his conformity—unknown to
the public. This anxiety about revealing Tian’s “true” sex implies another
transgression that undermines the attempt to retain gender order by assigning women
to perform femininity. Although Tian’s femininity as a woman in real life can be
extended to convey femininity in gay men, her gender identity is simultaneously
unsettled by Xiao-Yu’s residual maleness. Furthermore, the genuineness of Tian’s
performance as a gay male character also signals a certain degree of resemblance to,
or convertibility between, Tian’s unique femininity and Xiao-Yu’s atypical
womanish maleness. Therefore, even if Tian’s expression of femininity in the
character Xiao-Yu enables her to claim her “real” sex and gender, such a declaration
can hardly be upheld since it contradicts the representation of the (gay) male
character.
As the naturalness of gender and its accordance with sex fall apart, Xiao-
Yu/Tian represents a body that registers “nongendered queerness,” as argued by Sue-

91
Ellen Case in “Tracking the Vampire,” and can thus be appropriated flexibly for
multiple identifications. The amalgamation of Xiao-Yu and Tian multiplies the forms
of gender performance, including that of T lesbians. The thin and flat body, boyish
outer appearance, and the softness that signal Xiao-Yu’s femininity are translatable
to the characteristics of gentle T-ness to be identified and desired by nu tongzhi
spectators. With the information that Tian is a woman, a lesbian image emerges from
the very same character of Xiao-Yu. Viewers no longer see Xiao-Yu only as a
feminine man. We can begin to see her as a woman and decipher the elements
associated with a male body as the gender practices of a T lesbian. This is not to say
that only by recovering Tian’s female biological sex, one is able to see Xiao-Yu
differently as a lesbian character. Rather, it is exactly the public conviction of the
fixed notion of sex and gender that makes Xiao-Yu understood and remembered
simply and exclusively as a feminine gay male character. Indeed, after Tian’s “real”
sex and gender were unveiled, the reporter added an extra description of the feminine
side of her and her interaction with her male costars. While the additional note about
Tian’s femininity served to “tell the truth” about her sex and gender, the emphasis on
her heterosexuality was used to clarify her sexuality. An inevitable turn to sexuality
implies a worry that Tian’s male-looking appearance might suggest her
homosexuality, an ambiguity that would need to be straightened out as well. This
anecdote implicitly explains how Tian also gives an impression of a lesbian look.
The infinite possibilities provided by the character Xiao-Yu, however, have
long been reduced to feminine gayness because of the prolonged marginality of The

92
Outsiders, and accordingly, the missing information about Tian. My rediscovery of
The Outsiders is not merely to make the list of Taiwanese homosexual films longer. I
also attempt to “queer” this male homosexual film by destabilizing the fixed
interpretation of a gay character and locating a lesbian sensibility within it. As Xiao-
Yu offers us not only a gay character but also an image of a T lesbian, The Outsiders
presents itself as a queer film in the late 1980s Taiwan.

Vernacular Lesbianism

Almost a decade after Girls’ School, The Silent Thrush (Sheng-Fu Zheng,
1991) engages with lesbianism even more straightforwardly than its predecessor.
Revolving around the nomadic life of a dwindling koa-a-hi theater troupe, female
homosexuality constitutes a major subplot in the depiction of the troupe’s sorrow and
joy. Unlike Girls’ School and The Outsiders however, The Silent Thrush is not
forgotten but rather excluded. It is excluded from being a part of the national cinema
due to its inappropriate representation of the culture of koa-a-hi, a newly emergent
emblem of Taiwanese national culture, in association with lesbianism.
39
On the other
hand, its representation of lesbianism frustrates nu tongzhi critics, as some have
complained that it notoriously reiterates a mainstream heterosexual view of
homosexuality and that it even replicates sexist heterosexuality. Released in the same
year as Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, which deals with the political
history of Taiwan in the ‘60s in an art film style, and feminist director Yu-Shan
Huang’s internationally acclaimed lesbian film Twin Bracelets,
40
in comparison the

93
lowbrow The Silent Thrush seems to fail the traditional definition of the paradigm of
national cinema and the criteria for being labeled as nu tongzhi cinema. A dissection
of the discourse about The Silent Thrust explicates how homosexuality is rejected
from entering into a national and tongzhi discourse. I argue that The Silent Thrush
challenges the heterosexual cultural tradition of koa-a-hi with a lesbian vision and
complicates the representation of lesbianism with class issues. Furthermore, it allows
an image of lower-class lesbianism to surface, which modifies the genealogy of the
nu tongzhi image that has been predominately constructed by the middle-class
tongzhi intellectuals.
The Silent Thrush is a film adaptation of an award-wining novel of the same
title written by a female writer, Ling Yan, which addresses the dwindling of outdoor
stage koa-hi performance in the 1980s. It tells of the struggle of the Guang-Ming
41

theater troupe from the first-person point of view of its female protagonist, Mu-Yun.
She leaves home after high school and declines the opportunity of attending college
or seeking a decent job, only to follow Guang-Ming, pursuing her childhood dream
of becoming a koa-a-hi performer. Mu-Yun’s dream never comes true. Instead, she
witnesses the stern reality that puts the troupe’s survival at stake and the life
struggles of its members. In the film, Guang-Ming loses its audiences to striptease on
the cultural occasions in which people used to hire outdoor stage koa-a-hi troupes to
perform in expression of people’s gratitude to god. In order to compete with erotic
dance groups, Guang-Ming asks its actresses to do striptease dances after a brief
segment of traditional koa-a-hi in each performance. In addition to the vicissitudes of

94
traditional koa-a-hi performance, The Silent Thrush also focuses on the interpersonal
relationships among the members of Guang-Ming, including two lesbian couples.
Even before the film’s release, the sexually provocative representation of The
Silent Thrush immediately incurred the wrath of cultural critics. The film was
condemned for its severe detriment to the koa-a-hi culture due to its sexual vulgarity.
Ostensibly, the criticisms emphasized how “untruthful” the elements of female
homosexuality and other sexually stimulating plots were to the reality of the
contemporary koa-a-hi culture. But underneath their antagonism toward The Silent
Thrush was a “nationalist homophobia.” In Kathryn Conrad’s discussion of
homosexuality and the Irish national identity, she sketches out several cases of Irish
nationalist homophobia to illustrate how homosexuality has been regarded as the
uncontainable foreign threat and excluded from the limited discourse of what
constitutes “Irishness.”
42
The critics’ hostility toward The Silent Thrush’s
contamination of the koa-a-hi culture as the emblem of Taiwanese culture reflects a
similar ideology of nationalist homophobia, though it is manifested differently.
Before going into a detailed analysis of critics’ accusations against The Silent
Thrush, it is important to understand why and how koa-a-hi is positioned as the
symbol of a Taiwanese, instead of Chinese, national culture. Originally a form of
folksong mixed with a variety of tunes from different provincial theatrical traditions,
koa-a-hi has enjoyed wide popularity in Taiwan since the 1920s. It fell under
criticism for encouraging feudalism and was repressed by the colonial government
during the Japanese colonial period. In about the 1950s and 1960s, koa-a-hi’s social

95
and cultural status was restored and praised by some intellectuals as an authentic folk
tradition of Taiwan, but it remained a popular form of provincial cultural activity
both in the media and on stage. Outdoor stage koa-a-hi performances faced an
economic and artistic downfall in the 1970s and 1980s—the period that the film
depicts—due to competition from newer entertainment forms, such as cinema and
television.
Politically, as the traditional performance of koa-a-hi speaks the dialect of
Holo, its development was hampered by the Kuomintang government’s culture and
language policy of the “Speaking Mandarin Campaign” in the 1970s, an extended
program of the Kuomintang’s overall policy of Chinese nationalism. In reaction to
the disastrous crisis that jeopardized its subsistence, a project of revitalizing koa-a-hi
was launched in the 1980s by multiple social, political, and cultural forces. Scholars,
koa-a-hi performers, and cultural elitists began to reform and refine koa-a-hi to make
it more akin to high art than popular entertainment. At the same time, the Democratic
Progressive Party (DDP), the opponent of the Kuomintang, appropriated koa-a-hi as
the cultural representative of the native culture of Taiwan in their nationalist
discourse against the Kuomintang’s Chinese-dominated approach. By the mid 1990s,
the koa-a-hi culture eventually established its political legitimacy as a “theater of
Taiwaneseness”
43
with the rising national ideology of “Taiwan nativism” propagated
by the current ruling party DPP.
It is in this context that the treatment of koa-a-hi in The Silent Thrush caused
fierce controversy. As lesbianism is intertwined with the koa-a-hi culture in The

96
Silent Thrush, the recognition of a lesbian subject discomforts the heteronormativity
of nationalism that koa-a-hi had been positioned to uphold. A self-proclaimed
independent researcher of the koa-a-hi culture, Li Li published a harsh commentary
after reading the script of The Silent Thrush, in which Li condemns the film for
deriding the native culture of Taiwan:
The problems of koa-a-hi described in the novel are atypical, but the film
exaggerates those problems in a sensational way, hoping to make money out
of this. How lamentable! After we have based ourselves in Taiwan for forty
years, [the film] does not show any identification with, or compassion for,
our native culture…The spirit of the original work is totally lost in the script.
Perhaps the film should change its title to “The Raped Thrush”…The scenes
of bathing, female homosexuals and striptease are all pointless and
ludicrous…what else can we get from this film except the bathing scene of a
Playmate equivalent, homosexuality, and striptease?”
44

Beginning with the film’s imprecise representation of the koa-a-hi culture, this
statement blames homosexuality for ridiculing koa-a-hi, a culture that represents the
space and place that we have lived “for forty years.” Li’s rhetoric implies a
competition between the nationalist discourses of Taiwan and Chinese nationalism,
as Li pleads for identifying with “this” place of Taiwan and its culture, as opposed to
“that” place of mainland China. When homosexual otherness debases koa-a-hi, it
jeopardizes the goal of raising the native culture of Taiwan—by means of promoting
koa-a-hi—to the level of a national culture. Li’s sarcastic renaming of the film title,
“The Raped Thrush,” strongly connotes a loss of purity, innocence, and legitimacy.
Moreover, since the deviant homosexuality contradicts the hetero-dominant ideology
of the nation-state, its entrance into the national discourse needs to be proscribed.

97
Resonant with Li’s criticisms, film critic Yian Mo wrote another unfavorable
review of both the novel and the film of The Silent Thrush, criticizing the film for its
erroneous representation of koa-a-hi and its exploitive sensationalism of
homosexuality and other sexually charged scenes. According to Mo, actors of koa-a-
hi troupes in real life do not live “anomalously and decadently” as depicted in the
film. Mo argues,
The book claims to preserve koa-a-hi, to be written for the restoring our
native art and culture. But it only damages koa-a-hi, even distorts people’s
impression about koa-a-hi. Taking advantage of koa-a-hi, the film fills itself
with images of homosexuality, striptease, and women bathing…I hope people
in koa-a-hi troupes could right a wrong, to speak up for koa-a-hi.
45

In Mo’s account, again, the plot of female homosexuality is indicted as
contaminating the symbol of Taiwan’s native art and culture. Since the homosexual
relationship is represented as occurring among koa-a-hi actresses, Mo’s appeal to
koa-a-hi actresses in real life hopes to correct the film’s “misrepresentation” of koa-
a-hi as a lowbrow and disreputable performance that is unsuitable to represent the
culture of the nation of Taiwan. Li and Mo’s denunciation of The Silent Thrush
speaks to a heterosexist imagination of a national culture. Beneath the critics’
censure of the film’s false representation of homosexuality in koa-a-hi culture
resides a powerful anxiety over the fragility and instability of national identity,
whose consolidation relies on a constant exclusion of sexual otherness.
While The Silent Thrush antagonized cultural nationalist intellectuals with its
brazen depiction of lesbianism, this representation of lesbianism, set in a lower-class
environment and located within a commercial film, also troubled nu tongzhi cultural

98
critics. These critics tend to see the story of The Silent Thrush as one that either
“negatively represents lesbianism as tragic,” or “repeats the stereotypical lesbian
type of T and Po” (See Chapter One).
46
Lesbian critics must have strongly
disapproved of the cinematic version of The Silent Thrush as none had written about
the film until very recently.
47
Deficiencies in critical attention to the film register a
“positive images debate”; as Sally Hussey points out, “the positive images debate
highlights the problematic relationship between negative images of homosexuality in
the cinema and the production of cultural homophobia.”
48
Instead of falling into the
either/or polarity by arguing that The Silent Thrush is a positive or authentic
representation of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi, it is more pivotal to understand how the film
mobilizes the category and definition of “lesbian film” by addressing a lesbian
experience unfamiliar to the middle-class majority of contemporary nu tongzhi
activism.
It is easy and convenient to identify The Silent Thrush as a
commercial/popular film for heterosexual audiences to consume the subject of
lesbianism. Nevertheless, on this path to pleasing heterosexual minds and
accumulating capital, there is always something “queer” that gets in the way. Since
the pre-production promotion, the aspect of lesbianism was the focus of the film’s
discursive practices and was manipulated strategically to titillate audiences. The first
reports of the production of The Silent Thrush in the United Daily News, as a
preview of what lesbians and lesbianism would look like in the film, detailed the
manly outfits and gestures of the actresses who would play T characters and

99
described how women exchange their flirtatious glances. To the right of the text is a
picture of the other two actresses wearing considerably overexposed cocktail dresses
and holding hands; next to them is a male actor, gazing at the women. Although the
women who posed for the picture do not play lesbians, their stylization implies the
general tenor of the film. Together with the eloquent written text about the look of
lesbian characters and the carnal interactions between them, this constellation of
images seems to posture the lesbian characters and lesbianism with “to-be-looked-at-
ness” in a Mulveyian sense, where the power of the look belongs to the (heterosexual)
male and the (homosexual) female is positioned as the object of desire. In another
report, the written words elaborate how the actresses learned to play lesbian roles
with instructions given by a real lesbian, and below the text is a close-up of these two
actresses kissing each other with the T on the top and the Po on the bottom.
In both pictures, the structuring of a male gaze towards lesbian fantasy is not
flawless, as the male gaze is constantly deflected by the presence of a heterosexually
undesirable T character that occludes the privilege of a male heterosexual gaze.
49
In
between the male beholder and the two actresses in the first example is the butchest
character, Tau-iu-ko, whose head is playfully twisted toward the women by the actor.
The act might look as if the actor is bullying Tau-iu-ko, by which men’s ultimate
superiority is asserted, and yet on the other hand, it also suggests that the male gaze
is interposed by a T character. The display of an intense sexual flow between the T
and Po character is made more evident in the second picture by the kissing and the
close-up composition. If these promotional pictures are said to exploit the subject

100
and image of lesbianism for heterosexual audiences, this fantasy is constantly
haunted by the omnipresence of Ts, who replace the male gaze and interrupt
heterosexually imagined lesbianism.
At the same time, the role-play of T-Po also troubles nu tongzhi cultural
critics’ struggle for positive images of nu tongzhi in addition to impeding a straight
fantasy of lesbianism. According to nu tongzhi critics who have problems with The
Silent Thrush, confining lesbianism to the T and Po rigidity conforms to the public’s
stereotypical and negative preconception about lesbianism, which reflects our
cultural homophobia. Against the genderless ideal promoted by nu tongzhi cultural
critics, there seems to be no spectrum of T-Po wherein different styles can cross and
flow, but only a clear-cut distinction between T and Po that copies the binary
heterosexual doctrine of masculinity versus femininity onto lesbians. Two T
characters, Tau-iu-go and Ka-Hong, look mannish with man-styled short hair and
often loose and unkempt male clothes. Both are uncultivated and behave forthrightly
and sometimes bumptiously. As the executive of the theater troupe, Tau-iu-go is
determined, unflinching, experienced, and respected by her troupe members. She
comes forward for her female fellows to decline unwanted socialization. She also
arbitrates the disputes among members and takes the responsibility to protect the
troupe. Ka-Hong, the leading sio-seng (junior male role) in the troupe, is good-
looking and attractive in her romantic bearing. She knows how to turn on her charms
to get women. At the opposite pole is the Po type of Ai-Kheng, Ka-Hong’s lover
who plays the leading sio-toan (the female role pairing with sio-seng), and the

101
narrator, Mu-Yun, who has an affair with Ka-Hong. With feminine appearances, Ai-
Kheng and Mu-Yun tend to be docile and meek in contrast to their active T
counterpart.
When arguing that the representation of the T-Po dynamic in The Silent
Thrush is stereotypical and clichéd, nu tongzhi intellectuals rarely pay attention to
the conflation of the characters’ sexual orientation and their occupational identity as
a koa-a-hi performer. This overlapping is grounded in the particular lower-class
environment of the troupe in which the distinction blurs between job and life, public
and private space and onstage and offstage activity. For all its members, the troupe is
both the working place and their home as they move together in search of the next
job/performance. The convergence of living and working conditions can be best
demonstrated in a scene in which one of the female performers is dancing on the
stage, and her dance is the immediate distraction to soothe her crying baby, who is
held by the father in a swing, following the tempo of the dance music. Situating the
film’s representation of lesbianism in T-Po terms within this context allows us to
reconsider the characterization of T and Po lesbians not as a repetition of the
heterosexual stereotype of lesbianism, but as a sexual and identity practice that
incorporates their specific social background. Tau-iu-go and Ka-Hong render their T-
ness with each of their positions and roles in the troupe. Tau-iu-go’s T-ness mirrors
her capability and sophistication for negotiation and mediation in a patriarchal
society. Ka-Hong’s T-ness and Ai-Kheng’s Po-ness extend from the temperament of
their characters on the stage.

102
The coalescence between public and private space, working and personal life,
also turns the troupe into a lesbian-friendly place, as their lesbian characteristics are
inseparable from their productive activities in the troupe. When Mu-Yun was
shocked at the intimate interaction between the lesbian couple, Ka-Hong and Ai-
Kheng, she was told by one of the male members, “This kind of thing is very
common in troupes, no need to feel too surprised!” In Ya-Dan Deng’s insightful
reading of the novel, Deng also notices the troupe’s openness toward lesbianism.
Echoing Terri Silvio’s metonymic use of “jianghu” that appropriates its original
meaning as a secluded hideout for wandering swordsmen or outlaws to describe the
troupe’s atmosphere, Deng argues,
Jianghu refers to a space outside the state system, in remote areas, at the
margin of family order. It is a space for roaming freely; a space that exists but
not really exists. It is a permanent remark of always outside the national
territory, beyond the nation-state. If we see the troupe as jianghu, lesbianism
is situational. Not that this space lacks men. It is because the space of jianghu
enjoys freedom beyond the control of nation-state and other political force
fields. It makes lesbianism visible but not necessarily recognizable.
50

According to Deng, the conditions of outdoor koa-a-hi theater resemble the
atmosphere of jianghu, allowing lesbianism to be acceptable in the troupe. While I
agree with Deng about the relative freedom that comes with the troupe’s marginality,
I believe it is equally important to note how different categories of “lesbian” and
“work” that reflect the dichotomy between private and public identities and practices
converge within this space.
A queer environment of koa-a-hi suggested by the intermingling of the public
and private spheres also contests the point made by cultural nationalists about the

103
pure heterosexual culture of koa-a-hi. Cultural nationalists’ aversion to The Silent
Thrush, as mentioned above, is evinced through a condemnation of lesbianism as an
untruthful fabrication for sensational effect and lucrative box-office returns. In the
film’s portrayal, nevertheless, the configuration of lesbianism is inseparable from the
characters’ functional roles in the troupe. In other words, it is the very environment
of koa-a-hi that finds concordance with lesbianism, since what the troupe demands
ironically reinforces the lifestyle of lesbians. It is noteworthy that this argument does
not claim another reality of koa-a-hi that is homosexual; rather, it argues that the
perfect harmony the film represents between the culture of koa-a-hi and lesbianism
and between being a troupe member and a lesbian defers the point insisted upon by
cultural nationalists that the culture of the koa-a-hi is a total heterosexual enterprise.
Despite some efforts to re-read the novel version of The Silent Thrush, the
film has not been reconsidered as being meaningful to the nu tongzhi culture. For
example, whereas Deng works hard to argue for “Bumpkin queerness” that
“highlights the lower-class attribute of this group of homosexuals and sex workers”
in the novel, the film is decried for “over exaggeration and overexposure [of
sexuality].”
51
In addition to the concern over positive images, nu tongzhi critics’
reluctance to discuss The Silent Thrush seems also to reveal a fear of the dominant
male gaze that would colonize lesbian desire and fantasy. However, as feminist film
scholar Judith Mayne reminds us, “The screen is a site of tension that regulates,
excludes but also provides the site for different relationships of desire.”
52
On the one
hand, The Silent Thrush is complicit with the laws of narrative and visual pleasure,

104
for example, by shooting the female and lesbian body with extreme close-ups. Yet,
on the other hand, this hetero-patriarchal fantasy is constantly disturbed by the
ubiquity of the T’s queer body, which is supposed to mediate the desire between the
male spectator and the object of the gaze, namely women and Po lesbians. Moreover,
the figure that leads us to those arguably problematic moments of lesbianism in The
Silent Thrush is the narrator/observer Mu-Yun, whose passion for koa-a-hi, as
implied by the film, actually lies in her fantasy towards male impersonators who play
sio-seng characters. Therefore, we could also argue that Mu-Yun is not the agent of a
heterosexual male gaze but a lesbian voyeur who is able to give the presumably
negative portrayal of lesbianism a different meaning. For instance, through the eye of
Mu-Yun who later in the film has an affair with Ka-Hong, the violence between Ka-
Hong and Ai-Kheng could be read not as a negative representation of lesbianism but
as a melodramatic lesbian love triangle.
A productive reading of The Silent Thrush beyond the negative/positive or
authentic/inauthentic division must configure different kinds of lesbian subjectivity
and desire. Although both nationalist critics and lesbian intellectuals alike, for
different reasons, charge the film with engaging in sexual sensationalism to appeal to
mainstream audiences, the film was a box office flop. One reason among many
others that the film failed to attract mainstream audiences, as I have suggested, is the
“queer” thing that prevents the film from providing any safe means of denying
lesbianism or masking it with something else. The vernacular lesbianism also
challenges the academic-oriented and middleclass-centered discourse of nu tongzhi

105
culture by asking how to account for the image of nu tongzhi. Moreover, recognition
of lesbianism in the film subverts the attempt of cultural nationalists to sanitize the
native culture of koa-a-hi as free of homosexual potentiality. While I am not
interested in making an argument that koa-a-hi actresses could be nu tongzhi, I do
want to draw attention to the risk of falling into the trap of nationalist homophobia
when refusing this possibility. The Silent Thrush recklessly proposes or lays bare the
compatibility between the koa-a-hi culture and nu tongzhi culture and lifestyle,
which imbues the national cultural tradition with a queer feeling—the culture of koa-
a-hi is national but also homosexual.

