AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities

13. How to Be Queer in Taiwan: Translation, Appropriation, and the Construction of a Queer Identity in Taiwan

THIRTEEN HOW TO BE QUEER IN TAIWAN Translation, Appropriation, and the Construction of a Queer Identity in Taiwan Song Hwee Lim In their 1995 essay, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner note that queer theory is “less than five years old” and ask, “Why do people feel the need to introduce, anatomize, and theorize something that can barely be said yet to exist?” Two lines down, they quip, “Queer is hot.”1 What they might not have realized is, a year before on the other side of the Pacific, the term queer had been translated as ku’er in Taiwan by a radical intellectual journal Isle Margin (Daoyu bianyuan). The compound term ku’er consists of the Chinese characters ku (meaning “cruel” and “cold” as well as “very” and “extremely”; it is also the transliteration of the English slang “cool” meaning fashionable or having street credibility) and er (meaning “child,” “youngster,” and “son”).2 This chapter traces the appearance of the term ku’er and aims to answer the following questions: What impact does the translation of queer as ku’er have on existing discourses of same-sex sexuality in Taiwan? To what extent does this translation and appropriation construct a new queer identity in Taiwan? How does it problematize issues of local/global identities and cross-cultural politics in the name of hybridity? Or, to put it another way, what does queer theory teach us about Taiwan? This chapter is divided into four parts. Section one provides a historical account of the various discursive terms in Chinese for same-sex sexuality until the 1990s; section two locates the instance of the translation of queer 236 . SONG HWE E LI M as ku’er and argues that this translation is foregrounded by an imperative of difference and differentiation from earlier discursive terms; section three examines how the ku’er discourse attempts to imagine a queer community in Taiwan and the identity politics embedded in the process of translation and appropriation; section four concludes the discussion by interrogating the notion of hybridity in the construction of a queer identity in Taiwan. One: Speaking of Same-sex Sexuality in Chinese As Kevin Kopelson notes, “It is by now a commonplace of Foucauldian criticism that homosexual identities, as opposed to homosexual acts, arose only after a number of relatively recent, and primarily sexological, discourses breathed life into them.”3 The distinction between same-sex behavior and identity is noteworthy here because it echoes premodern Chinese understanding of sexuality. There has been a long tradition of same-sex relationships in China from antiquity to the late imperial periods, documented in Bret Hinsch’s Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition. Hinsch highlights in particular the care to be taken when discussing same-sex sexuality in the Chinese context “because classical Chinese [language] lacked a medical or scientific term comparable to ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homosexual,’” and “instead of saying what someone ‘is,’ Chinese authors would usually say whom he ‘resembles’ or what he ‘does’ or ‘enjoys.’”4 However, since the early twentieth century, with “a Westernization of Chinese sexual categories and a Westernization of the overall terms of discourse about homosexuality ,” Hinsch believes that the “fluid conceptions of sexuality of old, which assumed that an individual was capable of enjoying a range of sexual acts, have been replaced with the ironclad Western dichotomy of heterosexual/ homosexual.” As a result, the “Chinese now speak of ‘homosexuality’ (tong­ xinglian or tongxing’ai), a direct translation of the Western medical term that defines a small group of pathological individuals according to a concrete sexual essence.”5 In her study on the Chinese translation of Western sexological terms in Republican China (1912–1949), Tze-lan Deborah Sang notes that the characters tongxing’ai (literally same-sex love; the same characters are read as doseiai in Japanese) “was coined in Japan at the end of the Meiji [1868–1912] and the early Taisho [1912–25] period as Japanese intellectuals translated European sexology.” There is “reason to believe that tongxing’ai was a direct adoption of the Japanese doseiai, based on which the Chinese then invented the variants tongxing lian’ai and tongxing lian [both meaning same-sex love].”6 HOW TO B E Q UE E R I N TA IWA N . 237 While Sang concurs that the “range of Chinese discourses on homosexuality narrowed after the 1920s,” she nevertheless...