Host of the first gay pride in the Sinophone world, Taiwan is well-known for its mushrooming of liberal attitudes towards non-normative genders and sexualities after the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. Perverse Taiwan is the first collection of its kind to contextualize that development from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its genealogical roots, sociological manifestations, and cultural representations. This book enriches and reorients our understanding of postcolonial queer East Asia. Challenging a heteronormative understanding of Taiwan’s past and present, it provides fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from queer criminality and literature in the 1950s and 1960s to the growing popularity of cross-dressing performance and tongzhi (gay and lesbian) cinema on the cusp of a new millennium. Together, the contributions provide a detailed account of the rise and transformations of queer cultures in post-World War II Taiwan. By instigating new dialogues across disciplinary divides, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies and queer studies, especially those interested in history, anthropology, literature, film, media, and performance.

In the post-Cold War era when America's foreign policy is focusing on how best to foster democratic transition throughout the world, the lessons that can be learned from Taiwan's democratization impart valuable lessons to students and scholars. This volume examines in particular questions concerning the state of political trust, ethnicity, democratic values and political institutions.

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum. Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity.

Writing Taiwan is the first volume in English to examine the entire span of modern Taiwan literature, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. In this collection, leading literary scholars based in Taiwan and the United States consider prominent Taiwanese authors and works in genres including poetry, travel writing, and realist, modernist, and postmodern fiction. The diversity of Taiwan literature is signaled by the range of authors treated, including Yang Chichang, who studied Japanese literature in Tokyo in the early 1930s and wrote all of his own poetry and fiction in Japanese; Li Yongping, an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia and educated in Taiwan and the United States; and Liu Daren, who was born in mainland China and effectively exiled from Taiwan in the 1970s on account of his political activism. Because the island of Taiwan spent the first half of the century as a colony of Japan and the second half in an umbilical relationship to China, its literature challenges basic assumptions about what constitutes a “national literature.” Several contributors directly address the methodological and epistemological issues involved in writing about “Taiwan literature.” Other contributors investigate the cultural and political grounds from which specific genres and literary movements emerged. Still others explore themes of history and memory in Taiwan literature and tropes of space and geography, looking at representations of boundaries as well as the boundary-crossing global flows of commodities and capital. Like Taiwan’s history, modern Taiwan literature is rife with conflicting legacies and impulses. Writing Taiwan reveals a sense of its richness and diversity to English-language readers. Contributors. Yomi Braester, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Fangming Chen, Lingchei Letty Chen, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Joyce C. H. Liu, Kim-chu Ng, Carlos Rojas, Xiaobing Tang, Ban Wang, David Der-wei Wang, Gang Gary Xu, Michelle Yeh, Fenghuang Ying

In the aftermath of 1949, Taiwan’s elites saw themselves as embodying China in exile both politically and culturally. The island—officially known as the Republic of China—was a temporary home to await the reconquest of the mainland. Taiwan, not the People’s Republic, represented China internationally until the early 1970s. Yet in recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt. After major diplomatic setbacks at the beginning of the 1970s posed a serious challenge to Kuomintang authoritarian rule, a younger generation without firsthand experience of life on the mainland began openly challenging the status quo. Hsiau examines how student activists, writers, and dissident researchers of Taiwanese anticolonial movements, despite accepting Chinese nationalist narratives, began to foreground Taiwan’s political and social past and present. Their activism, creative work, and historical explorations played pivotal roles in bringing to light and reshaping indigenous and national identities. In so doing, Hsiau contends, they laid the basis for Taiwanese nationalism and the eventual democratization of Taiwan. Offering bracing new perspectives on nationalism, democratization, and identity in Taiwan, this book has significant implications spanning sociology, history, political science, and East Asian studies.

Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia.

Sinoglossia places the terms of embodiment, mediality, and translation at the center of analytical inquiry into Chinese and Sinophone cultures. Converging in the rubric of Sinoglossia, the chapters in this volume introduce a theory defined by cultural formations not overdetermined by Sinitic linguistic ties. The concept of Sinoglossia combines a heteroglossic and a heterotopian approach to the critical study of mediated discourses of China and Chineseness. From the history of physical examinations and queer subalternity to the cinematic inscription of Chineseness-as-landscape, and from Sinopop to the translational writings of Eileen Chang and Syaman Rapongan, this book argues for a flexible conceptualization of cultural objects, conditions, and contexts that draws attention to an array of polyphonic, multi-discursive, and multilingual articulations. In this new horizon of understanding, place or topos necessarily constitutes the possibility of friction and source of innovation. “Sinoglossia opens new possibilities for critical studies of China, Chineseness, and Chinese cultures. Bringing together pathbreaking scholarship from diverse perspectives, and highlighting multiplicity and heterogeneity on a range of topics, this volume is a vital addition to a range of fields.” —Karen L. Thornber, Harvard University “Vitally centering and theorizing processes of embodiment, mediality, and translation, this timely and rich volume—simultaneously reflective, speculative, comparative, and historically informed—convincingly articulates Sinoglossia as a flexible, heterogeneous approach to intercultural phenomena tenuously identified as Chinese or Sinophone.” —Brian Bernards, University of Southern California