Conclusion
Since Taiwanese film considerably lost its audience in the 1980s and early
1990s, the construction of the history of Taiwanese cinema has relied on the films
that receive international recognition. Interestingly, the three films that I have
discussed, despite being neglected in the domestic market, have frequently been
shown in international film festivals. Girls’ School was chosen by the Government
Information Office (GIO) to represent Taiwan at the Johannesburg International Film
Festival, and The Silent Thrush was included in the program of the 1991 London
Film Festival. The Outsiders was invited to various international film festivals after
its release in 1986 including well-known international gay and lesbian film festivals
such as Outfest and the Turin International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. But none
of this international exposure has helped these films to be recognized in the history

106
of Taiwanese cinema. Instead, the very same subject matter — dealing with themes
of homosexuality and explicit sexuality— that make them international successes
push them outside of the morally acceptable bounds of Taiwanese society and, thus,
its historical record.
While these films distinguish Taiwanese cinema from other national cinemas,
this differentiation, based on the specific issue of sexuality, is unwanted and further
banished from the history of Taiwanese national cinema. Even though these films are
deemed insignificant and worthless in domestic terms, their acceptance, or even
popularity, in the international film circuit promotes Taiwan and Taiwanese cinema
in homosexual terms, thereby attracting international attention to Taiwan through
homosexual-related issues. The argument made through an excavation of these early
homosexual films is twofold. First, it argues for an inward-looking way, as suggested
by Andrew Higson in his influential essay “The Concept of National Cinema,” to
constitute a national cinema “in terms of its relationship to an already existing
political, economic and cultural identity and set of traditions.”
53
With their bold
approach to homosexuality, Girls’ School, The Outsiders, and The Silent Thrush
negotiate and mobilize the heterosexual premise that conducts and polices the sexual
politics of Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s. To unravel such a struggle over sexuality
is to diversify the assumed heterosexual nationhood and challenge the attempt to
construct and preserve a unified national identity in the field of the cinematic
production of cultural identity.

107
Second, once we fathom how these films engage with heterosexual
supremacy, we are able to ratify their meaning for tongzhi politics. Produced before
the formation of the tongzhi community and discourse, these films do not have an
agenda on how to construct a radical anti-heterosexual discourse. These films’
breach of heterosexual dominance can only become tangible through our careful
reading of their visual and narrative codes and other discursive practices, such as
their promotion and criticism. A genealogy of the tongzhi image needs not to be
composed of by images that tally with a given definition of tongzhi, but by the
images that gradually help us form the concept of tongzhi.

108
Chapter Two Endnotes

1. Tai-wan xin daiying. The term is translated either as Taiwan New Cinema or
Taiwanese New Cinema.

2. Only very recently has The Outsiders been remade in the DVD format,
thanks to the popularity of the TV drama Crystal Boys (Public Television Service,
2003) that is based on the same source, Bai Xian-Yong’s novel Crystal Boys.

3. Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), 7.

4. Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Taiwan New Cinema, or a Global Nativism,” in
Theorising National Cinema, eds. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (London: BFI,
2006), 138-147.

5. “History of Taiwanese Film,” Taiwan Cinema Note, Council of Cultural
Affairs of the Executive Yuan, http://moive.cca.gov.tw/history/history/asp (accessed
Febuary 07, 2007).

6. Xiong-Ping Jiao, “Watch movies with Jiao Xiong-Ping: Some thoughts
about Girls’ School,” United Daily News, 26 Oct 1982, Edition 9.

7. R. Radhakrishnan, “Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity,” in
Nationalisms and Sexualities, eds. Andrew Parker et al. (London: Routledge, 1992),
78.

8. June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the
Cultural Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press), 53.

9. Yip, 60.

10. For example, the distributor complained to the director that there was not
enough music and sound effects in the film. Jiao, ibid.

11. Tian-Xian Wen, World Screen 319 (1991), 53-58; 323 (1991), 68-74.

12. Ke Fei, “The History of Tongzhi,” in the pamphlet of Understand Tongzhi
for the 2001 Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Movement, http://www.lgbttaipei.net/
download/2001hp/2001/i-history.htm (accessed February 19, 2007).

13. Li-Juan Chen, “An Exploration of Homosexual Issues,” The Chinese
Guidance Association Journal 16, no.3-4 (1980), 25.

109

14. Chen, 27.

15. Xian-Qun Li, “High School Student’s Homosexuality,” The Chinese
Guidance Association Journal 19, no. 3 (1983): 30.

16. Xing-Hong Lin, Women Who Say Action: A Study of Female Directors of
Commercial Films in Taiwan and Their Films, Master Thesis (Tainan: Institute of
Art Studies, National Cheng-Kong University), 92.

17. Min Sheng Bao, 27 Jun 1982, Edition 10.

18. Hui-Ping Zheng, “Screenwriters on Screenwriting: Chu, Xiou-Juan and
Girls’ School,” Today’s Movie Magazine 139 (1982): 39.

19. Zheng, ibid.

20. “Reviews on Girls’ School,” Today’s Movie Magazine 139 (1982): 62-63.

21. Xi-Ba Zeng, “Girls’ School—Li’s Affectionate World,” Today’s Movie
Magazine 139 (1982): 62.

22. Liang Liang, “Li, Mei-Mi and Girls’ School,” Today’s Movie Magazine
139 (1982): 63.

23. Min Sheng Bao, 13 Nov 1982, Edition 10.

24. Wen, ibid.

25. One of the widespread images of masculine women at the time was Sylvia
Chang in the “Aces Go Places” series, produced by Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest
Studio, but the character is situated in a heterosexual marriage.

26. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press,
1998), 15 and 234.

27. Ann Ciasullo, “Making her (in)visible: Cultural representations of
lesbianism and the lesbian body in the 1990s.” Feminist Studies 27, Issue 3 (2000):
577-610.

28. “Bo li” was used pejoratively to name male homosexuals in the 1970s and
1980s in Taiwan. It was originally a slang term referring to one’s hip. It later became
a term to refer to male homosexuals because of the anal sex practiced among male

110

homosexuality. See Ming-Xu Kuo, “Meaning Something Else: Homosexuality In
The Eyes of Heterosexuals.” Network Sociology 23 (2002), http://www.nhu.edu.tw/
~society/e-j/23/10.htm (accessed March 01, 2007).

29. On the website of Taiwan Cinema Note, Sun’s filmography as an actor does
not include The Outsiders. This once again demonstrates that The Outsiders has been
forgotten.

30. Min Sheng Bao, 15 May 1986, Edition 11.

31. Min Sheng Bao, ibid.

32. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Tenth Anniversary Edition) (London:
Routledge, 1999), 143.

33. Butler, 143.

34. Min Sheng Bao, ibid.

35. Butler, 145.

36. Butler, 146.

37. Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, and Gay Male
Spectatorships (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 158.

38. Farmer, 125.

39. Another similar point is the film’s use of striptease, but for the focus of this
chapter I will limit my discussion to the issue of lesbianism.

40. The film won the Audience Award at the 1992’s San Francisco
International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

41. The term literally means “brightness,” which strongly contrasts the
difficulties that the troupe encounters.

42. Kathryn Conrad, “Queer Treasons: Homosexuality and Irish National
Identity.” Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2001): 124-137.

43. Huei-Yuan Belinda Chang, “A Theatre of Taiwaneseness: Politics,
Ideologies, and Gezaixi.” The Drama Review 41, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 111-129.

111

44. Li Li, The Liberty Times, 15 Jul 1991.

45. Yian Mo, The Liberty Times, 27 Jul 1991.

46. See Lucifer Hung, “Between the Lace and the Whip: The Flow of
Lesbians’ Desire as Disclosed in Contemporary Taiwanese Fiction,” Chung-wai
Literary Monthly 25, no. 1 (1996): 60-63, and Ya-Dan Deng, “Bumpkin Queerness:
The Politics of Gender and Sexuality Representation in The Silent Thrush.” Cultural
Studies Monthly 49 (August 2005), http://hermes.hrc.ntu.edu.tw/csa/journal/49/journ
al_park374.htm.

47. Terri Silvio has just published an essay on the film The Silent Thrush. It is
titled “Lesbianism and Taiwanese Localism in the Film The Silent Thrush” and will
be published in Asia Pacific Queer: Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in the Asia-
Pacific, edited by Peter A. Jackson, Fran Martin, Mark MacLelland and Audrey Yue.

48. Sally Hussey, “Scene 176: Recasting the Lesbian in Robert Aldrich’s The
Killing of Sister George.” Screening the Past 10 (June 2000), http://www.latrobe.
edu.au/screeningthepast/firstreleasae/fr0600/shfr10d.htm.

49. Although Ann Ciasullo argues that a butch character can be heterosexually
undesirable by both straight men and women, my argument focuses on heterosexual
women.

50. Ya-Dan Deng, “Bumpkin Queerness: The Politics of Gender and Sexuality
Representation in The Silent Thrush.” Cultural Studies Monthly 49 (Aug 25, 2005),
http://hermes.hrc.ntu.edu.tw/csa/journal/49/journal_park374.htm (accessed April 6,
2007).

51. Deng, ibid.

52. Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film
Theory (London: Arnold Publishers, 1997): 131-133.

53. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema.” Screen 30, no. 4
(1989): 42.

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CHAPTER THREE

Troubleshooting Visibility: Subaltern Counterpublics and Beyond

In 2003, the Western press, including the BBC News and Agence France-
Presse, covered the Taiwan government’s proposal to legitimize gay marriage as part
of a Human Rights Basic Law. Both noted that Taiwan would be the first country in
Asia to recognize marriages among people of the same sex.
1
The proposal was not
delivered to the Legislative Yuan for a vote; nevertheless, a year later, USA Today
and the Toronto Star reported that Taiwanese President Chen Shui-Bian has again
publicly pledged to “let gays found a family and adopt children,” an announcement
Chen made right before the presidential election of 2004.
2
Besides Taiwan’s political
development and troubled relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
this news about the legalization of same-sex marriages/partnerships and child
adoption is probably one of the two stories (the other being the devastating
earthquake on September 21, 1999) that have received the most attention from the
Western press in recent years.
In the Western, especially American, media, the coverage serves to contrast
the Bush Administration’s policy on homosexuality and the heated public debate
about gay marriage. For the Taiwanese government, a gay-friendly agenda helped to
attract liberal voters while promoting a favorable national image to the West to
highlight Taiwan’s uniqueness and sharpen the contrast with its rival, the repressive
People’s Republic of China. But what makes the government of Taiwan, an island
with a Chinese-derived culture, choose to put homosexuality, a supposedly

113
controversial issue, in the forefront in order to sell Taiwan’s nationalism? What
makes the government believe that homosexuality is the perfect enticement to seek
support from the West and to manifest its uniqueness among other Asian countries?
The apparently friendly attitude of Taiwan’s government towards tongzhi is
actually the ripple effect of tongzhi’s “subaltern counterpublics” that the tongzhi
community has formulated since the early 1990s, when they began to address their
rights and claims to equality to the public. Subaltern counterpublics, a concept
conceived by cultural theorist Nancy Fraser, refers to “parallel discursive arenas
where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses
to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”
3

Based on the model of Western participatory democracy, Fraser’s definition of
subaltern counterpublics is informative; however, it is insufficient to account for a
counterpublic outside the Western democratic model, which is based on the premise
of communicating issues of economics or domestic privacy to the public realm. In
this chapter, Fraser’s theory of subaltern counterpublics is relocated to a Taiwanese
context of sexuality and is further extended from a formalized discourse to include
informal everyday practices. Specific societal and cultural constraints that face
tongzhi, as demonstrated in this chapter, require them to engage the dominant public
sphere in ways other than prompting the discursive contestations theorized by Fraser.
This chapter builds on and revises Fraser’s conceptualization of subaltern
counterpublics, by expanding it to another dominant institution of the pubic sphere,
the media, to trace tongzhi’s formulation of counterpublics. In so doing, it explores

114
the unique tactics that tongzhi employ in simultaneously negotiating with multiple
power structures—the mainstream media, both city and state governments, and the
West—to influence their impact upon each other and thereby leverage those
dynamics in favor of tongzhi. These tactics go beyond Fraser’s conception of
counterpublics, creating a need for an alternate theory of counterpublics, which I call
“counterpublics of sensibility.” A counterpublic of sensibility relies not on
deliberation but on cumulative unplanned interpersonal encounters and the private
emotions of its group members.
In this chapter, I first examine two investigative reports produced by major
networks to demonstrate tongzhi’s formation of a Fraserian counterpublic and its
limitation in the context of Taiwan, since the model is based on the Western model
of counterpublics. Because of the distinct nature of the Taiwanese public sphere, in
which the state is willing to embrace tongzhi for political purposes and to further its
own modern status and distinguish it from the P.R.C., tongzhi need to come up with
different tactics to counter the state and media. Adding this historical, cultural, and
political specificity to Fraser’s more general philosophy, the following analysis of
tongzhi’s interaction with the government and their productive use of space and
Western discourse injects the element of negotiation into the opposition-based
counterpublic. This element of negotiation is most apparent in the final section that
analyzes tongzhi’s attendance at film festivals, as it demonstrates how informal and
private emotions can also account for a counterpublic that is more apposite given the
cultural dynamics of Taiwan.

115
This chapter argues that different formulations of tongzhi’s counterpublics
and the tactics they represent provide an alternative mode of negotiating with power,
especially when one is caught in the tradition-modernity axis, never autonomous
from kinship or family structures, and cannot fully stay outside of the pervasive
structure of the knowledge and information production of the West. According to the
French philosopher Michel de Certeau, a “strategy” is a specific type of knowledge
relying on the powers to provide it a “proper” space, whereas a “tactic” depends on
time rather than space, which must “manipulate events in order to turn them into
‘opportunities.’”
4
Highly aware of multiple powers emanating from various
directions—from the mainstream media, government(s), and the West — tongzhi
have forged a series of strategies to capitalize on the contradictions or mutual
interests within powers themselves. As this chapter demonstrates, the West, though
invoked, is referred to by tongzhi only symbolically through either human rights
discourse or its filmic products as a sign of democracy and liberty for advancing the
interests of the state. And the state, embodied by the government, is used to disturb
the mainstream media’s self-righteous and self-appointed role as the deputation of
public opinion. The coalition of tongzhi with a political party is formed to put
pressure on another party. Tonghzi, therefore, are able to break away from a common
dilemma that many non-Western queers face—while de-Westernization often
overlaps with the interests of national conservatism, the agenda of anti-homophobia
finds itself in line with the knowledge and information produced by the West. This
discussion of the experience of Taiwan’s tongzhi thus identifies a nuanced and

116
productive means of negotiation that can actually dismantle the confluence of
multiple powers while remaining balanced within the power web; therefore, tongzhi
avoid falling into a seesaw situation in which fighting against one power ends up
nourishing the other.

The Spectacle of Surveillance
“He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never
a subject in communication.”

--Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

With the discovery of the first official AIDS case in Taiwan in 1984, public
discussions concerning male homosexuality (nan tongxinliang) and later female
homosexuality (nu tongxinlian) have permeated mainstream media since the late
1980s and early 1990s. For instance, according to China Times’ alarmist statement,
“Because of the invasion of AIDS into Taiwan, people have been prying into the
lives and sexual behaviors of homosexuals.”
5
Once society was warned of the AIDS
epidemic, both the electronic and press media filled with stories about homosexuals.
The mainstream media’s aggression toward female homosexuals reached its highest
in an investigative report, produced by one of the three major networks, Taiwan
Television Enterprise (TTV), that targeted nu tongzhi.
6
This incident was the
prologue to tongzhi’s long-lasting struggle against the mainstream media’s
defamation and stereotypes.
On March 18
th
, 1992, TTV News and World Report aired a program entitled
“New Trend: Drastically Increasing Population of Lesbians in Taiwan” for a

117
subsection of Nightly Shadowing (ye mu zhui zong), which was originally designated
as the first of a special serial report on the subject of nu tongxinlian (female
homosexuals). Reporter Mei-Fong Qu, equipped with a surveillance camera,
camouflaged herself in mannish attire to pass as a T (roughly equivalent to butch) to
enter a T bar. This episode fuelled a huge controversy not only for its illegitimate
capture and broadcast of the people inside, supposedly lesbians,
7
but also because it
illicitly edited together the videotaped image and footage of an interview with a
female pop singer, Mei-Chen Pan, which insinuated Pan’s sexual orientation as a nu
tongxinlian (female homosexuals). This report, invading the secluded world of nu
tongzhi with surveillance cameras, shocked the community with the media’s all-
pervasiveness, and the bluntness of this report in their treatment of the image and
topic of nu tongzhi evinces tongzhi’s vulnerability when facing public scrutiny.
This first direct conflict between mainstream media and nu tongzhi occurred
immediately after the first lesbian group Between Us (wo men zhi jian) came out to
the public at an outdoor fair held by a feminist organization, Awakening, which
reveals the complicated nature of nu tongzhi’s self-revelation for the sake of better
social understanding. Unfortunately, this coming out was a double-edged sword that
provided the public direct access to the nu tongzhi community, and yet it also
triggered public indignation. As soon as the program aired, it stirred disagreements
from both the nu tongzhi community and Pan’s agent and record company. Qu
justified her report by claiming that it was inspired by the coming out of Between Us,
which she had read about in the newspaper.
8
This incident to some extent

118
exemplifies what Joshua Gamson terms, “the dilemmas of media visibility” for
marginalized groups. In his analysis of representations of sexual nonconformists on
American TV talk shows, Gamson argues that the need for, or even the realization
of, media visibility often corresponds to mainstream media’s pursuit of
sensationalism.
9
Even though Qu’s reportage differs from that of talk shows since
her subjects were not voluntary participants, it reflects a similar problem with public
visibility—while satisfying the desire to be recognized, affirmed, and validated, it
amplifies the risk of losing control over representations. Members of Between Us
came out to the public hoping that this active self-disclosure would help society
better understand nu tongzhi.
10
Alas, their coming out did not halt but triggered more
public curiosity about nu tongzhi. To put it another way, even though Between Us
tried to represent the whole population of nu tongzhi with a positive note, outside of
the act of collectively coming out, their efforts lost their positive value since it
instead allows the public to recognize and gaze upon nu tongzhi individuals. This
new attention on nu tongzhi did not prompt the more respectful environment that
Between Us expected to achieve through their coming out. Rather, it submitted nu
tongzhi to intense scrutiny from the mainstream media.
As a journalist, Qu’s employment of a surveillance camera reinforces its
disciplinary power as a social control. Structured around the idea of vision, the
surveillance camera enables the power to see, to put others’ private lives into public
discourse, and to identify the abnormal.
11
In Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard
Campbell’s words, for instance, “privacy is reserved for those who conform to

119
normalcy.”
12
This underlying principle upholds Qu’s confidence in using a
surveillance camera since she believed she was alerting her audience to a public
problem. Alongside the image of a dark bar space with people in motion was Qu’s
instructive but tainted narration: “Those who look like men here are actually
women.” Captured by a surveillance camera, nu tongzhi became scrutinized deviants
in a modern panopticism constituted by media technology. This reportage
exemplifies what Foucault identifies as the principle of power, visible and yet
unverifiable, in Bentham’s design of the Panopticon.
13
The minimum detectable
materiality of the surveillance camera renders the inspector, namely, the journalist,
and power unverifiable. At the same time, the broadcast reportage displays the
visibility of power registered by the surveillance camera, through which nu tongzhi
was and will always be spied on.
14

The degree of truthfulness in this visualized deviancy was insured by the
particular aesthetics of the surveillance images. The presence of shaky and
constantly out of focus images and dimmed lighting in Qu’s reportage allowed it to
claim its proximity to reality. Tarleton Gillespie refers to Jay David Bolter and
Richard Grusin’s argument about the “logic of immediacy” to explain the preferred
realist style in Fox Surveillance Specials. Agreeing with Bolter and Grusin’s
observation of humans’ insatiable desire for immediacy, Gillespie argues that
programs that rely on surveillance images erase the mediation that transforms the
real into representation and “promise[s] to highlight the presence of the real world
within its diegesis—‘capturing’ the world and conveying it to the viewer intact.”
15

120
Attributing Fox Specials’ insistence on realism to our desire for “being in the
presence of the thing represented,” Gillespie’s argument delineates the magnetism of
the show and surveillance images in general. What he does not specify, however, is
the type of reality—represented in genres loaded with surveillance images—that
would attract people to attend with no mediation. Whether it is a criminal chase or
burglary witness, the reality that is delivered as surveillance images invokes
something unfamiliar, inaccessible, or unavailable; its reality is something that we
would not experience in everyday lives. Mediation is the prerequisite of the desire
for immediacy. The trace of the medium can never be entirely erased and ironically it
is the highest value of surveillance images; while the aesthetic of the medium
promises unmediated access, it is the very medium of the surveillance camera that
allows viewers to enter the spaces that they will never access in reality. The
strangeness or abnormality exhibited by surveillance imagery, as suggested by Qu’s
reportage, is more equivalent to a spectacle than the so-called reality that is intended
by the surveillance apparatus. By means of the surveillance aesthetic, Qu’s reportage
bears a dual purpose. On the one hand, it convinces audiences to believe in the
aberration of nu tongzhi as a fearful reality, but on the other hand it entertains
audiences as it dramatizes the segment through a hyper-realistic visualization and
whimsical narration.
The attempt to create a spectacle of nu tongzhi along with the use of
surveillance imagery was made evident by Qu’s gender performance in the
beginning of the report. In order to enter the bar without revealing her journalist

121
identity, Qu dressed in male clothing pretending to be a T. With her surveillance
camera, Qu was able to get into the sheltered bar space and expose the community
while hinting that it is a highly sexually charged environment. In addition, through
her own believable gender performance, Qu presented herself to audiences as a
display of lesbianism. This intended spectacle reinforces the rigor of hetero-based
gender binarism – T and Po (roughly equivalent to femme) – which the public
assumes dominates the nu tongzhi community. In other words, Qu’s “full
preparation” effaced the actual fluidity of gender performance in the nu tongzhi
community and reinforced the idea that T/Po (often misunderstood as a duplicate of
heterosexuality) is the only form of a nu tongzhi relationship in the public’s eyes.
Other than Qu’s gender performance, the second and most important
technique that the program used to make nu tongzhi a spectacle is the calculated
insertion of an interview segment with the androgynous pop singer Mei-Chen Pan.
Pan’s masculine persona not only provides a suitable embodiment of nu tongzhi for
the public imagination, but it also reifies it in the public imagination. This insertion
of a recognizable and plausible figure to exemplify the phenomenon distantly seen in
the surveillance footage easily certifies the program’s premise as Qu announces at its
outset: “There has been an increase in the number of lesbians in Taiwan.” Ever since
her first debut in 1989, female pop singer Mei-Chen Pan has established a persona
that vacillates between maleness and femaleness as her hallmark. Although Pan kept
her hair longer than the shoulder line—a traditional symbol of femaleness in Taiwan
at the time—her front hair was cut in a male hairstyle. The majority of her fans are

122
women, and among them, a fair number of masculine-oriented women, arguably nu
tongzhi. Not only has Pan’s unconventional gender-neutral appearance entailed
conjectures about her sexual orientation, but her closeness with other females often
enlivened gossips since “it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian.”
16
Around
the time the report was made, Pan was rumored to be exceptionally close to another
Hong Kong pop star Kally Kwong.
Toward the end of the surveillance footage at the bar, Qu’s narration detoured
from interpreting the footage to an opening statement about the rumored relationship
between Pan and Kwong. Qu narrates, “There has been a rumor that Pan and Kwong
are female homosexuals (nu tongxinlian). Pan actually has an answer to the public in
regard to this [hearsay].” The image then immediately cuts to an interview sequence,
done a week before, in which Qu and Pan were both in the frame and Pan says,
People who like you [referring to Pan herself] must be more [than those who
dislike you]. Why don’t you mention that? It is impossible to ask people not
to say negative things about you. As long as I am doing the right thing, I
don’t care what people have to say about me.
17

Pan’s answer, in response to Qu’s inquiry about her sexuality, sounds rather
ambiguous, but it was actually a response to the original question before it was
replaced during the post-production by the following: “As a pop star, how do you
make sure that people like you?” After the report was broadcasted, Pan complained
that she was entrapped. She contested that her interview sequence was eventually
framed as supplementary evidence to prove the report’s point about female
homosexuals. Pan and her agent immediately issued a legal warning letter to TTV
demanding a public correction and apology for the calumny; otherwise, they would

123
file a legal complaint. Interviewed by other members of the press afterwards, Pan
spoke furiously:
‘I was set up!’ She has to calm herself down, not being enmeshed in how this
outrageous slur might hurt her career and personal image. So is Pan a lesbian
at all? Pan responded firmly: ‘I know I am a girl, and I too date guys; why
would I want to get involved in ’homosexuality’?”
18

According to this disclaimer, Pan’s fuss apparently was about the misinterpretation
of her being a nu tongxinlian, which would relentlessly tarnish her reputation since
the public commonly equates homosexuals to perverts. If the program offended the
community for its devious use of a surveillance camera to violently out lesbians,
Pan’s clarification increased the harm as it accentuated the aberration of being a
lesbian while she declares her normality.
Despite the overall negative implication, this report nevertheless provided nu
tongzhi a training ground to form a counterpublic and generate counterarguments.
Understanding that the controversy actually bypassed other victims at the bar, whose
identities were unveiled in the report, and stigmatized the group identity of lesbians,
Between Us drafted a petition against TTV’s voyeuristic and deceptive approach. A
renowned cultural elite, Kung-Yuan Fong (screenwriter of Ang Lee’s The Wedding
Banquet a year later), initiated a petition entitled, “Plea for Respecting
Homosexuals,” which gathered about a hundred signatures from artists, writers, and
media workers to support Between Us. This petition redirected the dispute to
society’s general homophobia and criticized TTV’s exercise of its power to construct
a heterosexual point of view to look at the underprivileged.

