Seeing China differently: National contestation in Taiwan's LGBTQ (tongzhi) movement

Abstract

The field of queer/sexuality studies in Taiwan was pioneered in the 1990s by a group of mainly secondgeneration descendants of Chinese civil war migrants (waishengren) who have problematised and disparaged the post-martial law Taiwanisation of identity and politics. Despite the seminal nature of their 'sex positive' work that challenged many cultural orthodoxies, subsequent sociopolitical developments strengthening civil society, visibility of and human rights protections for tongzhi (LGBTQ) citizens, the consolidation of Taiwanese identity, and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) acceleration of revanchist hostility towards Taiwan over the past two decades have coalesced to forge unequivocal rifts between them and a new generation of Taiwanese sexuality scholars and activists. This rupture highlights how "Taiwan's sex/gender/sexualities knowledge production and reproduction have long been intertwined with the [contentious] politics of nationhood, nation-building, and nationalism" (Kao, 2019). In probing these interstices, this article proposes a decolonial approach to tongzhi identity politics in Taiwan.

Tongzhi Sovereignty: Taiwan’s lgbt Rights Movement and the Misplaced Critique of Homonationalism

“…This has resulted in a situation in which the views of Ho, Ning, Petrus Liu (劉奕德), and their intellectual community-both towards Taiwan's lgbt rights movement and the country's ongoing political separation from the prc-continue to be widely circulated in English-language scholarship of sexuality/cultural studies while increasingly no longer representing the way the majority of tongzhi interpret recent lgbt progress and their desire to defend de facto independence (i.e. maintaining the status quo of a democratic Taiwan; see Chen-Dedman, 2022). In other words, for some time now there has been a lopsided representation problem in how Taiwan and its legal progress on lgbt rights are articulated in cultural studies scholarship, an issue that historian Mark Harrison (2009) and literary scholar Li-fen Chen (2011) first alluded to over a decade ago.…”