Surface Tensions: Reading Productions of Tongzhi in Contemporary Taiwan

It is probably impossible to think about the English term homosexuality in a contemporary context without addressing at some point the shadowy enclosure of "the closet"; in Taipei's tongzhi activist and academic circles it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the presence of "the mask." ¹ While it would be difficult to argue simply that the mask operates in Taiwan where the closet does in Europe, the United States, and Australia--since, for one thing, the language of the homosexual closet [yigui] coexists with and interpenetrates that of the mask [mianju] in Taiwan--I nevertheless hope to hold the tropes analytically distinct to a certain degree. ² This essay, then, considers the mask and the closet and is particularly concerned with some specific questions, which include the following: If the closet is organized around an irresolvable tension between secrecy and disclosure, how does the mask operate in relation to these terms? Is it possible that the mask has other, different investments instead of or alongside them? What perverse relationships might there be between the tongzhi mask and the idea of tongzhi "identity"? What kind of subject and what kind of "homosexuality" are projected by the trope of the tongzhi mask in its various deployments? My project is to chart some of the logics of the tongxinglian/tongzhi mask, not necessarily in decisive distinction to those of the homosexual closet, but nevertheless to take account of the mask's cultural and historical specificity. I am aided in these speculations by a consideration of Ta-wei Chi's 1995 novella The Membranes, which appears in the final section of this essay as a text inhabited by a logic and a subject analogous to those suggested by the mask.

Yin/Xian

I want to suggest the pervasive presence of a way of representing homosexuality in Taiwan that inscribes homosexuality as animated by an incessant movement between the poles of the hidden and the shown. The discourse I refer to tends to appeal to the dynamic alternation between the state of yin [concealment] and that of xian [disclosure], for example, in such phrases as yin er wei xian [concealed and undisclosed] or ruo yin ruo xian [now concealed, now disclosed], which cluster particularly thickly around figurations of homosexuality. The persistent articulation of homosexuality with a dynamic of yin/xian may appear to suppose a structure comparable to the closet in its construction of a homosexuality determined by an economy of the known and the unknown. Below, however, I consider what particular kind of "concealment/disclosure" is supposed by this Taiwanese discourse on homosexuality in order to contrast its specific inflections with those of the trope of the closet.

One of the most indicative and economical expressions of this discourse appears near the beginning of Pai Hsien-Yung's novel Niezi [Crystal Boys], which describes the "dark kingdom" of New Park's society of gay male sex workers and their lovers and clients in 1970s Taipei: "Zai womende wangguo li, zhi you heiye, meiyou baitian. Tian yi liang, womende wangguo bian yinxing qilai le" [In our kingdom there is only dark night; there is no bright day. With the first light of dawn, our kingdom falls into darkness]. ³ This description, at the commencement of Taiwan's first novel to deal so directly with the subject of homosexuality, inaugurates the field of Taiwan's "homosexual literature" by figuring homosexuality in terms of the visual and an alternating current of darkness and light. The "homosexual kingdom" is written as one that is always in the dark, because paradoxically, with the coming of the dawn light that ends the night, which is the kingdom's only mode of existence, another kind of night falls as the park becomes "darkened" or "invisible" [yinxing] once again. The undecidable position of homosexuality in relation to dark and light is indicated as in two short sentences the visual...