124
With the help of other social alliances, this was the first time the nu tongzhi
community intervened in the public debate to assert their political stand. Cultural
critic Juan-Fen Zhang, in her profound analysis of the history of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi
movement, nevertheless reveals some reservations about the influence that the
counterdiscourse has had on the power-bloc. She argues that TTV was actually not
afraid of any repercussions because it relied on society’s overall hostility toward
homosexuals. According to Zhang,
If the controversy got heated, the public would begin to wonder if the persons
who got involved are really nu tongxinlian. So long as the victims are fearful
of being presumed nu tongxinlian, [they would keep silent and] the dispute
would be reconciled, even without an apology.
19

She argues that the counterargument only provoked more surmises about the victims’
sexual orientation and in order to circumvent these insinuations, the targeted could
only seek reconciliation to quell the disturbance.
20
Zhang’s argument indeed
underscores the problematic effect of what I consider TTV’s intention to make a
spectacle of lesbians. While agreeing with Zhang’s analysis of TTV’s strategy, I
contend that the effort of constructing a counterdiscourse through a petition is still
effective to some degree, at least on the level of acknowledging the media’s
intrusiveness and arbitrary fabrication. A month later, after Between Us and when its
allies publicly announced their outrage, the Appraisal Council of Journalism ruled
that the report violated nu tongzhi’s and Pan’s personal privacy, which was not a
concern of public interest.
21
Partially for their inappropriate treatment of this
reportage, Qu and her producer Ya-Qin Zhang were fired after the Council

125
announced its rule. As Gillespie argues, inappropriate manipulation of surveillance
in surveillance programs can sabotage the ideological legitimation of journalism
itself, but TTV was able to restore and reclaim its legitimacy by firing Qu and Zhang
as their punishment for crossing the line.
22
The quarrel between TTV and Pan
eventually ended with an out-of-court settlement. When interviewed by the press
afterwards, Pan adopted a softer tone toward the issue of nu tongxinlian. She
emphasized that,
She has no discrimination against homosexuals. It’s just that she is not a
homosexual. Her friends know her effeminate side, and she is just like every
other girl waiting for her Prince Charming to come.
23

It would be too naive to believe that this result suggests a permanent change in the
mainstream media. In fact, TTV apologized neither to both celebrities nor to the
people who were at the bar. The only concession that TTV made was an expression
of their regret for what happened. Nonetheless, nu tongzhi’s engagement in public
debates complicates the discourse and destabilizes the institutional patterns of power.
The first collaboration with non-tongzhi influential people also forecasts one of
tongzhi’s negotiating tactics with various power forces.

Being Out or Coming Out?
A main factor that allows mainstream media such as TTV to be so bluntly
offensive in their mistreatment of nu tongzhi has to do with tongzhi’s struggle with
the idea of coming out. Even though nu tongzhi did form a counterpublic to provide
an oppositional interpretation of their identities and express their needs, the effect of

126
their counterpublic is limited because of their conditional coming out. For instance,
when protesting to TTV’s reportage, Between Us, on behalf of nu tongzhi as a group,
could only appear in writing, and that was the most they could do. They could come
forward to speak out only if they would not be seen in public and be identified. This
ambivalence toward coming out eventually became a weakness when facing the
mainstream media and the public. It is therefore important to first understand
tongzhi’s specific dilemma about “coming out” to untangle tongzhi’s struggle with
the mainstream media.
Since the American gay rights movement, based on identity politics, was
introduced to Taiwan, “coming out” has arguably become the most resonant strategy
in the development of the tongzhi identity.
24
As the primary rhetoric of Western
homosexual rights discourse, coming out has been encouraged to eliminate the
encumbrance that invisibility has on changing public opinions. This notion has been
widely promoted in the beginning of the tongzhi movement. This Western idea of
coming out, however, has a different ramification in the socio-cultural context of
Taiwan. And ironically, it often paralyzes tongzhi’s political efficacy since the
repercussions of disclosed-identification often causes more problems than it solves
because coming out, despite being an individual choice, often results in “outing”
one’s family members to society.
Coming out, the act of pronouncing a kind of truth about oneself, is
profoundly embedded in the idea of individualism and is encouraged as a form of
confession. Scientia sexualis, on which Foucault argues the West relies to produce

127
the truth concerning sex, applies the ancient procedure of confession to the rules of
scientific discourse.
25
The mode of confession is the most crystallized form of
individualism, as “the truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures
of individualization by power.”
26
In traditional Confucianist Taiwan, however,
family values are venerated as superior to individual values, and therefore explicitly
admitting one’s deviant sexuality is often more destructive than concealing it.
Irrespective of all possible hints that might pinpoint one’s sexuality, not admitting it
allows more space of ambiguity for tongzhi. Wei-Cheng Chu argues that
respectability in the culture of Taiwan is based on a latent and mutual compromise,
whereas in the West respectability is earned from an insistence on, and assertion of,
an individual’s sentiments and demands.
27
Wah-Shan Chou, another contemporary
scholar who researches homosexuality in Mainland China and Hong Kong, points
out that,
Zhan chu lai (coming out) has very different cultural and political
connotations in Chinese communities… [T]he confrontational model is more
appropriate in a society where individuality and self affirmation are the basis
of personal and cultural identity.
28

In a society like Taiwan, the individual is hardly separable from family, and the
multifaceted pressures stemming from “family” construes the primary obstacle for
tongzhi to come out. As individuals are caught up in a family/kinship-centered
personal network, coming out, regardless of one’s identity, would shame the family
and clan since homosexuality is believed to be a sign of perversion. To humiliate the
family is considered a violation of the filial principle (xiao). As society is an
extension of the basic unity of the family, the politics of shame further expands from

128
family to society in general. After one comes out to the immediate family, often the
closet not only does not disappear but also widens to include all other family
members. It is common to hear that some tongzhi decide to stay in the closet to not
hurt their family, even if they already strongly identify with their sexuality.
Meanwhile, economic dependency, resulting from an integral family structure, also
amplifies the difficulty of causing a rift in the family. These are all causes of many
tongzhi’s strong reservations about coming out, even though its political significance
has been broadly recognized.
In comparison with Taiwan’s tongzhi, family seems to be the first place for
Western gays and lesbians to make changes, and expanding upon that changing
society is tangible. In her discussion of the (Western) epistemology of the closet, Eve
Sedgwick cites an antihomophobic paragraph in Hardwick, which proclaimed that “if
every gay came out to his or her family, a hundred million Americans would be on
our side.”
29
Here, family is a crucial channel that helps individuals to communicate
with an unreceptive society, mediating between the public and private. In her
analysis of this coming out rhetoric, Eve Sedgwick further pinpoints the culturally
rooted connectedness between the metaphor of coming out and the public versus the
closet and privacy:
The image of coming out regularly interfaces the image of the closet, and its
seemingly unambivalent public siting can be counterposed as a salvational
epistemologic certainty against the very equivocal privacy afforded by the
closet.
30

Such division demarcated by the strict options of inside and outside of the
closet, even though problematic, is untenable in Taiwan. Outing one’s sexuality to

129
the public is not only a political project; it is also a cultural project wherein Western
values of individualism can be reaffirmed through the act of acknowledging one’s
own sexuality by virtue of confession. The act of coming out does not carry a sense
of positivity afforded by sublimating one’s private self into the public in Taiwanese
culture. The intermingling of private and public underlines the impediment to
properly locating the private and public self by which the strategy of coming out is
grounded and identity politics progresses. Taiwan tongzhi’s desire for and, at the
same time, anxiety about coming out signals an indetermination of how to represent
one’s private sexual self in public and/or to present it to the public, which also
explains tongzhi’s contradictory feelings about mainstream media and lack of control
over its representation.
Reflecting on the problems of coming out, Taiwan’s tongzhi indeed invented
a tactic of “mask donning” to cope with moments when there is an inevitable
necessity to come out without revealing individual identification. This tactic of mask
donning on the one hand satisfies the mainstream’s snooping hunger for seeing
tongzhi, and yet it aptly maintains the tongzhi’s ambiguity of not being immediately
recognized.”
31
This tactic, a way for tongzhi to negotiate between “the poles of
hidden and shown,”
32
however, still has its problems, as Chu argues, “When the
mainstream refuses to be open and liberal [politically correct, my interpretation] and
poses outrageous requests as seen in the incidents of Xing-Zhe Tu and forceful
exposure at the National Taiwan University.”
33
Another problem with the tactic of
“mask donning” that Chu does not mention is the mainstream’s appropriation of it.

130
This is most evident in the incident of the “Musical Pub” reportage in which the
mainstream media used the mask-derived mosaic effect, a special effect that blurs the
clarity of the image, to justify its problematic acquiring and broadcasting of images
of nu tongzhi.
On the evening of August 2
nd
, 1998, a sub-section of CTS Evening News,
News Investigating Team, aired special coverage on a T-Bar named Musical Pub,
which was titled “Nu tongxinlian Bars, Alternative Paradises.” Similar to Qu’s
scandalous reportage discussed above, the nu tongzhi community was again
affronted by an investigative report, which produced surveillance imagery of nu
tongzhi. Linking back to the prior incident, Juan-Fen Zhang calls this gui da qiang—
a recurring nightmare.
34
If the history repeats itself it is nevertheless repeated with a
difference. Different socio-cultural circumstances and the gradual growth of the
community render a distinctive manipulation of surveillance imagery and
justification of that intrusion. Unable to pass as a lesbian customer as Qu did six
years ago, male reporter Jie-Xiu Xie indeed got permission from two pub owners to
enter Musical Pub candidly as a journalist. Nevertheless, Xie did not officially
inform people whom he randomly talked to at the bar about the presence of a
professional camera, which was hidden in the bottom of a bag with an open hole for
the lens. A professional camera that is supposedly legitimate was turned into a
surveillance camera and embodied the ideological weight the latter carries.
This surveillance representation, because of its analogous quality to TTV’s
reportage, reminds the tongzhi community of its past mistreatment. The present is

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expanded beyond a fortuitous incident and a history of intrusion is established. A
historical linkage with the past allows tongzhi to address not only this particular
program but also issues of privacy and human rights in the media.
35
Defending
himself against the protest initiated by Between Us with more than a thousand
signatures, Xie claimed that he did not violate the principles of ethical journalism.
Other than having permission from the owner, Xie argued that when broadcast, the
images of people whom he talked to (supposedly nu tongzhi) were layered by a
mosaic effect for blurring purposes and their voices were altered, in order to prevent
any direct identification.
The mosaic effect, probably inspired by the practice of mask donning, indeed
often appears in interviewing sequences with tongzhi on TV. Although it is not
invented by tongzhi as a tactic, it functions much like mask donning to overcome the
in/out impasse of the closet. It protects one’s personal identity while fulfilling the
need to make a public display. Up to this point, very often when tongzhi agreed to be
interviewed by television, they would be shot at a distance from behind and the
image and sound would be covered by special effects such as a mosaic when
broadcasted.
36
Xie reappropriated the use of the mosaic effect to justify his
illegitimately obtaining images, but his fallacy lies in an overestimation of the
aesthetic potency of the mosaic effect to the point where its political rationale is
neglected. The reason for putting on a mask is not simply for the sake of covering
one’s face; it is a self-conscious performance to confront the public. Wearing a mask
on the surface seems to satisfy the public’s desire to see a tongzhi, but it actually

132
throws this voyeuristic desire back to the public by covering the face, the most and
only identifiable part of the body, to satirize the public’s desire for spectacle.
37

Moreover, the mosaic effect has some technical drawbacks that do no extinguish but
to the contrary magnify voyeuristic pleasure. The blurred image made by the mosaic
effect could actually be deciphered by narrowing human eyes if the image is shot too
close, or if the pixel size is too large. A slightly perceptible mosaic image could
ironically inscribe the keyhole effect, as it requires greater effort to peek into an even
more “private sphere,” and the payoff is the success in reassembling a recognizable
human face.
38
The mosaic effect, therefore, is equivalent to the keyhole mask
through which privacy is still penetrated and deprived.
CTS’ reportage takes the complexity of tongzhi’s struggle with mainstream
media to the level of citizenship. Because of the predicament of coming out, tongzhi
have trouble harmonizing the public and private self, which enables the mainstream
media to employ voyeuristic surveillance aesthetics to deprive their legitimacy as
citizens. Through showing unacknowledged private moments, be it with a mask or
the mosaic effect or not, this particular style visually reinscribes tongzhi’s
embarrassment about appearing in a public setting and thus confines tongzhi to the
private realm to reinforce a denial of their citizenship. In other words, the
representations that mainstream media create—as demonstrated by the
aforementioned incidents—deliberately visualize the social isolation of tongzhi while
eliminating signs associated with the idea of the “public,” upon which the concept of
citizenship is generally centered. Tongzhi’s uncertainty about their positioning in the

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public sphere paradoxically reinforces the mainstream media’s attempt to discourage
tongzhi from partaking in the public. Thus, tongzhi’s withdrawal and mainstream
media’s exclusion together weaken the proficiency of a tongzhi counterpublic.

Televised Rainbow
In response to the mainstream media’s exclusion of tongzhi from the media
public sphere in order to deny their citizenship, the tongzhi community constituted a
counterpublic that negotiates rather than opposes the dominant public; negotiation is
the proper tactic because of the different nature of the political situation of Taiwan
and the community’s desire for inclusion. From within, tongzhi invented tactics for
getting the endorsement from public representatives—the city and state
governments—to retrieve their citizenship in the media public sphere. Aware of the
mainstream media’s constant interrogation of tongzhi’s qualifications for citizenship,
reconnecting with the public attributes of citizenship has become one of the major
moves in the development of the tongzhi movement. In order to do that, tongzhi
activists looked for support from the legitimate authority by taking on the Western
human rights discourse of lesbian and gay rights.
39
This cultural reinscription of
Western lesbian and gay human rights speaks to the state’s desire for aligning with
the democratic and liberal West while separating from Mainland China by way of
differentiating from the latter’s infamous human rights infringements.
The government of Taiwan has historically tried to differentiate Taiwan from the
PRC. Since the regime of Kuomintang under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek fled

134
to Taiwan after the failure of the Chinese Civil War, Taiwan has constructed itself in
the capitalist model and painstakingly separated itself from communist China. Under
the leadership of Chiang Kei-Shek’s Kuomintang (KMT), Taiwan allied with the
capitalist West led by the United States in opposition to communist China. The
communist party of the PRC had long been portrayed as the ultimate evil—backward,
repressive, crude, and thoroughly diabolical—in Kuomintang’s ideological education,
especially before the suspension of martial law in 1987. This negative
characterization of the PRC allows Kuomintang to emphasize by contrast the
economic modernization of Taiwan. The regime’s switch from the KMT to the
independence-oriented Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2000 does not lower
but in fact heightens the antagonism as the government takes up a conservative
attitude toward the economic and cultural interchange with the PRC for advocating
Taiwanese nativism (ben-tu-hua). During the course of Taiwan’s political
vicissitudes, the United States, representative of the capitalist West with a global
image of freedom, liberty, and democracy, remains significant, both politically and
culturally, for Taiwan’s detachment from the PRC in invocating anti-communist
PRC rhetoric.
Cognizant of Taiwan’s mediating position between the West and PRC,
tongzhi capitalizes on Taiwan’s overall credence to Western ideologies and human
rights discourse, in particular to influence the government’s policy on tongzhi issues.
Tongzhi’s deployment of Western human rights discourse mediates the
“performative contradiction” between Western universalism and Asia Pacific’s

135
cultural difference and earns them more bargaining chips for negotiations.
40
This
capability to mediate between the West and the state, deploying a tactic of collective
coming out, transforms the public and confers power to tongzhi for negotiating with
the mainstream media. In Western gay and lesbian political theory, the defense of
“lesbian and gay rights” lies in the “self-determination of one’s relationships with
others,” and to argue for homosexual rights as a basic human right is a plea for
protecting personal choices by the law of the state.
41
This individualistic notion of
homosexual rights is often at odds with values claimed by most East Asian countries
that “give primacy to the family institution, deference to authority,” and are
“subservient to economic and political imperatives.”
42

The Taiwan government’s support for lesbian and gay human rights
discourse, however, distinguishes Taiwan from other Asian countries, because it
does not contradict the dominant Western concept of human rights. Since the power
dynamics triangulate with the PRC as the third point, the assertion of national
sovereignty, though split between claims for independence and reunification, does
not clash with but rather benefits from Westernized—or Americanized, to be more
precise—human rights discourse. Taiwan’s embracing of human rights discourse,
contrasting with the PRC’s unyielding stance in facing the international community’s
accusation of human rights infringements, helps the independence camp, represented
by the DPP, assert the cultural superiority of Taiwan. For the reunification camp
represented by the KMT, on the other hand, supporting Western human rights helps
it to claim a better and, ultimately, legitimate China, which the KMT represents. For

136
both parties, this reinscription of Western ideologies helps to improve the
international image of the nation that they wanted to create in their own terms. This
reinscription, on the other hand, allows tongzhi to negotiate with the state for
citizenship. It helps tongzhi participate in discursive contestations, which eventually
helps to modify the definition of citizenship in terms of sexuality to some extent,
even though tongzhi activists are still fathoming what sexual citizenship means
within the cultural context of Taiwan. Gradually gaining endorsement from the
government, tongzhi are able to fight against media’s erasure of their citizenship due
to their “deviant” sexuality, and regain control over their own representations on TV.
The opportunity that tongzhi seized to turn the tables on the state is actually
provided by the fierce political competition between the DPP and KMT.
Emphasizing his progressiveness as opposed to the KMT’s inertia, Chen received
support from most social minority groups, including tongzhi, during his campaign.
43

After he took office, however, tongzhi was excluded from the Taipei city renovation
project; most notably, they were excluded from the changes made to the Taipei New
Park as part of the reconstruction of the square of the Presidential Office. Since the
1970s, the New Park has been a secretive world for gay men or men who practice
same-sex sex.
44
In order to establish a Taiwan-oriented nationalistic undertone to the
political landmark, Chen decided to name the New Park a memorial park for the
infamous massacre, known as the 228 Incident.
45
Mistakenly making an analogy to
the formulation of a gay community in San Francisco, the head of the Department of
Urban Development proposed turning Red House Theater (hong-lu-xi-yuan), an

137
obsolete space for screening adult films, into a gay club to replace the New Park.
This ostensibly liberal policy indeed denies tongzhi’s access to the public space and
compartmentalizes them in a designated gay place. As one tongzhi activist argued in
a later protest, disagreeing with the policy, this allegedly gay space would only cause
tongzhi “be looked at by others as if in a zoo.”
46
Chen’s revival plan for the New
Park apparently prioritizes nationalism, and tongzhi’s citizenship was disavowed in
this reconfiguration of a different national identity.
Seeing that this spatial reorganization is an attempt to, in Foucaultian terms,
privilege a social order by legitimizing certain forms of life (heterosexuality) while
delegitimizing others (homosexuality), the tongzhi community opposed this proposed
change.
47
Their reaction, however, was not to occupy the New Park in order to claim
its queerness; rather, their rhetoric argued for the right to have free and equal access
to the New Park to address the concept of citizenship. Instead of demanding
tongzhi’s continuing ownership of the New Park, tongzhi activists emphasized that
the existence of tongzhi in the park is actually part of the history of the New Park as
a public space for all citizens. With their gradually increasing social recognition,
tongzhi are turning into a new social subject. Drawing upon this new identity allows
tongzhi to revisit the past that was excluded from the official history to demand
inclusion and claim its co-constituency. Looking at the power structure of the
political geography, Debra Burrington argues that “free and equal access to the
public space is a fundamental prerequisite to the exercise of the rights of democratic
citizenship.”
48
The revisionist historiography that tongzhi activists advocate is indeed

138
the reverse of Burrington’s. By reinforcing their historical existence in the New Park
as an element of the public landscape, tongzhi are able to claim their citizenship
while criticizing Chen’s policy on spatial segregation.
The controversy surrounding the reconstruction of the New Park not only
damaged Chen’s image as a human rights fighter for marginalized groups but also
forced tongzhi to reassess the efficacy of completely investing in a political party, or
more broadly, any nationalistic ideology. Like the TTV report, even though this
public protest that appealed directly to the government did not succeed on the
practical level, tongzhi converted this failure into an advantage to negotiate a
political intervention during the election of the Taipei city mayor in 1998 and the
following competition between Chen and KMT’s political star Ma Ying-Jeou.
Taking advantage of a growing current to transform Taipei into a cosmopolitan city,
tongzhi activist groups emphasized gay friendly Western cities as cosmopolitan in
order to pressure candidates from three different parties, including Chen of the DPP
and Ma Ying-Jeou of the KMT. Tongzhi’s strategic modeling of the West
successfully made Ma emphatically promise to protect tongzhi’s basic human rights
in contrast to Chen’s dissatisfactory tongzhi policy. In Ma’s vision, Taipei shall be
like New York in which gays and lesbians live respected by others. It seemed that
Ma was more open-minded to tongzhi than Chen; however, it was often forgotten
that Ma was once opposed to tongzhi marriage during his term as the Minister of
Justice when Chen was the mayor of Taipei. Ma’s change of attitude is largely
attributed to tongzhi’s provoking of the competition.

