Queer Taiwanese Literature A Reader

As the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in Asia and host the first annual gay pride in the Sinophone Pacific, Taiwan is a historic center of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture. With this blazing path of activism, queer Taiwanese literature has also risen in prominence and there is a growing popular interest in stories about the transgression of gender and sexual norms. Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, queer authors have redefined Taiwan's cultural scene, and throughout the 1990s many of their works won the most prestigious literary awards and accolades. This anthology provides a deeper understanding of queer literary history in Taiwan. It includes a selection of short stories, previously untranslated, written by Taiwanese authors dating from 1975 to 2020. Readers are introduced to a wide range of themes: bisexuality, aging, mobility, diaspora, AIDS, indigeneity, recreational drug use, transgender identity, surrogacy, and many others. The diversity of literary tropes and styles canvased in this book reflects the profusion of gender and sexual configurations that has marked Taiwan's complex history for the past half century. Queer Taiwanese Literature: A Reader is a timely and important resource for readers interested in Taiwan studies, queer literature, and global cultural studies. This book is part of the Cambria Literature from Taiwan Series, in collaboration with the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and National Taiwan Normal University.

Lesbian and gay--or queer--fiction (known in Mandarin as tongzhi wenxue) constitutes a major contribution to Taiwanese literature, as evidenced by the remarkable number of prestigious literary awards won by many of the authors of the short stories presented here. Indeed, the meteoric rise of this new genre was a defining feature of Taiwan's literary scene in the 1990s. Queer fiction was also instrumental in forming self-identifying subcultural gay readerships, thus serving a significant political function. But most strikingly, this fiction has been immensely popular with general readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as in diasporic Chinese communities worldwide. The startlingly fresh, brave voices that speak through these stories attest to the powerful social ferment of the past ten years in Taiwan, which have witnessed a revolution in discourses on sex and sexuality in the public sphere. Contributors: Chu T'ien-Wen, Qiu Miaojin, Chu T'ien-Hsin, Hsu Yoshen, Lin Yuyi, Lin Chun Ying, Chen Xue, Hong Ling, Chi Tawei, Wu Jiwen.

It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes—heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies—into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.

The six stories in this collection are representative works from the mature period and the war period. Each story depicts different hardships and predicaments faced by Taiwan as a colony under Japanese rule, offering insight into how this part of Taiwan's history continues to impact contemporary Taiwanese society.

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is the most up-to-date English-language study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed literature and culture in the Chinese-speaking world. From classical homoerotic texts to contemporary boys' love fan fiction, this book showcases the richness and diversity of queer Chinese literature across the full spectrum of genres, styles, topics and cultural politics. The book features authors and literary works from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora. Featuring chapters by leading scholars from around the world, this book rewrites literature, history and culture from a queer lens in China and globally.

“Shawna Yang Ryan’s propulsive storytelling carries us through a bloody time in Taiwanese history, its implications still reverberating today. The story is haunted by questions about whether Taiwan is a part of China or its own country, what the costs are of standing up for one’s beliefs and by the choices made by one father and his daughter. Green Island is a tough, unsentimental and moving novel that is a memorial not only to the heroes, but also to the survivors.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer A stunning story of love, betrayal, and family, set against the backdrop of a changing Taiwan over the course of the twentieth century. February 28, 1947: Trapped inside the family home amid an uprising that has rocked Taipei, Dr. Tsai delivers his youngest daughter, the unnamed narrator of Green Island, just after midnight as the city is plunged into martial law. In the following weeks, as the Chinese Nationalists act to crush the opposition, Dr. Tsai becomes one of the many thousands of people dragged away from their families and thrown into prison. His return, after more than a decade, is marked by alienation from his loved ones and paranoia among his community—conflicts that loom over the growing bond he forms with his youngest daughter. Years later, this troubled past follows her to the United States, where, as a mother and a wife, she too is forced to decide between what is right and what might save her family—the same choice she witnessed her father make many years before. As the novel sweeps across six decades and two continents, the life of the narrator shadows the course of Taiwan’s history from the end of Japanese colonial rule to the decades under martial law and, finally, to Taiwan’s transformation into a democracy. But, above all, Green Island is a lush and lyrical story of a family and a nation grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival, raising the question: how far would you be willing to go for the ones you love?

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the "post-truth" era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, the volume focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination.