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4 Feminist Girls, Lesbian Comrades performances of critical girlhood in taiwan pop music fran martin During the 1990s, the popular concept of the girl––as in girl power, girl bands, girl rock, the Spice Girls, Riot Grrrl, cybergirls, and others––became increasingly prominent not only in Euro-American commercial music cultures but also outside the West. How does the category of girlhood function in non-Western contexts, and in languages other than English? Through which channels were 1990s commercial and popular movements such as the “girl power” of the Spice Girls translated into local contexts outside the West, and what effects did they produce there for local girls and women? In this chapter I tackle these questions by analyzing a non-Western manifestation of globally mobile configurations of girl culture in an example with which I became familiar after extended periods living and researching in Taiwan during the mid- to late 1990s: independent folk-rock singersongwriter and producer Sandee Chan. Through this case study I consider how we can conceptualize the complex cultural interchanges between globalizing musical girl cultures and their local instances in Taiwan. Although the analysis that follows focuses on a real young woman musician and her female fans, this chapter is principally interested in girlhood understood as a discursive category rather than as a concrete group of persons defined by their inhabitation of a specific gender and age bracket. There exist several modern Mandarin terms approximating the English word “girl” in current colloquial use in Taiwan. The term nüsheng comes closest to and is most commonly rendered as a translation of “girl” in popcultural and pop-feminist usages. Other terms include the Japanese-derived shaonü, literally, “female youth,” which is commonly used to refer in a fairly literal sense to adolescent girls (young women between about twelve and twenty).1 Another term for girl is nühai (or nühaizi), literally “female child”; today this term is used loosely in colloquial speech, somewhat similar to nüsheng, but arguably with a more infantilizing overtone. Etymologically derived from the longer term “female student” (nüxuesheng) and in vernacular use since around the late nineteenth century, nüsheng does not really function in contemporary Taiwan to specify a particular group of 83 individuals delimited by literal girlhood age: women of any age under about forty could be referred to as nüsheng if the circumstances were right. Instead, the category nüsheng works as a pop-cultural signifier of a particular conceptualization of feminine gender in the contemporary world: a conceptualization , I argue, that references a certain attitude connected with globalizing formations of both pop feminism and female-targeted entertainment cultures. In addition to nüsheng, I look at another current category of feminine identity as well: nütongzhi, one of several available terms to refer to female same-sex desires, cultures, and identities. By focusing on responses to critical , pop-feminist performances of girlhood by Sandee Chan, as gathered from a group of her local lesbian-identified fans, I consider nütongzhi as a parallel and related category to nüsheng, one that has arisen more recently. A key question concerns how exactly nütongzhi as a relatively new (post1990 ) identity category in Taiwan relates to the broader category of girlhood (nüsheng). Through the example of Sandee and her lesbian fans, I demonstrate how the categories nüsheng and nütongzhi are related, first, through shared connotative associations with varieties of popular feminism .2 I then move on to suggest a further conceptual linkage between the category “girl” and the topic of same-sex love by highlighting the prevalence of a universalizing discourse on same-sex relations between girls and young women that coexists in Taiwan alongside the minoritizing discourse on nütongzhi identity. To begin to approach a non-Euro-American sexual identity category like nütongzhi, however, I must first consider the broader question of how to theorize sexuality in a transnational frame. Theorizing Sexuality Transnationally As Foucauldian scholarship on the history of sexuality has taught us, sexual identities like lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual––indeed, even sexuality itself, understood as a discrete and inherent property of individuals––are concepts that were first invented in, and hence are historically specific to, the modern period.3 As David Halperin succinctly puts it, “Sexuality . . . does have a history––though . . . not a very long one.”4 Historical studies of the emergence of contemporary minority sexual identities such as “lesbian” and “gay...

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