139
This political rivalry between Ma and Chen for representing liberal and
progressive thought is akin to the West’s continuing benefit to the tongzhi
community, which culminated in the first open tongzhi festival.
49
Half a year after
Ma assumed office as the mayor of Taipei, the Department of Civil Affairs, in
collaboration with several major tongzhi activist groups, introduced a proposal called
the “Tongzhi Civil Movement” with a budget of 800,000 Taiwanese dollars.
Grounded in promoting respect for tongzhi citizen’s rights to live and speak, this
project wished to create a metropolitan environment for both tongzhi and non-
tongzhi. Here, President Clinton’s appointment of gay officers and San Francisco’s
recognition of same-sex marriage, which are obviously fantasies of American
liberalism, were referenced by the Chairman of the department, Cheng-Xiu Lin, to
argue that the more open-minded a city is about marginalized groups and minorities,
the more progressive a city becomes. In order to transform Taipei into a supreme
global city, the argument goes, the city government of Taipei must engage issues
around tongzhi.
50

On September 2
nd
, 2000, the First Tongzhi Gay Festival, fully funded by the
city government of Taipei, was held at the Warner Village Complex Plaza. Vice-
Mayor Xiu-Xiong Bai, representing Ma at the festival, addressed these issues
explicitly in his opening remarks:
The Taipei City Government wholeheartedly stands up for tongzhi. Let us
confront society together fearlessly. Regardless of all the disagreements, the
Taipei City Government is hoping and will continue to create a better society,
along with our tongzhi friends.
51

140
Bai’s statement promoted Ma’s liberalism on the issue of tongzhi, which also
reaffirmed Ma’s campaign promises. The power struggles between Ma and Chen and
the parties they represented, respectively, pressured the latter to adopt a rather
positive stand when responding to the festival from his position as the President of
Taiwan.
Other than the contestation in domestic politics, another vital factor that has
helped change Chen’s stance on tongzhi issues was the participation of a famous gay
rights advocate, Michael Bronski, and a human rights lawyer, Nan Hunter. Both
were invited from the United States to share their experience with the U.S. gay rights
movement in a panel that discussed the tongzhi movement, tongzhi’s human rights
issues, and concerns of citizenship. The visit of Bronski and Hunt, on the one hand,
illustrates the global aspect of the gay rights movement, and yet, on the other hand, it
carries a symbolic connection with the liberal and democratic West that Taiwanese
officials emulate. This implication compelled President Chen, notorious for his
unfriendliness to tongzhi, to acknowledge the significance of tongzhi’s human rights.
For the first time, the president of Taiwan received representatives from local tongzhi
rights groups, together with Bronski and Hunter. In this one-hour meeting, President
Chen responded favorably to four basic requisites of tongzhi human rights proposed
by the Tongzhi Hotline, which included safety and human rights, educational rights,
and equality in employment. The last request was deliberately targeted at Chen and
his uncongenial policy during his term of mayor, and asked “the president to show
respect to tongzhi for setting an example to the public.”
52
This was purposely

141
directed at Chen’s policy concerning tongzhi, indirectly demanding that he admit his
wrongdoing. President Chen made the following statement during the meeting:
Homosexuality is neither a crime nor a disease. In Taiwan, numerous people
are devoted to fighting for political and social human rights. Tongzhi’s
human rights also need relentless endeavors and education…The Taiwanese
tongzhi movement began in 1990 with the launch of the first (nu) tongzhi
organization. Even though it has only been a decade, twenty-one years after
Stonewall, we witness the flowering of the Taiwanese tongzhi movement. I
believe that success can be expected with everyone’s effort.
53

Chen’s remarks lucidly demonstrate how human rights discourse was
invoked beyond the domain of homosexual rights. Mentioning Stonewall as a
Western symbol to parallel Taiwan’s tongzhi movement allowed Chen to justify his
endorsement of the community. Chen’s reference to the struggle for political human
rights, which he actively participated in, obscures the specificities of tongzhi’s
struggle, and yet helps to appease the public’s disquiet aroused by his public
welcoming of tongzhi groups. In the course of the festival, issues of tongzhi human
rights were referred to strategically to attain recognition from high officials—by
capitalizing on domestic party rivalry and Taiwan’s eagerness to differentiate itself
from the PRC—to legitimize tongzhi issues on the state level; the content of
homosexual rights for the tongzhi, in particular, was still open to contestation.
Therefore, the attendance of Bronski and Hunter and the sharing of their experiences
do not indicate reliance upon, or a naïve recapitulation of, the Western discourse of
homosexual rights. It is instead a calculated technique used to urge the government,
which had been historically hostile to sexual minorities, to recognize tongzhi’s

142
citizenship, and on the level of representation, to pressure the mainstream media to
revise their standpoint.
Carrying on a tactic of “collective coming out” with the support from both
the city and state governments, the festival was indeed a public event. Collective
coming out, one of the two major tactics developed by tongzhi (the other one being
mask donning) was originally meant to enlist tongzhi-friendly people to speak for
tongzhi on public occasions. This tactic is expanded upon during the first student
tongzhi festival at National Taiwan University in 1995 in which “non-tongzhi could
and did participate in tongzhi activities. The effect of collective coming out is
achieved not by a revelation of individual identifications but by the permeating
atmosphere of a tongzhi thematic.”
54
The open space of the Warner Village Complex
Plaza where the festival was held allowed pedestrians to walk by and mix with
participants, either intentionally or casually. Favoring an open public square over an
exclusively gay space strongly resonated with the argument about sharing public
space with other citizens that was made during the protest against the renovation of
the New Park. Moreover, this integration also softened the impact of coming out and
closeted tongzhi could simply pass as bystanders interested in having fun. The
publicness of this event thoroughly destructs the surveillance aesthetic that
mainstream television has widely used to obtain images of tongzhi. The featuring of
an indistinguishable space erases the line between public and private and
foregrounds co-existence rather than individuality, which frustrates the mainstream
media’s contrivance to isolate tongzhi and deny their affiliation with the public.

143
CtiTV’s report, for example, begins with a frontal view of a drag queen
dancing onstage, following a back shot of couples holding hands while ambling
among the crowd and a birds-eye view of two girls walking through the crowds. The
narration frames the image, stating,
Whether it is drag queens or tongzhi couples, those who are often treated with
biased eyes, now can face the public with poise and dignity in the first
Tongzhi Gay Festival sponsored by the city government of Taipei.
55

After this introduction, Chairman Lin is interviewed, restating the importance of
tongzhi citizenship, followed by a drag queen who echoed the Chairman’s views and
another participant who openly and proudly acknowledges his sexual identity as
tongzhi. The image then cuts back to the scene of the festival. Interestingly, people
whose images were captured were aware of the presence of the camera as some of
them directly look at the camera when walking by. This reflexive moment not only
confronts the gaze of the viewer in the here and now, but also tongzhi’s whole
history in mainstream media. As tongzhi could either come out to the public or keep
their sexual identities ambiguous, the camera loses its ability to equate being
“captured” on tape with being outed. The dissolving of the closet in the festival space
and a celebratory tone left no room for mainstream media to vilify tongzhi with their
typical ploys. Trying to balance its view and offer resolutions in the service of the
dominant interest, the reportage included two brief on-the-street interviews with
people who were presumably picked at random. Perhaps partially due to the
government’s sponsorship and partially due to their inexperience with the methods of
the media, the two interviewees confusingly answered the questions with a sense of

144
meekness. Although the second interviewee, a middle-aged taxi driver, revealed his
reservations about homosexuality, he admitted first that he was rather conservative
and traditional. The first interviewee referred to tongzhi as them/others, but
suggested that the festival shouldn’t be judged negatively because tongzhi have their
own beliefs, including those concerning sexuality. The interviewees’ lack of
assurance in their answers makes the interviews quite unconvincing, if they aim to
offer a criticism of the festival. The reportage ended with a positive image of the
rising rainbow flag that implies tongzhi’s brighter future.
The overall advantageous coverage in both the electronic and press media
during this period, of course, does not guarantee favorable representations hereafter.
As contemporary media scholars point out, TV is a field open rather than closed to
contestation and will always be pulled and pushed by a variety of forces and
influences. This description of two types of media events that rely on surveillance
cameras reveals the particular tactics that tongzhi have used to negotiate
representations with mainstream media. Since issues related to non-heterosexuality
have historically been viewed as illegitimate and excluded from public discussion,
the mainstream media could easily exploit this fact to repeatedly impose the negative
connotation of private-ness on tongzhi, especially through investigative narration and
the style of surveillance. By invoking the West and Western homosexual rights
discourse, the tongzhi community collaborates with different political parties to
successfully transport concerns of sexuality from the private to the public realm. The
invocation of Western discourse or partnerships with governments is not an outcome

145
of being culturally colonized or co-opted. On the contrary, both are techniques that
tongzhi apply to create a subaltern counterpublic in which the relation between
homosexuality and the public is re-situated, and the private-public divide that
mainstream media have relied upon is challenged and further dismantled.

A Queer Theater Space
Around the same time (1992) another kind of counterpublic against the
dominant media was developing. Its formulation relied heavily on exchanges of
private emotion instead of thorough deliberation as emphasized in the Fraserian
model. Fraser’s problematization of the public-private binarism in the bourgeois
public sphere centers on its personalizing and/or familiarizing of certain topics,
interests, and views that are traditionally excluded from public debate. In doing so,
the bourgeois public sphere is able to formally include but informally marginalize
subordinated social groups in order to prevent them from participating as peers.
56

Fraser’s treatment of the problematic categorization of issues, nevertheless, does not
completely free her from the private-public divide. An array of activities
disseminating within the counterpublics of the American feminist movement that
Fraser illustrates are all autonomously created, aiming to directly propagate the
feminist agenda to the public. This individualist and public-oriented style, however,
cannot fully account for tongzhi’s struggle, in which the collectivity plays an
indispensable role; the problem with coming out circumscribes the formation and
circulation of the counterdiscourse in a public setting.

146
I therefore coin the term “counterpublics of sensibility,” to conceptualize a
different kind of counterpublic constituted not by deliberations but by hunches, by
unspoken emotions that spread among and are intuitively shared by tongzhi. Through
the tacit exchange of feelings, this counterpublic of sensibility is able to transcend
the political impasse associated with public presence and solidifies a communal
identity that is unspeakable on the level of the individual. Even though a
counterpublic of sensibility is formulated in a rather informal way, it can still provide
a space for negotiating with the dominant public.
The best example of the formation of a counterpublic of sensibility is found
in tongzhi’s active attendance at film festivals, beginning with a series of Western
lesbian and gay/queer films at 1992’s Taipei Golden Horse International Film
Festival (TGHIFF). This unusual programming, in fact, did not deviate from the
institutional policy of TGHIFF; it is tongzhi’s innovative use of the festival and the
theater space that formulates a counterpublic of sensibility and from which a tongzhi
screen culture is created on both ends of exhibition and production. Media
scholarship’s recognition of the political implication of pleasure helps to identify this
emergence of a tongzhi screen culture that corresponds to a counterpublic that Fraser
theorizes in conventional political science.
57
In comparison with Fraser’s reliance on
tangible threads to construe a counterpublic, the implicitly resistant characteristics of
pleasure are more viable when understanding tongzhi’s often indirect approach to
formulating their identities.

147
Almost entirely dominated by mainstream Hollywood films, the film market
in Taiwan relegates non-commercial films to film festivals. First launched in 1986,
TGHIFF is by far the most essential venue that consistently screens foreign films
outside mainstream Hollywood production. A subdivision of the Oscar equivalent
Golden Horse Award and an autonomous organization, albeit a government agency,
TGHIFF celebrates critically acclaimed foreign and art-house films. Working within
these parameters, TGHIFF has established a discursive field signified by the contexts
of foreign countries—frequently the West—and art-house cinema. In this
institutional context of TGHIFF, it is understandable that the first launch of a large-
scale screening of Western lesbian and gay/queer films in 1992 initially meant to
reflect the blossoming of LGBT/queer film production in the West. The festival
classified dozens of Western lesbian and gay/queer films into sections such as “Gay
Desire,” ”Women in Love,” “New Queer Cinema,” etc. The list of films included
Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991); Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1991); Forbidden Love: The
Unnamed Stories of Lesbian Lives by Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie (1992);
and an introduction of Su Friedrich with her Damned if You Don’t (1987), Sink or
Swim (1990), and First Comes Love (1991), to name a few.
58
Along with these was a
series of films concerning the AIDS epidemic: Voices From the Front (Sandra
Elgear, Robyn Hutt, and David Meieran, 1991), Together Alone (P.J. Castellaneta,
1991), and Relax (Chris Newby, 1991).

148
According to film curator Karen Schwartzman, the specific objective of a
particular festival program is often subordinate to the overall long-term mission of
the sponsoring institution. As she points out,
Working within an institution, the curator most likely shares a point of view,
a perspective, with her or his respective group, a group that is more or less
explicit about its positions and goals…In any case, the work of
curating/programming and presenting films is long run…The selection
process and thematics are secondary to the primary activity of continuous
programming for a specific venue where the public trusts that consistent
criteria for selection will be employed.
59

Following Schwartzman’s analysis of curatorship, it is appropriate to say that the
exhibition of lesbian, gay/queer, and AIDS-related films at 1992’s TGHIFF did
correspond to the overarching goal of TGHIFF—“to open a window to see the
world…and allow viewers in Taiwan to keep up with worldwide filmdom.”
60
The
statement that the curator/programmer Christine T. H. Huang makes in the program
book illustrates how the programming went along with TGHIFF’s broad agenda:
Films centered on the theme Love in a Time of AIDS aimed to understand
how one comes to grips with the inexorable apprehension and uneasiness that
haunts the depths of one’s heart in this “disaster era” when the entire human
race is unnerved by a deadly pace in the spread of AIDS, whereas several
outstanding works that play on the homosexual theme attempted to analyze
the social and psychological predicaments endemic to the homosexual sub-
culture [of the West].
61

Yet the programming, recontextualized for presentation in Taiwan, implicitly
responded to the growing concerns about homosexuality in the early 1990s aroused
by the AIDS epidemic. Its involvement in the attempt to “approximate the original
text [the shown film] and its context of reception”
62
was made apparent by its
juxtaposition of the AIDS-related and lesbian and gay/queer films, which once again

149
suggests that tongxinglian would be visible only through their aberrancy. Even
though the organizers might have been aware of the peril of putting together these
two types of films—they consciously gave films involving AIDS its own
categorization—the programming as a whole still reveals a discursive closeness
between AIDS and homosexuality. Notably, not only did the section of Love in a
Time of AIDS receive the most attention from the press, the coverage of Tom Kalin’s
visit revolved around his opinions about AIDS prevention that he spoke about on a
film panel.
63
Paradoxically, it is this troubling attachment to the AIDS epidemic that
allows lesbian and gay films to be screened. The AIDS crisis did offer a productive,
though problematic venue to engage more progressive representations of lesbians
and gays. Similar to the surveillance programs, negative public imagery
accomplishes a positive entrée into public sphere visibility.
If concern for the AIDS epidemic proffered a justification to show tongzhi
film in an unreceptive society, several TGHIFF’s characteristics as an art film
festival unintentionally provided a mask through which tongzhi could attend
screenings of lesbian and gay/queer film less anxiously. Contained within the film
festival along with other foreign art films and promoted as such, the screening was
situated broadly rather than exclusively. As art film and films from the West are
often assumed to be more tolerant and open to contentious issues, it is
understandable why the screenings at TGHIFF led many to believe the films
provided positive and/or authentic representations of lesbians and gays when
compared to some Chinese language popular films that are criticized for unfairly

150
exploiting images of tongzhi for mass appeal.
64
With this general impression about
art film and films from the West, a tongzhi-friendly viewing atmosphere at TGHIFF
appeared to be taken for granted. As a structuring umbrella, the category of art film
from the West offered an ideal concealment to confuse the specificity that the
screening of tongzhi film might suggest to its attended audience. Since genre also
played a major role in its composition, the spectatorship of tongzhi film at TGHIFF
cannot be definitely marked by sexuality. Therefore, tongzhi audiences, especially
those who remained in the closet, could easily blend into the crowd and pass as art
film cinéphile without worrying about the insinuation.
The venue of the pubic movie theater where TGHIFF was held also mitigated
the explicitness about the attendees’ sexual identities. Screening in one of the
theaters at a multiplex along with other mainstream films makes it hard to pin down
attendees of a tongzhi film, not to mention identifying individual tongzhi audience
members from the crowd. Viewing a tongzhi film in this context does not oblige or
imply a coming out. This circumstance favors a less specified audience and better
accommodates the needs of Taiwan’s tongzhi since it allows them to bypass a
coming out that is associated with public appearance. To put it another way, TGHIFF
could be strategically reckoned to be a collective closet, and this is the aspect that
lured tongzhi, both outed and closeted, to flock to the theater to grasp the
representations of gays and lesbians that were still not widespread at that point.
The quality of TGHIFF, on the one hand, provides the function of a closet,
but on the other hand, it is a place for individual tongzhi to come out to the

151
community, and for the community to come out to society collectively. Since the
formation of a tongzhi community was in its rudiment state, unlike most international
gay and lesbian film festivals that commit to serve the community, it cannot be said
that TGHIFF was instituted to support an already-formed tongzhi community. To say
that the program targeted the particular demographic of tongzhi is imprecise. In other
words, rather than being inspired by the community, the screening is in part the fuel
that drove the formation of a tongzhi community. The well-attended screenings of
lesbian and gay/queer film at TGHIFF helped invoke a collective identity among
individual tongzhi viewers.
This sense of community was perceived and cultivated both inside and
outside the movie theater during the festival. In a special issue of Image Keeper
devoted to tongzhi film, several writers recalled how a sense of community rose to
the occasion. For instance, Miao-kou Xiao-hai-xian (a pseudonym) described the
scarcity and secrecy of this collective activity:
Watching a tongzhi film is like attending a “black mass” of a clandestine
religion. Darkness is the requisite to [see a film at] the theater…Fun spread to
every member of this minority group [as] they all believe in the same thing.
Laughter and sadness arose at the same moment when a double meaning was
detected.
65

According to the writer, despite being in the dark and unable to see the other
spectators, the viewing process can still conjure up a sense of community on the
emotional level by comprehending the same hints and sharing similar reactions.
Another writer, Lu Jiu (a pseudonym), recounted the scene at the box office outside
the theater:

152
I remember Chang Chuen Theater where the festival was held. Tongzhi
gathered at the box office, which looked like as if the New Park moved there.
It’s like an outdoor party too. Watching the film seemed to be secondary. The
most important thing is to meet new friends, and to greet old friends whom I
haven’t seen in ages. When attending the screening of Edward II, I ran into a
college friend.
66

Lu Jiu is probably right when s/he points out that watching the film was actually
secondary to partaking in the event. My own memory of TGHIFF also revolves
around the excitement of discovering a crowd of tongzhi whom I could identify with
through codified cultural signs or gestures, such as outfits, exchange of glances, etc.
In Lu Jiou’s scenario, without the forum of TGHIFF, Lu Jiu and her/his friend would
have remained in the closet to each other despite the fact that they have known each
other for a long time. Drawing an analogy between the box office space and the New
Park, Lu Jiu’s depiction underscores how this unplanned gathering at TGHIFF is
able to turn the public theater space into a somewhat protected community space for
coming out and meeting people. To find a community both inside and outside the
theater explains why attending screenings at TGHIFF is as alluring as watching the
films, if not more.
Along with this formation of a tongzhi community at TGHIFF is the
surfacing of a counterpublic of sensibility. In this public constituted by chance
encounters and tacit understanding, tongzhi unsettle the magnitude of coming out
that is generally considered to substantiate their existence. Just as they make
themselves visible but unlocatable at TGHIFF, they also complicate the meaning of
coming out. This counterpublic also underlies cinema’s quality of “heterotopia” in
their own (queer) terms. Defined as a space that encompasses oppositions such as

153
public/private, family/social, cultural/useful that dominate our lives and allows for
contestations, Foucault argues that a heterotopia discloses the collapse of
dichotomies and its property of emplacements “suspend, neutralize, or reverse the set
of relations.”
67
With tongzhi’s appropriation, theater space is simultaneously a closet
as well as a space for coming out. It is no longer a pure public space but a space that
allows two incompatible emplacements, defined along the private/public divide, to
coexist, a space whose definition hinges upon users and the particular context of use.
As another public parallel to the official public sphere, this tongzhi public can also
allow us to “recast our needs and identities, thereby reducing, although not
eliminating, the extent of our disadvantage in the official public spheres.”
68

This tongzhi public, constructed through the maneuvers of TGHIFF, could
also be thought of as a space of “withdrawal” (into a closet) and “regroupment”
(coming out within the community), one of the dual characters of a subaltern
counterpublic theorized by Fraser. Another effect of a counterpublic that is realized
in this tongzhi public is the formation of “a base for agitational activities directed
toward wider publics.” Beyond allowing collective visibility to tongzhi, it also
nourishes a tongzhi screen culture within mainstream society. The success of 1992’s
screening of lesbian and gay/queer film confirmed the commercial viability of
tongzhi film, which ensures the TGHIFF can continue to carry gay and lesbian/queer
film in subsequent years, even if the categorical term “tongzhi film” is not always
applied. Over the years, tongzhi-related film proves to be the most lucrative as it
ranks the highest in viewer preference nearly every single time in after-screening

154
surveys held by TGHIFF organizers.
69
This pronouncement of audience desire
constitutes a cry for further representations of tongzhi.
Expanding upon the tongzhi public formed at TGHIFF, a tongzhi screen
culture is created with tongzhi’s enthusiastic participation in moviegoing and the
increasing film production on tongzhi themes, and is further cultivated by the
interaction between the two. Witnessing the growth of tongzhi audiences,
commercial distributors immediately sought to profit from this newly formulated
demographic. Wei-Zhen Zeng, curator of the first Sound and Color Film Festival
(sheng-se ying-zhai), and former programmer of TGHIFF, made it clear that they
“hope to take over the loyalties of TGHIFF.”
70
Copying the model of TGHIFF,
commercial film festivals – most famously the Golden Field Film Festival (Jia-he
ying-zhai), Absolute Color Film Festival (jue-se yin-zhai), and Sound and Color Film
Festival, organized by distribution companies Golden Field (jia-he), Spring (chuen-
hui), and Era (nian-dai), respectively – began to slot tongzhi film in their festival
programs.
71
For example, 1996’s Golden Field Film Festival screened Lie Down
With Dogs (Wally White, 1994) and re-screened Go Fish, which was shown at
1994’s TGHIFF. Set it Off (E. Gray Gray, 1996), Bound (Andy Wachowski and
Larry Wachowski, 1996), and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Gus Van Sant, 1993)
appeared at 1997’s Absolute Color Film Festival.
72
Later, in 1998, the first and only
distributor solely dedicated to tongzhi film, Time Rainbow, was founded by Jiao
Xiong-Jian. According to the founder, films distributed by Time Rainbow include
Totally F***ed Up (Gregg Araki, 1993), Lilies aka Les feluettes (John Greyson,

155
1996), All Over Me (Alex Sichel, 1997), and Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s A Touch of
Fever (aka Hatachi no binetsu, 1993) and Like Grains of Sand (aka Nagisa no
Shindobaddo, 1995). Not merely was Western tongzhi film expansively imported,
Chinese Language tongzhi film also had a chance to be shown at the venues of
commercial film festivals. Chi Leung Jacob Cheung’s Intimates (aka Ji-sor, 1997),
popular in the nu tongzhi community, was first showcased at Golden Field’s A
Frame of Mind Film Festival (xin-qing yin-zhai).
Given commercial film festivals’ motivation for featuring tongzhi film, the
success of tongzhi film implies a commercial undertone. For distributors, making
profit is the ultimate goal of supplying a film. The format of a film festival is a
method to differentiate a niche market, and the theatrical screening, even briefly,
helps to sell videotape copies and multiply rebroadcasts on cable TV.
73
From the
standpoint of political economy, critic Gho Shan denounces commercial film
festivals as they capitalize on the dichotomy of mass (popular culture)/elite (art) to
commodify art film and instill bourgeois cultural taste. Following this logic, the
significant amount of tongzhi film at those commercial film festivals is no more than
a marketing strategy. Gho’s argument implies an apprehension that tongzhi film is
being reduced to a product from which tongzhi emerges solely as a subject of
consumption.
This critique reflects the subtle correlation between capitalism and the
outgrowth of the tongzhi community, but it falls short of its postulation of a binary
between commercialism and art, which downplays any resisting possibility within

156
commercial activities. For social groups that lack power and access to
representations as tongzhi, the screening of tongzhi film at commercial film festivals
proactively fulfills and evokes demand for (self-) representation. The outstanding
revenues of foreign tongzhi film at commercial film festivals confirms a market for
tongzhi film, and this affirmation convinces domestic production companies to
finance projects that feature the experiences of Taiwan’s tongzhi or that explore
homosexuality in the cultural context of Taiwan. Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993),
Vive L'Amour (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1994), and Murmur of Youth (Cheng-Sheng Lin,
1997), to name a few, are cases in point. Wedding Banquet, told from the perspective
of a Taiwanese American gay Wai-Tong, unravels the complexity between
homosexuality and patriarchal traditions in Chinese culture. While Vive L'Amour
combines urban isolation and evokes male-to-male desire through the character of
Xiao-Kang, Murmur of Youth presents an unexpected spark of same-sex intimacy
between two female friends living in Taipei.
While tongzhi film from the West is likely to provide a fancier lifestyle and
more liberal attitude towards lesbians, gays and queers, domestically produced
tongzhi film tries to present cultural elements in their depiction of tongzhi’s
experiences. Screenwriter Guang-Yuan Feng claimed that he wrote the script of
Wedding Banquet after extensive interviews with his tongzhi friends,
74
whereas
lesbian audiences could resonate with the disturbing feelings in the character Mei-Li
Lin in Murmur of Youth when a woman caresses her for the first time.
75
These films
not only diversify the field of representation dominated by Western images of gays,

157
lesbians, and queers, but they are also a starting point for dialogue among future
domestic productions. Furthermore, the awards that these films receive at
international film festivals help tongzhi-related issues gain social recognition as a
subject worthy of representations and discussion. This became most obvious when
The Wedding Banquet surprisingly won the Golden Berlin Bear at 1993’s Berlin
International Film Festival. This Western acknowledgment, in some way similar to
the visit of Bronski and Hunt, made the government officially support a tongzhi film
as President Deng-Hui Li officially received Ang Lee and watched a tongzhi film
with all his chamber members in the theater. Even though many critics condemn the
film’s compromise with heteropatriarchy, this critique probably contributed to the
state’s recognition of it. This path to recognition in some way resembles the
struggles of tongzhi, and what really matters is not tributes paid by the West and the
state but the space of and power for negotiations opened up by success as such, or
even failure.

Conclusion
Historically, the period of the early 1990s when historically situated
counterpublics of tongzhi emerge in the realm of the media plays an important role in
the media history of (nu) tongzhi, in that it marks a transition from a repressive phase
to a later era when (nu) tongzhi becomes a favorite subject matter in popular culture.
Theoretically, tongzhi’s struggle illuminates a different conceptualization of
subaltern counterpublics that is situated within and able to reflect cultural, social, and

158
political conditions of the society that it arises from. Attentive to obstacles that
tongzhi encounter, this chapter outlines various counterpublics constituted by tongzhi
in spaces that are created by media, on media, and for media. The struggle in the
realm of media is not simply to demand positive representations of tongzhi, though
this is one of the outcomes. Rather, media venues allow the emergence of a
community to happen with the involvement in the public. This exploration of various
tongzhi’s counterpublics generates the theorization of a new concept, the
“counterpublic of sensibility.” This new theory is necessary in that a Western model
of counterpublics based on public/private binarism cannot account for the
negotiations that tongzhi undertake in reaction to a particular set of private/public
relations regarding (homo) sexuality. This theorization suggests some direction for
resolving a seesaw problem that has concerned many non-Western lesbians, gays,
and queers who are caught between their native cultures and the West, where
resisting one power reciprocally affirms another.
Mindful of the trickiness of the coming-out rhetoric employed by mainstream
society, tongzhi’s negotiations with multiple powers by capitalizing on the inner
dynamics of the powers’ power struggle allow them to gain political visibility and
assert cultural existence without it solely being a consequence of coming out. And
because coming out discourse is deeply rooted in the Western ideology of
individualism, the ability to get around it to form a counterpublic demonstrates the
possibility of going beyond East/West binarism. This theorization proposes that a
shared identity of lesbians, gays, and queers with Westerners is not necessarily

159
incompatible with the assertion of a Taiwan/Chinese or even Asian identity, and vice
versa. Political struggle along the line of identity politics, though problematic, is still
possible for Taiwan’s tongzhi and others alike, as long as we can find an interpretive
framework to understand what identity means and how it formulates and functions as
a social, cultural, and political site. More importantly, as the negotiation of
counterpublics of sensibility does not aim to overcome other modes of subaltern
counterpublics but constantly struggles and negotiates with them, it is possible that
various counterpublics with different identity positions and having different effects
are able to interact and work together.

160
Chapter Three Endnotes

1. Chris Hogg, “Taiwan Moves to Allow Gay Unions,” BBC News, 28 Oct
2003. “Taiwan Moves to Abolish Death Penalty, Legalize Gay Marriages,” Agence
France-Presse, cited from “Gay Taiwan News & Reports 2003,” globalgayz.com,
http://www.globalgayz.com/taiwan-news03.html (accessed September 17, 2006).

2. Paul Wiseman, “In Taiwan, not much ado over gays saying ‘I don’t,” USA
Today, 5 Feb 2004. Martin Regg Cohn Martin, “Taiwan promises gay marriages.
Few here oppose rights including same-sex unions. Island’s tolerance rooted in
cultural, political realities,” Toronto Star, 8 Feb 2004.

3. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique
of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig
Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press), 123.

4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix.

5. Mei-Li Zheng and Yuxuan Aji (a pseudonym), “Happiness is Approaching:
A Retrospective of the Social History of Taiwan’s Homosexuals,” Unitas: A
Literature Monthly 13, no. 4 (Feb 1997): 92.

6. The fourth network, Formosa Television, was founded in 1997, following
TTV, CTV, and CTS, and is the only private owned network.

7. Whether everyone there was lesbians is uncertain, but the narration of the
report implied everyone in the bar was undoubtedly a lesbian.

8. Qu did not specify from which newspapers she read the news, but the report
by Pei-Ling Zhuang from United Daily News, for example, questioned what lesbians
really looked like: “There was no one around the booth [of Between Us], and
therefore people can’t see the real appearance of them.” United Daily News, for
example, covered the report, “Yesterday’s ‘Three Eight’ [Women’s Day] differed
from last year’s—Women’s groups advocated human rights as they gave out
women’s napkins, and homosexuals [female homosexuals] passed on flyers. The
feeling of ‘I [wpmen] love Women’ can be seen in various faces,” United Daily
News, 9 Mar 1992, Edition 5.

9. Joshua Gamson, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual
Noncomformity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

161

10. Lesbian activists’ decision to appear publicly demands that they, though
unwillingly, negotiate with cultural stereotypes, and in this case, any attempt to
contain them within the stereotypes.

11. John Fiske, Media Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), 217-218.

12. Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television
News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Regan Legacy (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1994), 58.

13. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 201.

14. For example, August 6, 2004, Set TV’s investigative news program showed
images of a lesbian couple in a neighborhood park from behind without having
permission and agreement from the couple.

15. Tarleton Gillespie, “Narrative Control and Visual Polysemy: Fox
Surveillance Specials and the Limits of Legitimation.” Velvet Light Trap 45 (2000):
40.

16. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse
Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 123.

17. Nightly Shadowing: New Trend: Drastically Increasing Population of
Lesbians in Taiwan (produced by Zhang Ya-Qin), broadcast on Taiwan Television
on March 18,1992.

18. Huang-Liang Chu, “’I know I am a Girl. Pen Mei-Chen Said: I was
trapped!” China Times, 20 Mar 1992.

19. Juan-Fen Zhang, Sisters Trespassing the Wall: A Study of The Nu Tongzhi
Movement (Taipei: Unitas Literature, 1998), 62.

20. Zhang, 62.

21. Zhang, 58-59.

22. Gillespie, 37.

23. “The Case of Pen Ended with Reconciliation Outside Court,” Central Daily
News, 06 May 1992.

162

24. Antonio Chao, “To Come Out or Not? This is a Question of Darkness,”
Stir/Shao Tung: initiative issue (1996 January): 63-64.

25. Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage, 1990), 67-68.

26. Foucault, 59.

27. Wei-Cheng R. Chu, “Coming Out or Not: Postcolonial Autonomy and \
Gay \Activism in Taiwan.” Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 30 (June
1998): 42.

28. Wah-Shan Chou, “Homosexuality and Cultural Politics of Tongzhi in
Chinese Society,” in Gay and Lesbian Asia: Culture, Identity, Community, eds.
Gerard Sullivan and Peter A. Jackson (Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, 2001),
33.

29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1990), 71.

30. Sedgwick, 71.

31. Chu, 45.

32. Fran Martin has a detailed reading of this trope in contemporary Taiwanese
literature in her artile, “Surface Tension: Reading Productions of Tongzhi in
Contemporary Taiwan,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no.1 (2000):
62.

33. Chu, 51.

34. Juan-Fen Zhang, “Gui-da-qian,” Womenet, http://www.womenet.org.tw/
articles/ghost.html (accessed July 15, 2006).

35. Ren-Mei Po, Ci-Xiu Wang, and Yu-Jing Jian, “You Can’t Peek ‘Between
Us’,” Min Sheng Bao, 12 Aug 1998, Edition 10.

36. Xiao-Fan Sheng notes in her comment titled “Sensitive News Subjects, To
be all the More Difficult” that “[c]oncerning privacy, news programs often use a
mosaic effect to cover the faces of people who are underage or do not want to be out
in the public,” Min Sheng Bao 19 Dec 1994, Edition 12.

37. Chu, 46.

163

38. Judith Mayne, “The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and
Feminist Criticism.” New German Critique 23 (1981): 33.

39. The discussion here is limited to how the image is constructed and how the
mainstream media altered their attitude towards tongzhi in their reports. The debate
as to how and whether tongzhi has gained the status of citizenship on the lawful or
political level is not a concern here.

40. Pheng Cheah, “Posit(ion)ing Human Rights in the Current Cultural
Conjuncture,” in Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture and the Public Sphere,
eds. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Larry E. Smith, and Wimal Dissanayake (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999), 11-42.

41. Shane Phelan, “Queer Liberalism,” The American Political Science Review
94, no. 2 (2000): 431-442.

42. Baden Offord and Leon Cantrell, “Homosexual Rights as Human Rights in
Indonesia and Australia.” Journal of Homosexuality 40 (2001): 233-252. Pheng
Cheah also discusses how Asian countries defend themselves against international
human rights scrutiny by criticizing Northern or Western imperialist imposition and
by reaffirming the principles of respect for national sovereignty and territorial
integrity.

43. The rising of the DPP along with other social movements propelled
Taiwan’s democratization. Shui-Bian Chen’s election as mayor of Taipei in 1994
suggests a step forward of this political modernization.

44. The literary representation in Xian-Yong Bai’s reputed realist novel Crystal
Boys depicts the underground life of dissident gay men who are active in the New
Park at nights.

45. An uprising happened in Taiwan beginning on February 28, 1947 after
Kuomintang’s takeover of Taiwan from the Japanese colonial government after the
end of WWII. It was triggered by a fatal conflict between a female cigarette vendor
and an anti-smuggling officer of the Kuomintang government. This single dispute
between an islander and Mainlander soon turned into a civil disorder and open
rebellion against the military government of Kuomintang. The insurgence was
suppressed by the Kuomintang government and this incident and details of it had
long been removed from education until recently.

46. Miao-Ying Jiang, “Tong-Zhen: The New Park is Irreplaceable,” China
Times, 13 Nov 1996, Edition 3.

164

47. Burrington, 108.

48. Burrington, 108.

49. Chen won the presidential election two years after losing the mayor
election in 1998.

50. Ming-Xin Huang, “Tongzhi Civil Movement Will be Present Next Week,”
China Times, 16 Aug 1999, Edition 19. It is ironic that the most notorious legacy that
the Clinton Administration left is his “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

51. Xin-I Qu, “Wish the Rainbow Flag Dance in the Sky of Taipei City,” E-
newspaper of Tomorrow (ming ri bao), http://www.ttimes.com.tw/2000/09/01/e
_life/20000009010390.html (accessed October 20, 2006).

52. “History of Sexuality,” Society for Scientific Study of Sexuality in Taiwan,
http://www.sssst.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=98 (accessed October 25,
2006).

53. Gender/Sexuality Rights Association Taiwan (4 September 2000),
http://www.hotline.org.tw (accessed October 13, 2006).

54. Chu, 45.

55. Ya-Hui Zhang, Cti Television.

56. Fraser, 118-119.

57. For example, the discussion of John Fiske and Lawrence Grossberg in
Media Making: Mass Media in a Popular Culture, eds. Lawrence Grossberg et al.
(London: Sage, 2005).

58. These sections were titled as follows: “Queer Bash Back,” “New Queer
Cinema,” “Gay Desire,” “Girls will be Girls,” “Queer and Experimental,” “Queers
on the Road,” ”They’ve Come a Long Way,” “Women in Love,” “Decode a
Stigma,” “Love in a Time of AIDS,” and “How AIDS Activism is Born.”

59. Karen Schwartzman, “National Cinema in Translation: The Politics of Film
Exhibition Culture.” Wide Angle 16 (1995): 86

60. The Executive Committee of Taipei Golden Horse Interntional Film
Festival, Taipei Golden Horse International Film Festival, http://archive.goldenhorse.
org.tw/2005/ch/at_1.php (accessed September 9, 2006).

165

61. Christine T.H. Huang, “A Screen Full of Wonders: Message from the
Festival Organizer,” The Booklet of 1992 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (Taipei:
Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee, 1991), 12.

62. Schwartzman, 70.

63. Ming-Ren Chu, “Director of Swoon talked about the AIDS again,” Min
Sheng Bao 04 Dec 1992, Edition 10; 29 Nov 1992.

64. For example, Girls Without Tomorrow (David Lam, 1992), The Naked
Killer (Clarence Fok, 1992), and Gigolo and Whore II (Andy Chin Wing-Keung,
1992).

65. Miao-kou Xiao-hai-xian (pseudonym), “People Who Are Hungry Can
Always Convince Themselves,” Imagekeeper 76 (August 1996): 79.

66. Lu Jiu (pseudonym), “Tongzhi Should Self-Empower,” Imagekeeper 76
(August 1996): 81.

67. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed.
James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), 181.
Foucault mentions cinema in this essay as a form of heterotopia, for it juxtaposes
incompatible three-dimensional space and two-dimensional screen in a single real
place.

68. Fraser, 123.

69. Sheng-Luen Yu, “Xiong-Jian Jiao Made Homosexual Films To Salvage the
Box Office Downfall,” The Journalist Weekly 564 (28 Dec 1997- 3 Jan 1998): 98.

70. Gho Shan, “The Rise and Operation of Commercial Film Festivals—A
Political Economy Analysis.” Film Appreciation 113 (Fall 2002): 47.

71. This trend continued until 2000.

72. The translation of film titles makes obvious the attempt of these
commercial film festivals to target tongzhi audiences. Lie Down With Dogs was
renamed literally as “the seduction of zero (referring to bottom in English context)
by one (referring to top in English context)” and Go Fish as “my girlfriend’s
girlfriend.”

72. Gho Shan, 47.

166

73. Gho Shan, 47.

74. Xiao-Wen Yu, “Constant Change Between Male and Female, Constant
Debate Between Right and Wrong,” The Journalist Weekly 314 (14-20 March 1993):
93.

75. Way Way, Way Way’s Home, http://www.wayway.idv.tw/m-beauty.htm.
Way Way is a well-known nu tongzhi activist.

167
CHAPTER FOUR

Melodrama Wanted: Contemporary Nu Tongzhi Representations

Since the success of 1992’s Taipei Golden Horse International Film Festival,
images of foreign lesbians, gays, and queers have become gradually more common
on big movie screens in Taiwan. Together with other forms of domestic cultural
production concerning tongzhi, the cultural visibility of tongzhi has increased
considerably and expanded to include domestic film and television productions.
Looking at three contemporary television dramas that feature a nu tongzhi story—A
Dance with Two Girls (a.k.a. Tong nu zhi wu, dir. Ruei-Yuan Cao, 2002), Voices of
Waves (a.k.a. Na nian xia tian de lan zhen, dir. Xiu-Yu Chen, 2002), and the first nu
tongzhi TV drama series, The Unfilial Daughter (a.k.a. Ni Nu, 2001)—this chapter
examines the mainstream media’s problematic configuration of female same-sex
love and nu tongzhi identity and the ways in which audience participation negotiates
and subverts the media’s portrayal and construction of nu tongzhi images.
The recent growth of media representation of nu tongzhi tends to be regarded
as progress in nu tongzhi’s cultural struggles. Such a celebratory tone confines the
struggle over cultural visibility to an accumulation of facts and underestimates the
complex undertone of mainstream acceptance. A close textual analysis of these
television representations dissects the ideology behind contemporary media’s
construction of an “adequate nu tongzhi image” that is believed to capture, if not
please, the public’s imagination of nu tongzhi. Examining how the space of girls’
schools is privileged as the site of placing same-sex desire and developing nu tongzhi

168
identity, I suggest that the prevalent evocation of the ambiguity between a nu tongzhi
relationship and a romantic friendship in girls’ schools in contemporary television
representations is both productive and problematic. While this approach reflects how
romantic friendship, particularly in girls’ schools, helps to smuggle same-sex desire
into a rigorous patriarchal society, it also risks reinforcing popular assumptions about
the circumstantiality of female same-sex love or even nu tongzhi relationships as
determined by one’s social environment and only a phase.
Yet, the limitations of this “adequate nu tongzhi image,” which suggests that
a nu tongzhi relationship is reducible to a romantic friendship, are negotiated by the
active participation of nu tongzhi viewers. Detailing the nu tongzhi reception of The
Unfilial Daughter, the second part of this chapter looks at audience discourse
circulated on a discussion board dedicated to the drama on the website of the
production company Taiwan Television Enterprise (TTV), the only fan site
associated with locally produced TV dramas with a nu tongzhi theme. In this online
community participants share their individual stories and concerns, creating a
collective self-expression in tandem with the televisual representation of the same
subject. The social dimension of audience, wherein the hegemonic meaning of the
text is undermined and reinterpreted on the level of self-identity, supersedes the
textual level of the media productions and suggests a different kind of cultural and
media visibility of nu tongzhi. As the attribute of anonymity on computer-mediated
communication allows (potential) nu tongzhi to interact with others without exposing
their real identities, this fan site offers nu tongzhi audiences/users who do not possess

169
cultural capital to overcome the coming-out dilemma (see Chapter Three) in order to
participate in public discussions.
The reason that only The Unfilial Daughter has a fan site, which has
remained active after the show ended couple years ago, lies in its employment of
popular melodrama, rather than a more alternative style as in A Dance with Two
Girls and Voices of Waves. This use of the genre of domestic melodrama generates
nu tongzhi viewers’ sense of a consonance between representations and the
complexity and conflict in their own lives. As Peter Brooks agues in his analysis of
the melodramatic imagination, melodrama “makes the world we inhabit one charged
with meaning, one in which interpersonal relations…must be carefully nurtured,
judged, handled as if they mattered.”
1
This emphatic acknowledgement of “the tragic
structure of feeling”
2
in everyday existence, invites viewers to invest their daily life
struggles with social power and patriarchal authority within The Unfilial Daughter.
Albeit a recapitulated glorification of girls’ school romance, the generic specificities
of melodrama makes The Unfilial Daughter, both narratively and formalistically,
ideologically contradictory. Reading audience responses of The Unfilial Daughter
further illustrates how nu tongzhi audiences engage with the representations and
formulate oppositional readings against the pre-constituted message embedded in the
story. Nu tongzhi audiences’ sharing of their personal stories, as a viewing response
to the representational account, constitutes multiple narratives of nu tongzhi’s life
stories, which helps to attract more users to the fan site.

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Notwithstanding the great popularity of The Unfilial Daughter among nu
tongzhi audiences, cultural critics and nu tongzhi activists have ignored it for its
aesthetic and ideological backwardness. As the growth of the nu tongzhi community
has been academic- and/or avant-garde- oriented, the neglect of The Unfilial
Daughter once again reveals an elitist tradition that has configured the progression of
Taiwan’s nu tongzhi community. Nevertheless, the dynamic interaction among nu
tongzhi viewers/users converts a space intended for the drama’s entire audiences into
an online nu tongzhi community space. Moreover, as the accessibility of a popular
narrative fulfills “a deep-rooted demand for participation,”
3
as Pierre Bourdieu notes
about the taste of working class audiences, The Unfilial Daughter is able to captivate
audiences across multiple social levels. As a result, the spontaneous nu tongzhi
community on the fan site diversifies the larger, elitist nu tongzhi community
formulated along with the tongzhi activism. Through the vantage point of audience
reception, this chapter redirects critical attention to suggest the social and cultural
significance of mainstream melodrama in nu tongzhi’s cultural struggles. This
comparison of political efficacy between the melodramatic serial and the other two
“quality” television programs urges a reevaluation of the productivity and
potentiality of popular nu tongzhi cultural products in contemplating the politics of
nu tongzhi representation and its relationship to the identity formation of nu tongzhi.

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Girls’ Schools: A Heterotopia
In contemporary television representations of nu tongzhi a girls’ school is
frequently used as a site where same-sex romantic friendships are encouraged and a
nu tongzhi relationship can be cultivated. On one hand, situating female same-sex
love in girls’ schools reflects nu tongzhi’s real-life experience proven by
ethnographic studies of the identity formation of nu tongzhi. On the other hand, it
also conforms to the popular perception of tentative same-sex infatuation in girls’
schools as transference of sparse contact with the opposite sex. To put it differently,
the reappearing and exclusive motif of girls’ schools in depicting female
homoeroticism undercuts the subversive particularity of girls’ school in sheltering
female homoeroticism and fostering nu tongzhi identity in hetero-dominant society.
Taking on the commonly known correlation between girls’ school and female
homoeroticism in Taiwan, such arrangement implicitly suggests that female
homoeroticism exists only in a sex-segregated environment and is thus doomed to be
a fantasy.
It is significant that we understand the social and cultural role of girls’
schools in Taiwan in order to unravel the problematic construction of “adequate nu
tongzhi representations” in contemporary television dramas. The tradition of girls’
schools in the cultural context of Taiwan can be traced back to the Japanese colonial
period, when upper class Taiwanese women were sent to schools to be nurtured as
female colonized citizens of Japan.
4
Gender inequality and difference were the
underlying principles in these institutions. Women, newcomers to modern education,

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were not given the same resources and privileges as their male counterparts. The all-
female environment of girls’ schools ensured that women were exposed to and
received only what was allowed by a patriarchal society. Through home economics
courses such as sewing and knitting, women’s education under colonial rule trained
women to be dutiful wives and loving mothers, as well as loyal nationals to the
colonial government.
5
The tradition of girls’ schools continued after the end of
Japan’s colonial rule. Probably informed by Western sexology translated and spread
in mainland China in the early Republican era, the educators and policy makers of
the new ruling party Kuomintang, who sought refuge in Taiwan after the Chinese
Civil War, expressed concerns about same-sex love (tongxin ai) in girls’ schools.
Especially in the fields of psychology and education, the issue of same-sex love in
girls’ schools was constantly discussed, though it was framed as if such affection
was only circumstantial.
The ambiguity of a girls’ school – a space that systematically promotes
hetero-normative ideology but meanwhile yields same-sex intimacy – is affirmed in
sociological studies. As Qiao-Ting Zhang points out in her ethnographic research
about how the environment of the schools impact the rise of nu tongzhi subjectivities,
the design of a girls’ school aims to regulate pre-adult sexuality, along with the
tradition of coaching girls to be proper women who conform to gender-specific
social decorum:
Single-sex high schools segregate and discipline bodies of male and female
teenagers… With centralized supervision, students are obliged to devote all
their time and energy studying in order to obtain higher cultural (and
educational) capital in the future…Teenage girls are regarded as “inactive,

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naïve, easy to be deceived, and therefore need to be protected”… and their
bodies are under patriarchal control enacted by the family-substituted
school.
6

As an outcome of this concept, almost every top high school at each geographic hub
in Taiwan – top in terms of admission rates to prominent universities – is sex-
segregated. According to Zhang, by forcefully prohibiting contact between boys and
girls and encouraging self-enhancement, the control of sexuality administered by
girls’ schools deliberately contrives to prepare students for upper social status and
consequently, well-matched marriages. Preoccupied with heterosexuality, the
meticulous control and protection of heterosexuality nevertheless generates an
environment for same-sex bonding, which propels same-sex desire. Many of Zhang’s
nu tongzhi interviewees agree that a girls’ school is more convenient and clandestine
and thus safer than home and less menacing than a hetero-oriented college. Zhang
concludes that in contrast to real-life society, a girls’ school is “relatively ideal as it
is free from compulsory heterosexuality, a heterotopia where same-sex love and lust
can be cultivated and memorized.”
7

The above accounts explicate the commonness of a close correlation between
the space of a girl's school and female same-sex desire. This phenomenon is adopted
by contemporary television when producing dramas on the nu tongzhi theme. In both
A Dance with Two Girls and Voices of Waves, the space of a girls’ school is visually
deployed as a “heterotopia” — a single real place that juxtaposes both heterosexual
discipline and homosexual flows. Foucault defines utopia as an unreal space, or a site
with no real place, and argues that “heterotopia” is “an effectively enacted utopia,” in

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which “the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found
within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed.”
8
Using
looking at a mirror as an example, Foucault claims that the mirror demonstrates a
mixed and joint experience between utopias and heterotopias. The mirror functions
as a heterotopia since it makes the place one occupies when looking at oneself in the
glass both real and unreal. It makes it real because the mirror does exist in reality,
and through it a counteraction against one’s absence in the virtual space is produced.
But, only through the existence of the unreal, virtual place can the real place be
established. A girls’ school also exists as a heterotopia as it juxtaposes the
contradictory spaces for hetero-patriarchy and homoeroticism in a single real place.
It is a physical place, and yet through female students’ imagination, the scheme of
the heterosexual environment is transformed into a homoerotic setting and the real
space becomes an enacted utopia that enables same-sex desires.
Through the use of motifs, editing, framing, and sound-image mixing, the
visual constellation in A Dance with Two Girls and Voices of Waves represents the
particular standing of girls’ schools as a heterotopia that encompasses female
homoeroticism. Adapted from an award-winning short story of the same title written
by Li-Juan Cao, A Dance with Two Girls depicts the entanglement between two
female friends, Shu-Xin Tong and Yuan Zhong, from Tong’s point of view. Being in
the same class, Tong and Zhong quickly develop a romantic friendship full of
“audacious intimacy,” in Tong’s words, but Tong’s qualms about their unusual
closeness causes her to withdraw. After graduating from high school, Zhong

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becomes pregnant as a result of her curiosity about what it feels like to make love
with a man. When the girls reconvene in college, Tong is involved in a heterosexual
relationship while participating in Zhong’s colorful bi-sexual life as a platonic friend.
However, Tong is relentlessly haunted by her memory of her intimacy with Zhong.
On the day Tong delivers her wedding invitation to Zhong, Tong confronts the issue
of same-sex sex with Zhong, who is preparing to leave for New York. Yet, this
confrontation neither alters any decisions nor solves the complex issues between
them, as neither of them dares to be responsible for diving into a nu tongzhi life.
Analyzing how the space of the girls’ school is used to convey the intimate
interaction between Tong and Zhong allow us to understand how the space is ideal
for representing adequate nu tongzhi images. The enactment of a homosexual utopia
in a girls’ school is visually demonstrated through the motif of a flower and editing.
Take one of the early scenes from the drama for instance. Following the bus
sequence in which Tong and Zhong first meet, the plot moves to a scene in a
classroom where Tong watches Zhong play basketball from a distance. After this
shot of Zhong from Tong’s point of view, it cuts back to Tong. Zhong later enters the
frame, leaving Tong a flower through the window aside Tong’s seat. Here, the
flower, a conventional symbol of romance, is constantly employed to convey
Zhong’s same-sex affection for Tong. Not a bouquet, but a wildflower that Zhong
randomly picks up on campus, the flower implies the everydayness of their love that
is nurtured in and by the environment of the girls’ school. The editing that cuts from
a long shot to an immediate presence moreover reveals a spatial convenience that

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once again ascertains the benefit of a girls’ school to their growing desire for each
other.
Bearing homoerotic fantasy within its physical space, a girls’ school, as a
heterotopia, constructs a space “as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged” for
female same-sex desire, as opposed to other spaces that are represented as
“disorganized, badly-arranged, and muddled.”
9
Home, the nucleus of heterosexuality,
is contrarily positioned as void and dysfunctional and even its breakdown cannot
destroy its heterosexual structure. This lucid contrast is represented by two separate
but parallel sequences when Tong receives a kiss from Zhong, with drastically
different reactions each time. When Zhong kisses Tong for the first time on her
forehead at the school’s swimming pool, Tong does not seem to be shocked,
especially since Zhong is motivated by Tong’s spontaneous soft touch on her arm.
Interestingly however, when it occurs the second time at Zhong’s home while
playing hide and seek, Tong thrusts Zhong away with abhorrence. The mixed
message delivered by Tong’s inconsistent reaction to Zhong’s kisses corresponds to
the change of location from a girls’ school to a real life setting. Here, as nobody is
around the house, Tong’s alarming consciousness of their behavior is not triggered
by a family member’s surveillance but by home’s inability to encompass non-
heterosexual transgression. Home is unable to sustain such a joint experience and can
only remind Tong of how awkward their kiss is in a hetero-reality. On the contrary,
because the space of a girls’ school permits homoerotic utopian fantasy within a
heterosexual structure, Tong feels safe enough not to hide her blatant intimacy with

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Zhong in school. Here, the difference between girls’ schools and home lies in how
the space facilitates and supports a metamorphosis of a relationship, from friendly
amity to romantic friendship, from romantic friendship to sexually charged nu
tongzhi relationships.
In Voices of Waves, the heterotopic characteristics of a girl’s school are made
evident by the juxtaposition between the expressions of homoerotic desire and the
disciplinary nature of the hetero-normative space of girls’ schools. Starting with an
out-of-context image of the character Man-Li Lu dreaming about herself in a high
school uniform playing on the beach after dark, the story tells of Lu’s eventual
realization of the crush that her deceased high school classmate Yi-Jun Shen had for
her over the years. This realization further causes Lu to reevaluate her relationship
with her boyfriend and her heterosexual life and identity as a whole. Lu begins to
befriend Shen in their sophomore year when they are assigned to the same class. This
romantic friendship eventually vanishes after a bicycle accident as Shen interprets
this as a punishment for her deviant desire for Lu.
From the outset of the narrative, the space of a girls’ school is represented as
simultaneously performing heterosexual discipline and allowing same-sex desire.
During the scene in which Lu sees Shen from a short distance for the first time, Shen
is berated by a moderator for wearing shorts but not the uniform skirt. When Shen’s
boyish deviance is rebuked, it triggers Lu’s curiosity about her. As Lu’s narration
reveals, “She [Shen] is different from the rest of us. She never tucks in her shirt and
rarely puts on the skirt. I don’t know how to describe it, but there is something

178
special about her, other than the way she wears uniform.” A similar theme appears at
a later point in the narrative. Lu’s interest in Shen is triggered again when she notices
Shen arguing with her partner Lin Long after they are questioned by the moderator
about the rumor of them being homosexuals.
The placement of a homoerotic fantasy within a girls’ school is played out in
Voices of Waves through one of the central motifs, a heart-shaped graphic. Prior to
the scene described above, we see a static shot of the bathroom wall upon which
Shen and Lin’s names are written within a heart shape. This implies the rumor of
their homosexuality. Along with this visual clue is Lu’s explanatory monologue:
“Some people like to use bathrooms as a means to fabricate scandals, even if they
know that is calumnious.” As this particular graphic is revealed at the end to
represent Shen’s secret affection for Lu, its first appearance on the bathroom wall,
following the moderator’s inquisition, implicitly connotes both the repression and
productivity of the space of a girls’ school.
10
Even though same-sex love is officially
prohibited, Shen is nevertheless able to air her feelings and Lin can defend their
relationship against the moderator’s charge.
Similar to A Dance with Two Girls, when the flow of same-sex desire is
located in girls’ schools, spaces outside the school, such as the home, are used to
represent the rupture and/or termination of the relationship. At key moments, the
growing romantic friendship between Shen and Lu is interrupted by a symbolic
heterosexual intervention. After a beach scene in which Lu fails to notice Shen’s
implicit hint about her “unconventional” type of love, Lu walks Shen home and

179
chitchats in Shen’s room. When Lu playfully bends Shen over, trying to snatch her
wallet, anticipation for sexual contact is built up for both audiences and Shen alike.
This spontaneous passion nevertheless is deflected and impeded by a passive
presence of heterosexuality as the sound of sobs suddenly cuts in, compelling Shen
to leave. Taken from Shen’s point of view, the subsequent shot follows the sobs and
reveals Shen’s mother lamenting her divorce. In contrast to previous school scenes
that suggest the spatial inclusiveness of girls’ schools, this sequence represents the
claustrophobic home that permits no room for non-heterosexual activities.
The scene of the bicycle accident reinforces this distinction between a girls’
school and other spaces in terms of the former’s ability to accommodate
homoeroticism. When Shen loses control of her bicycle and falls to the ground, the
camera interestingly does not tilt down to capture the fall but remains on the same
height shooting a bleak landscape. This unconventional aesthetic choice uses
emptiness to substitute for the dramatic moment, and deliberately disrupts the
narrative flow of the sequence. In doing so, it creates the effect of alienation in order
to visually underscore the incompatibility between same-sex love and the
surrounding space. Contrarily, there is no such conflict between the narrative and
spatial representation in previous sequences that depict the burgeoning feelings
between Shen and Lu within the heterotopic space of their schools. Following the
rupture structured by the formalistic operation, a sense of despair is induced and
illuminated by the following scene at the hospital where Shen overhears hostile

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criticism of herself from Lu’s mother and other friends, which leads her to withdraw
from her relationship with Lu.
In their treatment of space with respect to same-sex love, both A Dance with
Two Girls and Voices of Waves optimize the idea of heterotopia in girls’ schools
while minimizing the potentiality of other social spaces to be heterotopias. This
unbalanced investment in discovering homoeroticism problematically ratifies the
popular belief that female same-sex love does, can, and will only transpire in girls’
schools. An interrogation of this unevenness is not to suggest any other kind of
adequate representation; instead, it hopes to nuance the constraints of this approach
even if it claims to be loyal to real-life nu tongzhi experiences.

From Same-Sex Love to Nu Tongzhi Identities
The privilege and drawbacks of situating female same-sex love/nu tongzhi
relationships exclusively within girls’ schools reflects the social and cultural
circumstances that nourish homoeroticism. As early as the 1910s, same-sex love in
exclusively female schools had been the center of intellectual discussions concerning
non-heterosexual behaviors and relationships. This historical background helps to
explain why female homoeroticism has remained tolerable in girls’ schools and nu
tongzhi relationships and identities allowed to flourish there. Traditional
pervasiveness of same-sex bonding in girls’ schools, due to centuries of sex
segregation, drew the attention of Chinese intellectuals to Western discourses of
homosexuality in girls’ schools, which were introduced to Republican China in the

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1910s as part of an overall project of Westernization and modernization.
Intermingling with their comprehension of close same-sex ties in a Chinese cultural
context, Chinese intellectuals had divergent views on this thorny issue of female
same-sex love. Some intellectuals highlighted the spiritual aspect of same-sex
bonding and regarded it as deeply satisfying, valuable, and ennobling. But others
agreed with Western sexology—in particular, Havelock Ellis’ medical theory of
homosexuality—and regarded same-sex relationships as abnormal.
11

The divergent views on female same-sex love reflect an interchange between
Chinese and Western ideologies of female homosexuality. This can be seen, for
example, in Guang-Tan Pan’s translation of Ellis’ Psychology of Sex (1933), in
which he meticulously footnotes East-West parallels, as Sang argues, for “clarifying,
justifying, or criticizing the prevalence of same-sex passionate attachment in Chinese
schools (including colleges).”
12
Mainstream psychological and educational
discourses about female same-sex love that circulated in Taiwan after Kuomintang’s
takeover also largely complied with Western sexology while permitting innocuous
digression rendered by cultural difference. For example, when writing about youth
sexual education, I-Men Cai stresses,
Intense affection for the opposite sex is the most manifest aspect of
puberty… Our social tradition and custom, however, often blocks giving
vent to this feeling, which entails love with same-sex people. This is a
compensatory love. As long as one does not go over the boundary to involve
sex, it is not serious.
13
(my emphasis)

In Cai’s view, same-sex love in the girls’ school is caused by the sex-segregated
environment and is thus situational, provisional, and spiritual. It is thus different

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from what is understood as homosexuality. Cai’s understanding again demonstrates a
cross-cultural integration seen in the debate in the early Republican era.
This similarity in cultural attitudes and thinking allows for a comparison of
representations of female same-sex love between May Fourth literature (the
modernist literature movement)
14
and contemporary media representations of
Taiwan, which illustrate how the conceptualization of sexual identity, a modern
configuration informed by Western identity politics, influences the portrayal of
homoeroticism in girls’ schools. Female same-sex love in May Fourth literature
emphasizes its spirituality to counter the oppression of compulsory hetero-patriarchy,
whereas the take on nu tongzhi in contemporary media representations avoids
tackling sex because a depiction of sex would be linked to a new mode of sexuality.
In the 1920s and 1930s, May Fourth literature written by Chinese New Women
writers claims that the receptive sentiment towards same-sex love between women at
girls’ schools constitutes a specific literary genre, “women’s homoerotic school
romance.”
15
Emphasizing the emotional facet of female same-sex love and its
detachment from physicality, the explicit depiction of homoerotic desire in May
Fourth novels, as Sang argues, aspires “to establish alternative families and lifestyles
in a time of social change” against patriarchy in traditional Chinese society.
16
The
idealism offered by female same-sex love coincides with a feminist agenda at that
time of resisting marriage and childbearing in favor of being independent and non-
domestic. Explicit corporeal eroticism in female same-sex love – a term summoned
by New Women writers to refer to romantic friendship – was thus absent in this

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feminist school of thinking, not to mention its association with the Western medical
notion of perversion.
In Lu Yin’s Old Acquaintances by the Seaside (1923) and Lishi’s Dairy
(1923), the vivid description of emotional longing drives off physical desires or
contacts between its protagonists. The protagonist Lusha and her female friends in
Old Acquaintances express a desire for life-long female same-sex commitment by
building a house by the sea where they can live and work together. Physical sex is
lacking in this portrayal of an ideal women’s space and Lusha eventually falls in love
with a man, perhaps a reaction to the frustrated realization that their ideal is
“impossible to realize.”
17
Feminist proclivity for this same-sex love, though argued
by Sang as a lesbian spirituality, is evidenced when Lusha’s classmates comment
that, “Marriage would make a waste of her talents.” In a similar vein, in Lishi’s
Diary, Lishi’s aloofness to a heterosexual relationship is linked to, if not the result
of, one of her friends’ complaints about the truth of marriage. Other literary works
that pertain to bodily intimacy between women, including Ling Shu-Hua’s Rumor
Has It that Something Like This Happened (Shuo you zhemo yihui shi, 1926) and
Ding Ling’s Summer Break (Shujia zhong, 1928), set themselves apart from female
homoeroticism by either “disclaiming [the author’s] own inspiration,” or “throwing
an unsympathetic light on intellectual women’s same sex relations.”
18
Ling’s story
justifies the sexual, as well as the romantic, relationship between two female
protagonists as an unavoidable consequence of when and where they were born:
“They happened to be born in a nation governed by decorum. They could not obtain

184
the proper association with men. Therefore, they fell in love with the same sex.” For
the latter, sexual interplay among female schoolmates is only experimentation and
more importantly, a substitute for an unattainable relationship with men due to the
women’s social position as elites.
19
Female-female carnal desire, as Sang argues, is
missing in May Fourth women’s literature as being “trapped between insignificance
and ignominy,” whereas its absence in contemporary media representations is
ironically attributed to its decisiveness and sanctity in regard to representing same-
sex love.
20

Contemporary representation’s neglect of sex in portraying sexual intimacy
in romantic friendships is different from New Women’s literature’s feminist agenda.
Their evasion of sex does not arise out of a heterosexual feminist perspective that
fails to take into consideration the sexual aspect of same-sex intimacies. Rather, it
implies that a new identity of nu tongzhi, available to the characters, storytellers, and
audiences, looms large in telling stories of same-sex love, in that engaging in sex
immediately determines the romantic friendship to be a nu tongzhi one. In other
words, after sexual identity is known and exercised politically in Taiwan together
with the forming of the tongzhi community, a mode of female-female desire is
reconfigured in the form of identity. Experiencing homoerotic feelings now
immediately hints at a need for self-examination of whether one is a nu tongzhi or
not. In both A Dance with Two Girls and Voices of Waves, physical closeness hints at
sex, which signals the demarcation between a platonic/romantic friendship and a nu
tongzhi relationship. Sex never really happens between the two female protagonists,

185
but is constantly insinuated through editing, mise-en-scène, and other techniques
such as internal monologues, in order to evoke nu tongzhi without literally portraying
it. This hesitation between friendship and nu tongzhi relationships again ambiguously
represents both the possibilities and impossibilities of a nu tongzhi relationship
derived from close female friendship in the particular environment of girls’ schools.
While bodily intimacy between two women is employed to suggest a
romantic friendship’s conversion into a nu tongzhi relationship, it can also used to
impede such conversion: the bodily contact mirrors the physical resemblance of the
women’s bodies and makes obvious the transgressive aspect of “same-sex” in the
relationship. In the novel, Tong’s questioning – “to what extent can a girl like
another girl?” – denotes this dilemma, and the visual framing of this question in the
television version furthermore poses it in a self-reflexive manner that leads to Tong’s
rationale to withdraw from advancing the relationship with Zhong. This question is
repeated twice; in between the repetition a narrative space is constructed that
encompasses moments of desire revealed through vision and touch, which seem to
suggest a transformation from friendship to a nu tongzhi relationship. Encapsulated
by the repeated question however, this seeming progression is only Tong’s flashback
of an afterthought that subtly elucidates the suspension of their relationship. The first
instance of the key question problematizes the idealist aspect of the desire between
Tong and Zhong on both the diegetic and non-diegetic levels. After a compilation of
shots that portray Tong and Zhong’s private joyful moments at school, the story cuts
to a scene in which Tong gets off the bus with a rose from Zhong in hand. The

186
following shots cut back and forth between Zhong on the bus and Tong walking
down the street and both of them turn their heads to gaze at the other. As each shot
places the character who does the looking at the center without including the gazed-
upon object (the other person), this series of shots does not constitute a shot/reverse
shot relation. Without a shared visual clue, the connection among these shots is
ambiguous, leading to the sense that they could be independent from each other. The
question, uttered in Tong’s internal monologue, emerges in the last shot of this
sequence where Tong is at the center of the frame turning back and looking
straightforwardly at the camera/audience. This conventional use of self-reflexivity to
break down the world of representation contrasts with the dreamlike sensation of the
girls’ relationship as shown in the previous montage.
Nevertheless, when the auditory track of this question is visually connected
with the next scene, starting with the shot in which Tong recalls intimate moments
with Zhong as she touches her collarbone in front of a mirror decorated with flowers
from Zhong, diegetically Tong’s looking back seems to allude to a reflection about
their relationship from Tong’s point of view. While looking at herself in a mirror and
stroking her collarbone, Tong sets her sight on the edge of her bed; the shot cuts to a
scene of Tong and Zhong sitting side by side with Zhong caressing Tong’s hair and
face. A close-up framing of the shot heightens the emotional and physical closeness,
albeit Tong does not respond to Zhong’s attempt at intimacy. The shot cuts back to
Tong in front of the mirror and proceeds with the aforementioned swimming pool
scene that ends with Zhong kissing Tong on her forehead. After two separate shots of

187
Tong sitting on the edge of her bed and her parents on the porch, the shot cuts to
Tong’s self-touching again and the question regarding the extent to which a girl can
like another girl gets repeated. In this temporally disrupted succession of shots that
are circumscribed by the motif question, the bodily interaction, rather than foretelling
sexual contact, is a test of sexual intimacy between females as it is formalistically
interrupted by Tong’s reflection in the mirror. All together, Tong’s first utterance of
the motif question is posed out of curiosity, whereas its repetition, after a series of
“tests” and “reflections,” sounds more like a self-interrogation, if not a denial.
This transition from ignorance about a possible nu tongzhi relationship to a
disavowal of it, signified by reactions to sexual contact, is reinforced in the following
sequence. While playing hide and seek at Zhong’s place one afternoon, Zhong
affectionately kisses Tong, who is blindfolded, on her lips. Astonished by Zhong’s
sudden approach, Tong pushes Zhong away with disgust. Minutes after this
discomfiting moment, Zhong proposes to go swimming but Tong turns down the
idea with obvious reluctance by saying that she has her period. In the next scene,
Zhong rides Tong home on her bicycle, and Tong starts griping about their
relationship and tells Zhong, “We shall not be together. It’s awkward.” In the midst
of the silence following Tong’s remark, which almost ends the relationship, we hear
Tong’s internal monologue: “Me and Zhong are girls, no doubt, even though our
periods come at different times and the way we wear our bras differs.” Trapped by
the heterosexual imaginary, the girls’ shared physicality – the menstruation and
breasts – prevents Tong from accepting anything sexual with Zhong. A sexually

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charged kiss does not lead to a subversive questioning of the stability of gender;
rather, it indicates another kind of sexual identity to Tong. Tong’s acknowledgment
of the nu tongzhi identity is revealed later through her reaction to Zhong’s college
girlfriend Xiao-Mi. When comforting Xiao-Mi after her break-up with Zhong, Tong
loses her temper and shouts at Xiao-Mi, “Even if you can be with Zhong, then what?
Have you thought about it? Being a lesbian throughout your life?” Apparently, Tong
knows what being a lesbian means and her acknowledgment is represented through
her rejection of sexual involvement with Zhong.
The interdependence between sex and nu tongzhi identity suggested by the
story becomes crystallized at the end when the hopeless reality is contrasted with the
fantasy of union. In the final scene when Tong delivers her wedding invitation to
Zhong, who is leaving for New York, she confronts Zhong and asks, “Can two girls
make love to each other?” Given that Zhong has been sexually involved with both
men and women, her negative response seems to succumb to the supremacy of
heterosexuality that dominates Tong’s life. After this scene that concludes the story,
there is a prolonged shot where Tong and Zhong, framed diagonally against the
background of their hometown in a light sky-blue bird’s view shot, are dressed like a
bride and groom with hands held. This ending sequence as a whole suggests the
unreality of a female-female union, if at least for Tong and Zhong, who cannot
accept making love to each other.
In Voices of Waves, sex – the pivotal element in defining a nu tongzhi
relationship – is intentionally avoided to sustain the vagueness between a romantic

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friendship and a nu tongzhi relationship. Almost a reverse of A Dance, in which
Tong rejects sexual intimacy due to her repudiation of being a nu tongzhi, the
apprehension about sex in Voices is enacted by the character Shen, who recognizes
her own sexual inclination (if not identity). This reservation about sex is represented
through an uneasiness about bodily closeness, exhibited in a changing room scene.
Following an establishing shot of a swimming pool, the sequence begins with Lu
looking for Shen in the changing room area. After locating Lu’s spot, Lu “infringes”
on Shen’s privacy as she enters the space without Shen’s permission while Shen is
changing clothes. For Lu, two girls changing clothes, namely getting naked in front
of each other, is nothing out of ordinary; she does it all the time with other good
friends to be on time for classes. Such an intimate moment, however, stirs only
discomfort for Shen because of its sexual allusion.
The scene is shot in one shot without any camera movement. Lu’s body
above her shoulder blades is positioned in the foreground whereas Shen’s is in the
background. The diagonal composition reveals sexual intensity by contrasting Shen’s
consciousness and Lu’s unawareness. When Lu takes off her clothes to don her
bathing suit, Shen is astounded by this unprepared intimacy. Noticing Shen’s
stiffness, Lu unaffectedly reminds her to hurry up rather than probing into Shen’s
reaction. After Lu walks out of the changing room, Shen is given a brief period of
time alone in the frame when the actress conveys both relief and compunction about
the startling moment. In the next scene Shen teaches Lu how to swim at the nearby
beach on another day. Interestingly, this scene is when Shen and Lu get the greatest

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number of close bodily touches throughout the whole episode. This scene is
composed in a long shot, connecting with the wave motif, which signifies different
forms of lust and love. We see Shen and Lu, pushed by waves, holding each other.
Here, Shen’s expression of perplexity in the prior scene is explained. In the changing
room, sexual desire needs to be withheld in order to sustain the friendship, and
therefore sexual tension arises but turns into discomfort. Either incidental or
purposeful touches instantaneously cross the boundary and push the friendship to
“something else,” i.e. a homosexual relationship. As a result, Shen does not
contravene the norm and her self-control, as suggested in the following scene, allows
their relationship to continue and get even closer without the burden of becoming nu
tongzhi.
Contemporary television representations take sex into account quite
vigilantly in their configuration of nu tongzhi relationships that have evolved from
friendships, and yet this vigilance is strongly connected to sex’s decisiveness in
defining a relationship in nu tongzhi terms, a newly developed identity in modern
times. Self-consciously nu tongzhi stories, these dramas imply that a nu tongzhi
identity is indicated by the possibility of sexual involvement. On the one hand, the
representation of such a relationship between two girls cannot be designated as nu
tongzhi without deliberately engaging with sexual interaction. On the other hand, the
degree of sexual interaction can only go as far as hugging and kissing in order to
retain the adequacy of their representations based on particular “real experiences” of
nu tongzhi. This mode of corroboration – preferring sex to the spirituality of same-

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sex love to define a nu tongzhi relationship – can easily be used as an excuse to
sabotage an emergent nu tongzhi relationship, especially in its initial state.

The Unfilial Daughter, Melodrama, and Tactics of Viewing
Also featuring romantic friendships in a girls’ school as the starting point of
the protagonist’s nu tongzhi identity, the television mini serial The Unfilial Daughter
has similar ideological problems as the hour-long, single episode A Dance with Two
Girls and Voices of Waves. As a television melodrama however, this well-received
mini serial is open to different readings due to the contradiction embedded in the
genre and the lack of resolution required for a serial format. An examination of the
reading practice of nu tongzhi audiences complicates the divided critical discourse
regarding melodrama, considering it either as reinforcement of dominant values or as
a subversion of it. As feminist critic Marcia Landy notes, “forms of representation
are not only the source of repetition; they are also the story of change, resistance, and
even subversion.”
21
While The Unfilial Daughter problematically represents a nu
tongzhi stereotype, the melodramatic form provides a world of the imagination that
gives significance to nu tongzhi audience’s everyday struggle—something that is
often not acknowledged and difficult to communicate due to its social
unacceptability. The sharing of this melodramatic imagination on the online
discussion board produces a sense of community for its nu tongzhi viewers mostly
with an underprivileged social background.

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Adapted from an award-wining popular novel of the same title written by the
straight female writer Xiu-Lan Du, this mini serial was broadcast on TTV in April
2001 on five subsequent Monday evenings. Portraying the life story of nu tongzhi
protagonist Tian-Shi from childhood to middle age, The Unfilial Daughter combines
two major storylines – ceaseless family conflict and the protagonist’s emerging
identity as a nu tongzhi – with plentiful subplots. The plot of The Unfilial Daughter
may be summarized as follows: Tian-Shi’s father is a veteran of the Chinese Civil
War who took refuge in Taiwan with the Kuomintang army. The acrimonious and
frantic mother, whose family was rooted in Taiwan before 1945, reviles and loathes
her husband for his overall impotence. Born in the 1950s, Tian-Shi grows up under
the pressure of the Zhong-nan-ching-nu tradition (male/son supremacy) imposed by
her mother. Tian-Shi’s desire for girls slowly grows in junior high school and
strengthens when she falls in love with her high school sweetheart Qing-Qing. After
a school moderator finds out about their relationship, Tian-Shi and Qing-Qing are
prohibited from seeing each other. Brokenhearted, Qing-Qing commits suicide and
leaves her last words to Tian-Shi: “We never hurt anyone, why would they want to
hurt us?” Traumatized by Qing-Qing’s death, Tian-Shi suffers from the misery of
coming to accept her nu tongzhi identity. Later, Tian-Shi meets Xu Jie and is
introduced into the life of nu tongzhi, but her tragic past affects her ability to carry on
a healthy relationship. Toward the end of the story, Tian-Shi is diagnosed as having a
terminal illness, which motivates her to reexamine her life. Tian-Shi eventually
forgives her mother for the damage she has done to her life and agrees to medical

193
treatment. The serial concludes with a metaphorical scene in which Tian-Shi lets
Qing-Qing’s note blow away as she rides with other nu tongzhi friends on her way to
the hospital.
22

Unlike A Dance with Two Girls and Voices of Waves in which family is
disengaged or absent, family is the main institutional authority that performs
patriarchal power in The Unfilial Daughter, and Tian-Shi’s individual identity is
constantly in conflict with it. Expanding upon Thomas Elsaesser and Geoffrey
Nowel-Smith’s respective discussions of the domestic melodrama, David N.
Rodowick points out that in a domestic melodrama,
The figuration of patriarchal authority in a given text will formulate the terms
of conflict through the perpetuation of a series of symbolic divisions and
oppositions which organise the narrative around the problem of individual
identity, both social and sexual.
23

For some viewers, this model of conflict in portraying a nu tongzhi and her life
experience only produces stereotypes. In particular, the plot of a dysfunctional
family and Tian Shi’s inability to be in a monogamous relationship is particularly
troublesome. As a viewer called AirWolf points out:
The intense antagonism between Angel and her mother produces a
misperception that Angel’s sexual orientation comes from her problematic
relationship with her mom. Together with Angel’s flirtation with the middle-
aged woman, it misleads people to think that it is the deficiency of the
mother’s love that makes one nu tongzhi.
24

Another user Mao-Da expresses a similar disagreement against the correlation
between one’s family background and sexual orientation. She further argues that
many of her nu tongzhi friends, including herself, came from normal and loving

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families.
25
What is problematic to Babybutch is the tone of tragedy throughout the
story:
This approach is very likely to reinforce a homophobic ideology that believes
that all homosexuals end up living tragically because they are morally
wrong.
26

For some other nu tongzhi viewers however, the tragedy of The Unfilial Daughter is
understood rather in a melodramatic way. In her analysis of the American prime time
drama Dallas, Ien Ang uses Peter Brooks’ influential concept of “the melodramatic
imagination” and suggests that the viewer must recognize the workings of the
“melodramatic imagination” to understand Dallas. Ang defines the melodramatic
imagination as “the expression of a refusal, or inability, to accept insignificant
everyday life as banal and meaningless, and is born of vague, inarticulate
dissatisfaction with existence here and there.”
27
Inspired by Ang’s theorization of the
viewer’s engagement with melodrama, I argue that those who found pleasure in
watching The Unfilial Daughter also recognize a melodramatic imagination in the
tragic structure of feeling.
For many nu tongzhi audiences, the appeal of The Unfilial Daughter lies in
the ways in which it provides and nourishes a melodramatic imagination—the
seemingly meaningless torments in everyday life are given significance through
sentimental exaggeration. While it is the overall fragmented character of modern
society that causes the lack of meaning of everyday life, this feeling is stronger for
nu tongzhi audiences as the meaning making process is further thwarted by society’s
heterosexual attribute. The reaction from Mao-Da’s high school sweetheart, for

195
example, aptly describes the kind of melodramatic imagination associated with The
Unfilial Daughter: The drama makes her return to and make sense of the homosexual
relationship she used to have but has been deliberately in denial about.
28
Many of the
responses from nu tongzhi viewers reveal how The Unfilial Daughter helps them to
ascribe some meaning to their own struggles. For example:
Watching the love between Tian-Shi and Qing-Qing and Tian-Shi’s struggle
with herself and with the mainstream value set, I almost can see how I came
to identify [as a nu tongzhi] and gave power to myself.
29

Qing-Qing’s family is just like mine. My parents don’t believe that I’m a nu
tongzhi. They thought there was some kind of bad influence.
30

After watching the second episode, I felt as if my life was being played on
TV…everything felt so familiar.
31

When Qing-Qing says goodbye to Tian-Shi, it breaks my heart. It’s like a
flashback of my life.
32

My high school life has been replayed in The Unfilial Daughter … Now I
can only project an image of her [high school girlfriend] onto the
characters.
33

I am overwhelmed by memory and emotions after watching The Unfilial
Daughter. It reminds me of my college years, though I think I am a bit
luckier than Tian-Shi.
34

The Unfilial Daughter touches me a lot because Tian-Shi’s mom is somehow
like mine.
35

Whereas the employment of melodrama allows nu tongzhi audiences to
project themselves into a melodramatic imagination to make sense of their daily life
struggles, this very style and its effect of emotional amplification simultaneously
diverts attention away from nu tongzhi subject matter and undercuts its impact. As
Ien Ang points out, “melodrama does not seek to dramatize the unique experience of

196
a single human character…in other words, the ‘psychological credibility’ of the
characters in melodrama is subordinated to the functioning of those characters in
melodramatic situations.”
36
The plots in The Unfilial Daughter, such as the fight
between the mother and father, the constant conflict between Tian-Shi and her
mother (not necessarily concerning her nu tongzhi identity), the suicide of Qing-
Qing, etc. are all exaggerated events that push the emotional effect to the extreme
without necessarily connecting to individual characters. This in part explains
heterosexual audiences’ comfort with The Unfilial Daughter because Tian-Shi’s
identity as a nu tongzhi has no effect on the sensational effect achieved by the
stylization of melodrama. As the form of melodrama generates a split in the focus of
attention between nu tongzhi audiences and their heterosexual family members, some
nu tongzhi audiences are able to watch The Unfilial Daughter at home with other
family members. As Chen-Xuan’s post demonstrates:
I watched the first episode alone. My younger brother watched the second
episode with me. From the third to the fifth, my family watched it all
together! My mom actually thought this is a good show. She even commented
on the actress’ performances, but she has no idea that I am [a nu tongzhi]…
37

(my emphasis)

As Chen-Xuan’s mother praised the drama as a whole and commented on the
exaggerated acting in particular, a female homosexual relationship in the narrative is
very likely to be regarded as part of the package used to enhance a sentimental
response.
The emotional attachment that is suggested, built, and strengthened by its
stylization, incessantly disturbs the assumed moral universe that considers

197
homosexuality to be depraved. In the case of Abi’s family, the easy intimacy with
and appeal of melodrama pulls them back and upsets their stark aversion to the nu
tongzhi theme:
My family also watched The Unfilial Daughter together. My older sister and
I just love it and we can’t stop complimenting how great it is. My parents
however think it’s abnormal and disgusting. We then got into a fight.
However – though my parents think it’s bad, they don’t want to leave! I’ve
tried to get rid of them, but they were totally absorbed into the drama. They
must be in denial that they actually enjoy the drama.
38

Apparently Abi’s parents are irritated by the nu tongzhi content, and yet they are
enthralled by everything else this melodrama has to offer. In her discussion of Dallas
and Dynasty in the American context, Jane Feuer argues that the contradiction of a
television serial is different from both classical films and soap operas. Instead of
lying in the unresolved closure at the end as in Douglas Sirk’s classical narrative, the
contradiction of a serial is exhibited through its idiosyncratic plot structure – neither
the good nor the evil earns the rewards or retribution because the plot has to go on.
39

In prime-time serials, a continuously developed plot suspends the final resolution
and generates contradictions. In The Unfilial Daughter for example, the sexually
deviant daughter Tan-Shi is also a victim, and Qing-Qing’s suicide is dramatized to
emphasize the sensational aspect of death instead of a repression caused by hetero-
hegemony. For Abi’s parents, their viewing pleasure implies identification with the
drama, namely, with the decadent world that they should otherwise abhor or eschew.
In addition to its theme and the narrative structure, the mise en scène of The
Unfilial Daughter also appears to be ideologically problematic in terms of
representing nu tongzhi, and yet it helps to cover up its controversial nu tongzhi

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content. The Unfilial Daughter is set in the 1950s during which the overall social
ideology was anti-homosexuality. Such backdrop on the one hand justifies the
problematic representation of nu tongzhi in The Unfilial Daughter as conservative
and oversimplified. On the other hand, the mise en scène that represents Taiwanese
society in the 1950s makes it seem impossible to connect with the contemporary
concerns of nu tongzhi issues. Maimai’s viewing experience indicates:
Mine [the viewing experience] was actually not so much of a problem…they
didn’t really know what I was watching…only my sister seemed to feel
something strange, but the reason being that she thought I was watching a
serial dated back in the 1950s.
40

It is not sexuality but the ostensible anachronism that the drama tackles that triggers
the curiosity of Maimai’s sister. The other storyline that goes side by side with Tian-
Shi’s burgeoning nu tongzhi identity is a succession of family conflicts. The
disharmony of Tian-Shi’s family connotes issues of the historical collision between
so-called mainlanders (the father character) and the Taiwanese (the mother
character) along gender lines.
41
This macro-history is highlighted through the setting
in the 1950s, immediately after the Civil War, and the friction is represented through
interpersonal relationships. The setting contrasts the mother’s aptitude in running a
grocery store with the father’s sluggishness and unemployment (as a veteran). The
mother represents a typical bad mother figure in television drama whose
dissatisfaction towards the father and her life in general symbolizes the historical
friction and her desire and failure to control her destiny stands as a metaphor for
Taiwan’s historical outcome. The tension between Tian-Shi and her mother, even on
the issue of Tian-Shi’s sexual identity, becomes only part of the interpersonal

199
conflicts embedded in a story of postwar Taiwan. If not followed closely, The
Unfilial Daughter could be mistaken as any other television serial that portrays a
historical Taiwan. The perception of Maimai’s sister suggestively precludes the
possibility of thinking that the drama may contain modern issues of lesbianism.
Not only the theme, narrative structure, and mise en scène of melodrama that
alleviates the tension elicited by the sensitive theme of nu tongzhi, the ordinary
practice of watching a television serial is also tactically utilized by nu tongzhi
audiences to pass the family radar. For example, when Bai-luen-er’s parents stood
behind her curiously and asked what she was watching, she responded that she was
watching a highly recommended television serial. Bai-luen-er referred to the
ordinariness of a serial to evoke her parents’ familiarity with the genre, which in the
meantime made them pass over the peculiarity of the nu tongzhi subject matter.
Other than the commonplaceness of melodrama, the ordinariness also implies the
common habit of watching television. More than one viewer mentioned that they
flipped or switched channels to avoid being detected watching the serial at home. For
instance, when Dong-Ann’s younger sister unexpectedly came out of her bedroom,
Dong-Ann immediately changed the channel from TTV to MTV.
42
In another case
when Xiao-P’s mother pried into what she was watching, Xiao-P blandly flipped
channels and acted as if she could not find anything she liked.
43
Dong-Ann used the
same tactics before she settles on TTV:
I turn the TV on, but I can’t go straight to TTV. I need to do some zapping as
if I don’t know what to watch. After a short while, I can then fix the channel
to The Unfilial Daughter [TTV]. Otherwise, my father and younger sister
must be leery of what I am watching.
44

200

The common practice of flipping through the channels becomes the alibi and means
of survival for nu tongzhi audiences when other family members intrude on their
viewing with malicious intentions. Studies of remote control devices (RCDs)
demonstrate that the RCD, as a subversive technology, has resulted in more power
for audiences to choose and control.
45
While the RCD is taken up by regular
audiences to avoid undesirable content through “zapping” and “zipping” or to
compile a highly individualized mix through “grazing,” channel surfing in this case
is strategically deployed by nu tongzhi audiences with the same logic to a different
end: To outwit the heterosexual scrutiny inherited in a nuclear family household in
order to watch their desired content, often against the approval of other family
members.
The necessity to disguise watching The Unfilial Daughter with TV viewing
habits such as zapping closely relates to the fact that most nu tongzhi audiences are
not out to their families and thus are fearful of the immediate association between
showing interest in the show and their hidden sexual identities. This particular
condition of not coming out renders a personal computer a popular alternative to
watching the drama as it proffers privacy and minimizes the risk of exposing nu
tongzhi identity. Unlike watching such programming on the TV – the center of
family recreation – watching it on a personal computer through TTV’s webcast
services, AV signal transferring equipment, or at a cheap Internet Café allows nu
tongzhi to construct a mini closet in these open spaces.
46
For example, with a high-
speed Internet connection at home, Swatchthree was able to watch the drama online

201
to forestall a family war by warding off her parents’ skepticism.
47
Zheng-da Guang-
ming (literally meaning “honesty” in Chinese) points out how watching the drama on
a computer can grant a personal space that is completely free of others’ control.
48
In
contrast, Maruko, who watched the drama on TV, could not watch the whole thing
since the presence of other family members prevented her from doing so.
49

As revealed in the accounts of nu tongzhi audiences’ viewing experiences,
the design and materiality of a personal computer also contribute to a sense of
privacy that allows nu tongzhi audiences to keep their sexual identities cloaked in
secrecy. While a rerun on TV largely hinges upon the assessment of major
corporations as to which channel and timeslot a program will appear, a replay on a
personal computer is in the control of the viewer. Kc’s example demonstrates the
convenience of a personal computer on her control of when to watch. When her older
sister appeared abruptly, Kc, who watched the drama on a personal computer,
immediately quitted the browser window, and yet did not lose any part of the show
as she could “watch it all over again” after her sister left.
50
In the above-mentioned
case of Bai-luen-er, another reason that her parents left after knowing that she was
watching a television drama was that she was watching it on her computer, and “the
monitor is too small to see anything clearly.”
51
Capitalizing on the possibilities
opened up by the genre and broadcast context of The Unfilial Daughter, nu tongzhi
audiences managed to watch the drama even within heterosexual households by
astutely eliciting the banality of melodrama or cautiously handling their viewing
practices.

202

Dissenting Visibility: Beyond the Adequate Nu Tongzhi Images
Nu tongzhi audiences’ activity of watching The Unfilial Daughter at home
gives home a spatial meaning beyond merely being a space for a heterosexual family
to reside. Through nu tongzhi audiences’ active engagement with the drama,
homosexual desires are exchanged between the drama and nu tongzhi audiences at
“home” – the emblem of an inviolable heterosexual edifice as depicted by these three
television dramas. Nu tongzhi viewers’ real-life experience of watching The Unfilial
Daughter at home challenges the idea that only a girls’ school is able to contain non-
heterosexual desires within a heterosexual-designated place. Here, home is no longer
an indestructible place of heteronormalcy. It is transformed into a heterogeneous
space that embodies divergent “sets of relations” – for Foucault the basis by which a
given site can be defined – of both the construction of heterosexuality and
homosexual deviant desires. The supremacy of heterosexuality enacted through the
designation of a home space collapses, as it is harassed/disturbed, neutralized, or
even undermined by the stream of homosexual emotions that occur in the whirl of
watching The Unfilial Daughter.
52

In addition to the actual viewing practice that contradicts home’s spatial
definition, nu tongzhi audiences’ sharing of personal stories in the online space also
provides kinds of visibility that differ from the adequate image represented in
contemporary television representations. Contrary to the representations, a school
environment, even a girls’ school, is not always nurturing or harmless. The posts on

203
the discussion board of The Unfilial Daughter mixes positive comments about
female homosexual relationships in girls’ schools with descriptions of hapless and
doleful experiences. An anonymous viewer recalled an incident in which two of her
classmates were teased and interrogated by the whole class about their abnormal
closeness.
53
Another viewer, PPP, shared a similar experience of a closeted couple at
her school that was caught and one of them was coerced into transferring to another
school. The school newspaper even published an admonitory article on
homosexuality immediately after.
54

Reacting against popular discourse on homosexual tendencies in teenage girls
as an interim phase, many posts argue that “not meeting enough boys” is not the
cause of their nu tongzhi desire, and a sex-separate environment helps them realize
such desire. In Kirara’s account, when her mother found out about her homosexual
inclination, she ascribed it to Kirara’s studying in a girls’ school and believed that it
would naturally disappear once she went to college. After three years of college,
Kirara came out to her mother, as she had had relationships with women all along.
Yong-Heng’s comment about how liking women may not directly relate to the
environment of a girls’ school is even more remarkable for its ironic tenor:
My baby sister is now in her last year of a junior high girls’ school (I had
attended girls’ schools for six years too). She’s had relationships with girls
since her sophomore year. I was shocked when I knew it. Even though I am
cool with it, I did question her about her real sexuality. I thought it was only
transitional because of the conditions of a girls’ school. I never thought I
myself would become one of them [nu tongzhi] too.
55

204
At first, Yong-Heng agrees with the popular belief that same-sex desire during
girlhood is improper but acceptable because it supposedly fades away eventually.
Reflecting on her own desire for women however, Yong-Heng comes to recognize
the truthfulness of her baby sister’s sexuality. These accounts by nu tongzhi that
emphasize how exposure to men cannot “cure” their sexuality, contradicts the public
imagination of the rise and fall mechanism between homosexuality and
heterosexuality that is contingent upon specific environments and atmosphere.
Extending from the melodramatic imagination surrounding the drama, the
sharing of personal stories of nu tongzhi viewers – mostly their struggles, confusions,
and torment for desiring women or being nu tongzhi – forms a multiplicity of
narratives about nu tongzhi. Unlike the protagonists in three television dramas where
a trial with heterosexuality is imperative to confirm one’s nu tongzhi identity, the
personal accounts articulated by nu tongzhi viewers show other ways of discovering
one’s sexual identity. Further, these accounts become another reference point that
helps some viewers to understand their sexual identity as a nu tongzhi. The effect of
which a nu tongzhi identity can be established or confirmed by references to other
people’s experiences grants this online space a sense of community.

Infusing Diversity
Contrasting with A Dance with Two Girls and Voices of Waves, the
melodramatic style and the dissemination through mainstream television allow The
Unfilial Daughter to be more accessible to nu tongzhi audiences from a wider scope

205
of class, age, and educational background. To be more specific, the aesthetic,
technological, and media specificity of The Unfilial Daughter is capable of engaging
those who are socially and economically dependent or live outside metropolitan
areas and thus lack exposure to high cultural tongzhi activities. As Pierre Bourdieu
argues in his influential article, Aristocracy of Culture, the popular audience’s
“reluctance and refusal [of the high aesthetic] springs not just from lack of
familiarity but from a deep-rooted demand for participation, which formal
experiments systematically disappoints.
56
A sense of participation is achieved by
watching The Unfilial Daughter and continues through viewers’ active participation
in the discussion board, which helps the online space evolve into a specific sub
community of nu tongzhi. Subjects of discussion in this fan community extend from
the serial to other issues surrounding nu tongzhi, such as how to come out to family,
the definition of T and Po, and sharing domestic and international news related to
tongzhi. Distinct from the main nu tongzhi community that is sophisticated,
theoretical, and elitist, the sub-community associated with a popular media form
continuously attracts nu tongzhi who have fewer social, cultural, and political
resources. This demographic is unattended to by the major tongzhi movement, which
is active among academics and college students and in the realms of literature, avant-
garde theater, and art film.
The interactive platform of the discussion board furnishes the participating
audiences a strong sense of community. By means of the quotation function, the
audience is able to respond to particular questions posted by other users, which

206
creates an interpersonal interaction akin to talk. This collective mode of interaction
engenders a communal sense in the board space, as expressed by Xiao-Kai: “After
reading people’s posts, I know I am not alone. I’m a nu tongzhi and there are others
like me on this planet.”
57
Considering this audience forum as a community space,
some people began to post their personal information hoping to meet people “who
are also nu tongzhi” or “who are like me (themselves).”
58
Providing personal
information about their outer appearances or their hobbies and interests, using email
or instant message (ICQ) accounts, participants seek not dates but friendly
companions.
Once the fan space was perceived as a community space, other activities that
are less and less germane to the drama began to sprout. For example, one audience
member Bu-gi-mo (literally meaning “not alone” in Chinese) from Maryland, U.S.,
voluntarily inaugurated an appeal on the discussion board, titled “You are not alone”
to recruit nu tongzhi in a petition format in order to show isolated nu tongzhi that
they are not on their own and certainly not aberrant.
59
In less than a month, the
appeal gathered more than four hundred signatures from people in numerous
geographic areas across different continents. Almost seventy percent of the signers
were Taiwan locals with a large number from non-metropolitan regions.
60
In addition
to individual responses to Bu-gi-mo’s call, there were also clusters of signatures
signed by a representative. Rainbow, from a vocational school in Tainan, listed
sixteen names of her friends/classmates, and so did Yuan-Yu for eight of her
friends.
61
In addition to the working-class background partially indicated by their

207
schools and geographic locations, most signers are teenagers, as twenty-five-year-old
Xiao-Bai pointed out that she is rather old compared to others.
62

As research, these reports are non-scientific since most information is alleged
to fail verification; some signers were even unsure about their sexual identities and
only left messages to seek advice. However, this is neither the concern of the appeal
of “You are not alone” nor my point. This articulation was never intended for any
sociological or political purposes beyond imbuing the space with warm fuzzy
feelings, sentiments that fortuitously resonate with the emotional feedback received
from watching the melodramatic The Unfilial Daughter. With a large number of
responses, a sense of solidarity and encouragement is conveyed, and interpersonal
interactions reciprocally consolidate the sense of community that the initiator and
other active participants hoped to generate.

Conclusion
Notwithstanding faithfully following the so-called “real experience” of nu
tongzhi to represent nu tongzhi, contemporary television representations in the
abovementioned dramas still risk reinforcing stereotypical public images of nu
tongzhi in that they romanticize and overvalue the determination of female same-sex
desire in girls’ schools in forming a nu tongzhi identity. While this perspective
arguably represents “real-life experience” to a certain degree, it also bypasses the
core issue of hetero-hegemony that principally configures so-called real life
experiences. The supposedly progressive attempt to represent nu tongzhi falls short

208
for its conservative approach on the narrative level. Even if the formal qualities of A
Dance with Two Girls and Voices of Waves tend to be non-conventional, the
aesthetic choice is made for the sake of quality, rather than to confront the hetero-
dominant ideology imbedded in stylistic conventions.
A critical understanding of nu tongzhi audience discourse in response to The
Unfilial Daughter brings to light that it is ironically the mundane television
melodrama that proffers possibilities for contesting heterosexual presumptions of nu
tongzhi. In their argument against dominant academic commentaries on television’s
antagonism towards queerness, Margaret Marshment and Julia Hallam point out that
there is a general suspicion in which “the forms and contexts of popular culture are
intrinsically hostile to the possibility of radical messages.”
63
The dissatisfaction and
frustration shared by many media critics when examining representations of lesbians,
gays, and queers on mainstream television in fact overlook the political efficacy of
the emotional engagement and a sense of participation generated by the pleasure and
intimacy audiences have with mainstream television programs.
Examining the audience’s reading practice using the cultural criticism of
television melodrama, I have demonstrated how The Unfilial Daughter restates but at
the same time undermines the dominant presumption about nu tongzhi identity and
desire. The audience’s active engagement with the drama – encouraged and mediated
by their familiarity with the media form and the genre of melodrama – creates an
impact beyond textual limitations. An oppositional reading against the heterosexual
imagination of nu tongzhi occurs in the process of conversation and negotiation with

209
the text. The collective autobiography constructed by personal experiences shared
among nu tongzhi audiences further produces a different kind of cultural visibility
from mainstream television representations. This alternative visibility created by a
sub-community associated with fans of a television melodrama diversifies the larger
univocal nu tongzhi community. Only through a reassessment of mainstream
television melodrama, we can perceive its cultural significance in challenging the
public’s fusion of romantic friendship and female homosexuality, and perhaps more
importantly, in challenging the elite-dominated discourse in forming and
characterizing the nu tongzhi community.

210
Chapter Four Endnotes

1. Peter Brooks, “The Melodramatic Imagination,” in Imitations of Life: A
Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1991), 65.

2. Ien Ang, “Dallas and the Melodramatic Imagination,” in Imitations of Life:
A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1991), 473-495.

3. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture,” in Media, Culture & Society:
A Critical Reader, eds. Richard E. Collins et al. (London: Sage, 1986), 176.

4. Prestigious girls’ high schools in Taiwan such as the Taipei First Girls’ High
School and Zhongshan Girls High School, for example, were established during the
period of colonization, in 1903 and 1897 respectively.

5. Jian-Ming Yu, “Some Observations of Women’s Education in Taiwan
During the Japanese Colonial Period,” Newsletter of Taiwan History Field Research
23 (1992): 15-20. It is worth noting that most contemporary historical research on
girls’ schools in the colonial period has not dealt with issue of homosexuality.

6. Qiao-Ting Zhang, Campus Memory: Identity and the Emerging of Lesbian
Subjectivities in Taiwan (Taipei: Tansan Books, 2001), 4-9.

7. Zhang, 5-26.

8. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed.
James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), 178.

9. Foucault, 184.

10. There are two possible readings of this scene. It could be Shen’s expression
of her love for Lin in a way that audiences learn about at the end of the film.
However, as this scene appears after the school moderator’s interrogation and Shen’s
anger towards Lin’s flirtation with boys, with the voiceover of Lu commenting that
some people like to use the bathroom to spread rumors, it could also be read that
Shen intentionally puts that drawing where the administration will notice to remind
Lin of their relationship or to irritate her. Either way, the presence of this heart-
shaped drawing demonstrates that the school environment is able to contain this open
secret about their existing homosexual desires.

211

11. Tze-Lan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in
Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 122-123.

12. Sang, 120-121.

13. I-Men Cai, Youth Sexual Education (Taipei: Da-Hua Wen-Hua-Se, 1956),
17-18.

14. A Chinese modernist literary movement that occurred in the early
Republican period.

15. Sang, 127.

16. Sang, 25-26.

17. Sang, 138.

18. Sang, 148.

19. This summary of the literary representation is greatly influenced by Sang.

20. Sang, 132.

21. Marcia Landy, “Introduction,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and
Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1991), 17.

22. In the novel version, Tian-Shi dies and has never had a chance to be
reflective about her life.

23. David N. Rodowick, “Madness, Authority and Ideology,” in Home is
Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987), 271.

24. AirWolf, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 29 May
2001, 13:15, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

25. Mao Da, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 10 May
2001, 14:13, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

212

26. Babybutch, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 11 May
2001, 15:46, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

27. Ien Ang, 490.

28. Mao-Da, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 10 May
2001, 12:54, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=
20790 (accessed October 14, 2001).

29. Neptune, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 16 May
2001, 11:45, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

30. Xu-yu-he-yie-de-mao, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum,
TTV, 20 May 2001, 04:08, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&
topic=20790 (accessed October 14, 2001).

31. bb, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 12 May 2001,
12:11, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phpBB/viewtopic_print.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

32. Oga, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 13 May 2001,
16:11, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phpBB/viewtopic_print.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

33. Anonymous, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 15 May
2001, 19:56, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

34. Kay, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 16 May 2001,
03:28, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phpBB/viewtopic_print.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

35. Yi-Feng, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 23 May
2001, 20:21, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=207
90 (accessed October 14, 2001).

36. Ang, 481.

213

37. Chen-Xuan, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 24 Aug
2001, 12:21, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

38. Abi, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 22 May 2001,
21:27, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phpBB/viewtopic_print.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

39. Feuer, 558.

40. Maimai, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, 21 Aug 2001,
20:13, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phpBB/viewtopic_print.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

41. Kuomintang took political refuge in Taiwan after they lost the Civil War to
the Communist Party immediately after WWII.

42. Dong-Ann, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 13 May
2001, 20:15; Xiao-Fei, 16 May 2001, 16:12, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum
=17&topic=20790 (accessed October 14, 2001).

43. Xiao P, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 15 May
2001, 16:34,
http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phpBB/viewtopic_print.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

44. Dong-Ann, ibid.

45. Robert V. Bellamy Jr. and James R. Walker, Television and the Remote
Control: Grazing on a Vast Wasteland (New York: Guilford Press, 1996). Zapping
means using the remote control device to skip over advertising and unwanted
content, and zipping refers to the action of using the fast forward function on a
recorded program to avoid undesirable content.

46. The web-cast service provided by TTV is only free of charge for the first
two episodes.

47. Swatchfree, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 14 May
2001, 23:11, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB.viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

214

48. Zheng-da Guang-ming, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum,
TTV, 20 May 2001, 04:06, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB.viewforum.php?forum=17
&topic=20790 (accessed October 14, 2001).

49. Maruko, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 17 May
2001, 08: 55, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

50. Kc, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 16 May 2001,
18:12, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phpBB/viewtopic_print.php?forum=17&topic=20790
(accessed October 14, 2001).

51. Bai-luen-er, ibid.

52. Foucault, 178.

53. Anonymous, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 10 May
2001, 12:54, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewforum_print.php?forum=17&topic=
26629 (accessed October 14, 2001).

54. PPP, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 30 May 2001,
22:13, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phpBB/viewtopic_print/php?forum=17&topoc=26629
(accessed October 14, 2001).

55. Yong-Heng, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 27 May
2001, 14:08, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewtopic_print/php?form=17&topic=266
29 (accessed October 14, 2001).

56. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture,” in Media, Culture And
Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins and others (London: Sage, 1986),
176.

57. Xiao-Kai, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 01 June
2001, 19:44, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewtopic_print/php?form=17&topic=266
29 (accessed October 14, 2001).

58. Aksbbt, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion forum, TTV, 29 May
2001, 20:28; Xiao-Wen, 29 May 2001, 21:15, http://chat.ttv.com.tw/phBB/viewtopic
_print/php?form=17&topic=26629 (accessed October 14, 2001).

59. Bu-gi-mo, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion board, TTV, 24 May
2001, 05:48, http://bb.ttv.com.tw/bb/viewtopic.asp?forum=17&topic=30013&page=
1&total=755&TP=38 (accessed November 20, 2006).

215

60. The result is counted by a user named Rainbow for three weeks from the
beginning of this activity.

61. Rainbow, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion board, TTV, 05 June
2001 16:31;Yuan-Yu, 11 June 2001, 13:45, http://bb.ttv.com.tw/viewpoint.asp?foru
m=17&topic=30013&Page=16&total=775&TP=38 (accessed November 20, 2006).

62. Xiao-Bai, The Unfilial Daughter online discussion board, TTV, online
posting 31 May 2001, 23:12, http://bb.ttv.com.tw/bb/viewtopic.asp?forum=17&topic
=30013&page=11&total=755&TP=38 (accessed November 20, 2006).

63. Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit:
String of Knots to Orange Box.” Jump Cut 39, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/
onlinessays/JC39folder/OrangesNotOnlyFruit.html (accessed December 16, 2006).

216
CONCLUSION

Representing Nu Tongzhi and Beyond

In March 2007, the nu tongzhi film Spider Lilies (a.k.a. Ci qing, Zero Chou,
2007) that features a love relationship between two leading female protagonists (with
one of them designated as a T nu tongzhi) was honored with the Teddy Award at the
2007 Berlin International Film Festival. Receiving an award from one of the most
important institutions for lesbian/gay/queer cinema, which helped discover directors
such as Pedro Almodóvar in Spain and Gus Van Sant in the United States, Spider
Lilies brought widespread attention to Taiwanese cinema through its nu tongzhi
subject matter. Bringing home international recognition, the film surpassed ten
million Taiwanese dollars in gross profits and defeated other Hollywood films to
occupy the third position on the weekly box office ranking during the first week of
its release.
Reputation and revenue were not the only things the film brought home with
it. More importantly, the recognition from a prestigious Western institution like the
Berlin Film Festival not only assuaged the film’s sensitive subject matter of a nu
tongzhi romance but also triggered fervent open discussions about lesbianism in
public. Instead of avoiding intimacy, which might generate skepticism of their “true”
sexual identity as heterosexuals, the two leading actresses, Isabella Leong and Rainie
Yang, comfortably reenacted their characters intimate relationship during public
promotions and screenings as a nu tongzhi couple. Moreover, the director Zero Chou
and her cinematographer and girlfriend Holo Liu even came out publicly, as if the

217
acknowledgment from the Teddy Award granted them the confidence to stand up to
heterosexual biases in society. The discourse propelled by the success of Spider
Lilies illustrates a kind of tactic that I have described and analyzed in the previous
chapters—capitalizing on Western liberal discourse of lesbians and gays, or even
seeking the endorsement from the West, in order to influence public attitudes
towards nu tongzhi.
In a similar vein, during the 2006 Taiwan Parade, the tongzhi community
appropriated a Western activist model to address a specifically local issue. Resonant
with the global gay pride parade movements, Taiwan is the first Asian country to
have initiated a gay pride parade. While the parade recapitulates the idea of explicitly
performing and marching non-normative bodies to confront the hetero-dominant
society, the theme of the 2006 Taiwanese Parade addressed the thorny issue of
“family,” with which almost every tongzhi struggles. During the parade, there was a
special section in which tongzhi family members and relatives could participate. The
event also included a series of panel discussions to address a wide range of family
related issues. With this culturally specific theme, the event redefined the meaning of
a gay parade from being a global gay/lesbian/queer consciousness-raising movement
to a local cultural affair.
These two recent events vividly illustrate the process of reinscription and
reappropriation of Western discourse that Taiwan’s tongzhi have undertaken to
negotiate their identities, cultures, and public presence. They also remind us of the
necessity to unravel the formation and articulation of Taiwan’s nu tongzhi identity

218
beyond the binary divides of East and West, local and global, traditional and
modern.
1
This dissertation has attempted to delineate how the West is invoked but
negotiated, celebrated but resisted, to show the limitations of situating the formation
of a transnational or postcolonial sexual subject in separate spheres. Given the
historical supremacy of Western culture in Taiwan, it is impossible to detach from
the West and retreat to cultural primitivism in our understanding of modern sexual
identities. Also, the concept of sexual identity is itself a product of modernity and the
West has been regarded as a role model in Taiwan’s shaping of modernity.
The formation of nu tongzhi identity is tightly entwined with the Anglo-
American conceptualization of lesbians, gays, and queers. Yet, as this project has
implied, the Western definition and theorization of lesbian identity, sexuality, and
representation are both productive and limited. Whereas the Western theory of
lesbian sexuality is helpful to re-read the common trope of the mother-daughter
relationship in Chinese culture as a lesbian scenario for example, its skepticism of
romantic friendship seems unfit for nu tongzhi since many of them have consciously
relied on such cultural traditions to secretly convey their same-sex desire. Therefore,
I have proposed a new approach that considers the Western ideological and
theoretical construction of lesbians (and other non-normative sexual subjects) as
mobilizing analytical tools.
In many studies of non-Western lesbians and gays, there is often a tension
between sexual identity and cultural identity. Whereas the former tends to be
criticized as being culturally colonized by the West, the latter’s ability to dislodge

219
itself from a conservative regime of patriarchal heterosexuality to become a non-
normative sexuality is often doubted. This unresolved impasse generally results in a
hypothesis that treats “the West” as a static entity with no fractures, conflicts, and
debates. Taking heed of the moments of contradiction and fragmentation in the locus
of Western ideologies and theories of sexuality, it is possible to mobilize so-called
Western discourse for one’s own purposes. My work demonstrates this strategy of
mobilizing the West and Western discourse from two perspectives: a cultural critic’s
reading of nu tongzhi identity and desire and nu tongzhi’s struggles with media
representations. For example, I return to the contention about lesbian sexuality in
Western theory to locate homoeroticism in otherwise heterosexualized interactions
between male impersonators and their female fans. At the same time, the exploration
of activist practices in Chapter 3 shows how the nu tongzhi community discursively
avails itself of the symbols of the West and Western-derived discourse of lesbians
and gays to bargain with the government. Through these examples, I suggest a
strategic reinscription of the West and Western discourse which allows us to further
comprehend the intersections and interconnections between sexual identity (nu
tongzhi in this case), cultural identity, and the global dynamics within which these
identities are formulated, closely related, and mutually influenced.
In addition to the strategy of mobilizing the West and Western discourse, it is
equally important to also understand the nation-state as a flexible category. As I have
pointed out in the previous chapters, the nation-state is instable and fragile; it relies
heavily on constant regulation, exclusion, and negotiation to secure its hegemony.

220
But its exercise of disciplinary power, as Foucault tells us, could also be productive,
2

and the nation-state could actually enable the emergence of nu tongzhi. Excavating
long disregarded homosexual films in Taiwan reveals some threatening moments of
homosexuality in the process of consolidating a heterosexual nation, which
counteracts the repressive hypothesis that assumes that only with the aid of Western
discourse did resistance against hetero-dominance occur in Taiwan.
From another standpoint, the instability of the nation-state hints at its
fractured history, unsettled political change, and struggles in the realm of
international politics. As a result, its consolidation of power frequently disintegrates
as soon as there is conflict between different demands that are all imperative to
sustain its power and legitimacy. Take the issue of sexual politics in Taiwan, for
example. While heterosexuality is mandated to maintain the optimum population by
means of reproduction, non-normative sexualities need not be fully suppressed
thanks to the government’s appeal to the international community to be recognized
as a liberal and democratic country. The state’s hesitance and ambiguity in upholding
heterosexism engenders some possibilities for non-heteronormative sexualities to
grow and prevail.
Recent scholarship in lesbian, gay, and queer studies in Western academia
has expanded from Western to non-Western societies. The growing interest in
studying homosexual-related issues in non-Western societies, on the one hand, could
be viewed as a reiteration of the Western academic tradition of studying the
“Others.” Yet on the other hand, it could also suggest an earnestness to examine the

221
phenomenon and the implications of “lesbian,” “gay,” and “queer” becoming global
terms, with the Stonewall Rebellion regarded as “‘ground zero’ for all gay and
lesbian efforts,” as noted by Martin F. Manalansan IV.
3
If this project in any way
satisfies the curious gaze upon a non-Western object, it does so in ways that
constantly discomforts such Western-centered inquisitiveness.
This dissertation contributes to the study of the subject of sexual identity
formulated in a transnational context by proposing a new approach beyond the
oppositional mode. It goes beyond simply indicating cultural differences, since such
an attempt, even with valid observations of the local context, still recuperates the
problematic and inert binarism between East and West, local and global. As this
analysis suggests, there is a reciprocal relationship between the cultural and political
struggles of nu tongzhi, the national ideology of gender and sexuality, and the
Western discursive formation of gender and sexuality. By mobilizing their
interrelations, nu tongzhi are able to negotiate their public presence in the media.
This perspective is equally valuable for cultural critics to make sense of the cultural
and political representability of nu tongzhi.
In addition to accounting for the upsurge of the nu tongzhi community in the
past ten years by engaging with issues of media representation, this dissertation also
attempts to explore other aspects that are left out in the articulation of nu tongzhi
identity and identification/desire. As I argued in the second and fourth chapters,
popular forms of representation such as commercial films and television serial
dramas have been dismissed in the configuration of a nu tongzhi image and media

222
history. It seems that the radical self-expression of a subversive nu tongzhi body,
identity, and desire has been transformed into a conservative control of the public
perception of this very body, identity, and desire. The subtle clash between the ideal
advocated by nu tongzhi intellectuals and popular culture’s appropriation that is
sometimes welcomed by ordinary nu tongzhi audiences implies a rupture in the
formation of the nu tongzhi identity marked by class difference. In effect, the
relationship between the subject of nu tongzhi and popular culture has become a
pressing issue after the success of several tongzhi (gay and lesbian)-themed
commercial films. Spider Lilies, mentioned earlier, also employs considerable
popular culture elements; this is most evident in its cast of popular stars and its use
of the romance genre.
As suggested by the investigation of the reception of various contemporary
nu tongzhi television programs in the last chapter, the form of popular culture seems
more accessible to ordinary nu tongzhi audiences. On the other hand, there is also an
increasing concern about nu tongzhi’s emergence as a consumer subject and the
impact of being incorporated into the hetero-dominant popular culture. The dispute
over popular culture and tongzhi prompts us to deliberate how other social categories
like class, ethnicity, political economy, and others, might complicate our
understanding of nu tongzhi identity and identification/desire. There are already
copious scholarly discussions that address Western lesbian, gay, and queer
relationships in terms of popular culture and the link between processes of
commodification and the formation of lesbian and gay identities.
4
A straightforward

223
adoption of Western critiques makes sense considering the capitalist economic
structure of Taiwan. Yet, the peculiar ways in which the formation and expression of
nu tongzhi identity and desire strategically negotiate with multiple powers should
never be overlooked. Therefore, the following questions for future studies on nu
tongzhi and popular culture need to be addressed: How might other Taiwanese social
and cultural factors that impact the nu tongzhi’s struggle complicate the theoretical
premises of Western cultural criticism? How might the nu tongzhi’s affiliation with
popular culture generate different questions that modify Western theories of class
and sexuality?
Throughout this dissertation, I have argued for a new interpretation of the
formation, the growth, and the struggles of constructing a nu tongzhi identity and
identification/desire without falling into the binarisms of East vs. West and local vs.
global. Instead, I suggest that we can surmount this limitation by nuancing how
terms, concepts, and discourses associated with these categories are negotiated and
how they are in dialogue with each other. My proposition of this new approach is
grounded in a wide range of case studies. I believe it represents a rudimentary step
toward a theoretical model of sexual identity and desire that is interwoven with the
colonial legacy of the West and nation-based cultural identity—much like the status
of nu tongzhi identity and desire in Taiwan.

224
Conclusion Endnotes

1. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing
Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” GLQ 7, no. 4 (2001): 663-679.

2. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1987).

3. Martin F. Manalansan IV, “In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay
Transnational Politics and the Diasporaic Dilemma,” in The Politics of Culture in the
Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham: Duke University Press,
1997), 490.

4. For example, Rosemary Hennessy, “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture.”
Cultural Critique 29 (Winter 1994-1995): 31-67; Danae Clark, “Commodity
Lesbianism,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle
Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (London: Routledge, 1993), 186-201;
Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market
(New York: Palgrave, 2000); Alexandre Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer:
Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
225
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Asset Metadata

Creator Wang, Chun-Chi (author)

Core Title Lesbianscape of Taiwan: media history of Taiwan's lesbians

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/27/2007

Defense Date 05/03/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cultural visibility,film,lesbian/nu tongzhi,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer discourse,television,transnationalism

Place Name Taiwan (countries)

Language English

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Halberstam, Judith (committee member), Jaikumar, Priya (committee member)

Creator Email chunchiw@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m701

Unique identifier UC1319124

Identifier etd-Wang-20070727 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-525688 (legacy record id),usctheses-m701 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Wang-20070727.pdf

Dmrecord 525688

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Wang, Chun-Chi

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu