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The rise of Taiwanese nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s that rapidly, radically, but "peacefully" replaced Chinese nationalism to become the hegemonic discourse in two decades is a political "miracle." My paper argues that this compressed political transformation would not have been possible without the help of psychoanalytic discourse mediated by critical theory in the activist and critical intellectual circles. In the context of the (post-) Cold War era, there was a peculiar form of decolonization equated with de-Sinicization. At stake is a translational concept that itself becomes untranslatable: zhu-ti-xing, the Chinese word for subjectivity. By analyzing the conflicts within the Chinese-speaking activists and intellectuals in the United States and in Taiwan, I will demonstrate in this paper the ways in which the Lacanian idea of the subject as having a lack becomes a critical tool for the advocates for the independence of Taiwan to break through the existing discursive inertia and to effectively make Taiwan a nation without essence, a nation of zhu-ti-xing/subjectivity, and to facilitate the fitting of this new hegemony into the ideology of Pax Americana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the Japanese and Taiwanese dancers who—in the 1940s and under the auspices of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation—performed for the Japanese army on the frontlines of combat as a visiting entertainment troupe of comfort (Imon-dan). Imon-dan performers, unlike Ian-fu (comfort women), were professional artists even before the war. During the Sino–Japanese War, the Ministry of the Army deployed entertainment troupes of comfort who were professional performers to entertain soldiers stationed in the Japanese occupation area. Such troupes included Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese dancers because wartime Japan occupied Taiwan and Korea. This paper tracks one route to Burma in 1941 using new information from several people and a video recording. Consequently, the Japanese government used the Imon-dan in this instance to promote Japan's support for Burma's independence. These encounters resulted in modern dancers interacting with Taiwan and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mainland Chinese gained access to the songs of the Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun) in the late 1970s and early 1980s by listening to "enemy" radio stations in secret or purchasing musical products smuggled into the Mainland market. This marks the emergence of popular culture in Mainland China, in the aftermath of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Based on archival materials, interviews, and memoirs, this paper examines the ways in which Teng's songs were disseminated and Hong Kong's and Taiwan's pop cultures were received in the Mainland, demonstrating that Mainland listeners embraced Teng's songs in their own pursuit of private sentiment and secular life. In this regard, Teng's songs played no small part in weakening the revolutionary esthetic and socialist mass culture and in facilitating cultural enlightenment in the reform era. The examination of pop songs in reform-era China also encourages us to revisit the Frankfurt School's criticism of the cultural industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early 1980s marks a significant period for modern theatre in Taiwan. It is often heralded as the "renaissance of modern Chinese/Taiwan theatre" through the reinvention of Chinese theatrical traditions, such as the Peking opera. This paper examines the connotations and denotations of "the West," which serves as an important reference or counterpart in theatre practice of the period. An "open body" on stage was highly appraised and requested for theatre practitioners during the time. By historicizing the West in tandem with the concept of the "open body," this paper calls attention to the socio-historical and the geopolitical aspects of the Cold War in Taiwan's "theatrical renaissance." "An open body" was emphasized in the first year of "Experimental Theater Exhibition" in 1980. Wu Jing-jyi, who had experienced working and directing in one of the most famous Off-Off-Broadway theatres, LaMaMa E.T.C in New York, led a series of workshops and training courses in "Lan-ling Theater Workshop" and created a new performing method on the basis of what they coined as "an open body." Lee Kuo-hsiu, Liu Ching-min, Chin Shih-chieh, Lee Tien-ju - most of whom were and still are the leading actors and actresses in Taiwan - among others were all trained and influenced by this method. The magnificent production of the play Hechu xinpei was an example that followed the "open body" performance method. In this paper I make two main arguments. First, without examining closely what an open body signified at the time, the discursive formation of the body in the 1980s theatre renaissance cannot be fully comprehended. Second, I propose that the modern Taiwanese body that is open is simultaneously imbricated in relation to geopolitics, knowledge of Area Studies, and modernity - categories that the United States invented, led and developed throughout the Western bloc in the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper began as an inquiry into the plight of ethnic Japanese in postwar Taiwan. As a group, they have been an object of benign neglect. Despite the advent of “multiculturalism” (duoyuan wenhua zhuyi) in Taiwan, was marked by an “alien” (mainlander Chinese) KMT regime and led to the eventual liberation of opposition parties and indigenous ethnic groups, few have found it relevant to celebrate the cause of oppressed Japanese. The postwar ban on Taiwanese and Japanese culture was part of the same imperative of mono-cultural nationalism that endeavored to erase 50 years of Japanese colonialism in order to restore the legacy of Chinese civilization. At the same time, there is little recognition in the literature of any Japanese “diaspora” in Taiwan. It pales in comparison with the many Japanese orphans abandoned in Manchuria after the Second World War. The birth of a generation of children from mixed marriages making claims to Japanese “identity” has added other significant dimensions to the concept of diaspora and its definition as a social group or discursive construction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on interviews with 30 female readers of BL (‘boys’ love') manga conducted in Taipei in 2005, this paper analyses the BL scene in Taiwan from the perspective of its social utility as a discursive arena enabling women collectively to think through transforming social ideologies around gender and sexuality. This form of participatory pop culture is most interesting, I argue, not because of any unilateral subversiveness vis-à-vis culturally dominant understandings of (feminine) gender or (homo)sexuality—although it does often contest such dominant understandings. Rather, it is important in providing a space for the collective articulation of young women's in-process thinking on these questions. The paper also engages with the Japaneseness of the genre as consumed in Taiwan in order to consider the imaginative function that its perceived cultural ‘otherness’ performs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As popular music is an important means of expression and representation, it is important to consider the social forces that give rise to it and the various extents of these influences. This paper explores generic and discursive practices that have been labelled 'taike rock' in Taiwan. In recent years, 'taike rock', a generic term brought into use by music industry insiders, journalists and entertainment media, has triggered animated debate. The disputed term tai-ke, literally means 'Taiwanese guest,' but in its earliest and original form, as used by those post-1949 mainland Chinese arriving in Taiwan with the KMT regime, the term connoted ethnic discrimination towards native Taiwanese and was used specifically to articulate perceptions of their unsophisticated outlook and behaviour. Recently, however, the commercial forces of the music industry have re-appropriated the term tai-ke to create 'taike rock', thereby ascribing new meanings and triggering controversy. In this paper, the phenomenon of taike rock is explored in order to discover the extent to which its newly ascribed meaning renders obsolete the old political and cultural antagonisms between native Taiwanese and 'Mainlanders' (i.e. post-1949 immigrants from the Chinese mainland), especially as the trend attracts commercial and media attention. In the process of this examination, the taike phenomenon is then considered to be musically embodied in taike rock, the generic practice of which has given rise to its contested nature. Next, the discursive and performative aspects of taike rock are finally evaluated by looking at a general protest against the corporation Neutron Innovation's attempt to trademark the term 'tai-ke'. In discussing this anti-trademark campaign, this paper concludes by bringing up critical issues of cultural identity and creativity in popular music in the face of corporate monopolisation of intellectual property rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value-laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said's concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo-American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music-making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio-historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti-communist political forces, in nation-building (north-south Korea, red China-free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country's historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo-American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country's music-making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music - and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between 'offensive' Korean Wave and 'defensive' Taiwanese 'rockers' in the globalization era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the transformation of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's creative approach through an investigation of the intimate relationship between Hou's films and the development of Taiwanese film history by placing Hou's films into the interlacing framework of the politics, economy, society and aesthetics of Taiwan. The paper approaches the films with regard to genre and author theory, the studio system, influence from predecessors, Taiwanese laws and regulations, censorship system, film festival and film awards, box office and critical reviews. The paper is structured chronologically, starting with an examination of Hou's earlier films and experiences to provide a glimpse into Hou's early approach which has often been overlooked. Later, the paper clarifies Hou's role in and overall relation to Taiwan's New Cinema. The paper describes how Hou successfully drew together two different forces in New Cinema, creating a pattern where directors actively participated in each other's projects. These new culturally and socially conscious films, including Hou's Sandwich Man, were rich in artistry, and quickly gained support from the newly risen middle class during the later period of martial law. Through a discussion of Hou's The Boys from Fengkuei, A Summer at Grandpa's, A Time to Live, A Time to Die and Dust in the Wind, this paper depicts New Cinema undergoing setbacks at the box-office and confrontations with local media, which resulted in the issuance of a manifesto in 1987. While considering the significance of the renowned Taiwan Trilogy (A City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster and Good Men, Good Women) the importance of A City of Sadness, which had an enormous impact on Taiwanese politics, society, culture and economy, is emphasized. Finally the discussion focuses on Hou's later films Goodbye South, Goodbye, Flowers of Shanghai and Millennium Mambo where Hou displayed an entirely different interest in shaping space and time in his narrative. In the process of this discussion, Hou's interaction with the Taiwan social environment is repositioned in a review of his path as a commercial film director to auteur, from a concern with society to his involvement in politics. Hou's work is seen as a historical milestone in the development of Taiwanese film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which the production of commercial Hokkien popular culture - including film, music and television - has been transformed over the course of the last half century from a regional industry into something now associated almost exclusively with 'nativist' Taiwan. The paper thus draws on and contributes to debates about Diaspora, transnationalism and cultural expression in the wider East Asian region. In tracing the development of the Hokkien popular culture industry since the Second World War, I hope to show how many of the practices and traits common to Hokkien cultural production in Taiwan today originated in earlier eras and in other parts of the Chinese Diaspora (most noticeably early post-war Southeast Asia and Hong Kong). The paper also provides some ideas about why what was, in the 1950s, a lively international trade in commercial Hokkien popular culture, has, in more recent decades, become largely confined to Taiwan, with broadcast and cultural policy, demographic changes and commercial realities all playing a part in influencing the industry's fate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing the media construction of the ‘foreign brides phenomenon,’ this paper examines ‘what’ is described in the media, ‘how’ it is constructed, and ‘why’ this construction seems believable in Taiwan. Based on the narrative analysis of the media reports of the ‘foreign brides’ phenomenon, this paper argues that ‘social problems’ are products of ‘interpretative work’ accomplished by various effective narrative strategies, including overlapping media coverage, authorizing description, fabricated statistics and equivocal wording, and collaboration with governmental agencies. The Taiwanese media construct the ‘foreign brides phenomenon’ as a social problem. The brides are portrayed either as passive victims or materialist gold-diggers, and prone to committing crimes, while the bridegrooms are portrayed as the ‘socially undesirable,’ including physically or mentally disabled, and morally inferior. Personal interaction with media workers helps deepen the analysis into the dynamic process of media construction, revealing the power struggles over reality construction. It further analyzes the national anxiety behind these media constructions, explaining why the media constantly construct the ‘foreign brides’ as social problems and threats to Taiwanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers, by way of conjunctural analysis and genealogical investigation, the policed culture of sex under the regulatory regime of 'virtuous custom' as sustained by the now defunct Police Offence Law (abrogated and replaced by the Social Order Maintenance Law in 1991) between the 1950s and 1990s. It attempts to trace the historical process whereby the social/sexual order came to be established in postwar Taiwan, thus articulating the cultural specificity of gendered/sexual subjectivities as formed within that particular geo-political terrain. Examining the police technology as well as the official/journalistic discourse of sex, this paper demonstrates that 'virtuous custom', a nationalist ideological construct predicated upon the Confucian sage-king paradigm, operated as a norm of sex whose boundary was secured through the policing of non-familial/non-marital sexualities, arguing further that both female sexuality and male homosexuality have been historically regulated by the state through its banning of prostitution. As the normative regime of 'virtuous custom' has become even more hegemonic due to the rise in recent years of anti-prostitution state feminism, contesting the new social/sexual order on the grounds of its ideological operations and practices represents the most challenging task for progressive sexual and gender politics in Taiwan today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was originally written as a keynote speech for a specific occasion, an international forum that was held by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) in Taipei in February 2001, to discuss Taiwan's international status in the post-Cold War era. The PCT is known as a strong advocate of Taiwan independence and democratization, and I had this specific audience in mind in organizing this paper. My concern was that the independence advocacy that had aptly expressed people's aspirations in the democratization movement under the iron-fist rule of KMT was being subsumed, as Taiwan polity was Taiwanized and democratized, into a banal statist discourse. This discourse, I am afraid, has distanced itself from its original popular source and become the elite politicians' discourse, indifferent to the everyday life and security of the people in Taiwan. I approached this problematic from the perspective of 'people's security', which I discussed in my previous essay on the topic in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1. As the mutual relationships between East Asian countries had to be shaped overwhelming by the US Cold War rhetoric and material influences, discussing Taiwan with regard to the transition to the post-Cold War era required me to go, albeit in outline, into the basics of these relationships as well as the modes of US hegemony in this region both in the Cold War and post-Cold War settings. I felt that characterization of these diverse elements, if sketchy, was indispensable to discussing the topic, Taiwan today. At my friends' suggestion, I tried to revise the original paper to fit into the concerns of the general readership, with the different aspects mentioned more fully explained. However, I have found this difficult as it would require me to write a completely new article, or maybe a whole book. So I present this paper almost as it was written for the original PCT audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pursues the genealogies ofmi-yi(secret doctors) as a threshold figure to attend to the questions of state-mediated governance and knowledge power concerning medical modernity in postwar Taiwan. To consider themi-yifigure as symptomatic of Taiwan's medical modernity, I inquire into the question of how the scientific discourse of modernity as purported by the class of medical professionals converges with state power to discipline and regulate medical subjects and practices vis-à-vis the discourse ofmi-yi. To this end, I analyze the anti-mi-yidiscourse that emerged since the 1950s to discuss how the modern medical profession employed a language of science, rationality, and security that initiated an extended state surveillance of unregulated medical subjects and practices. The second part of the essay reads Chen Yingzhen's novella,Zhao Nandongas part of Taiwan's medical “archives” to explore the politics of embodied medical labor as a situated instance of the contradictions of medical modernity. I situate the literary imagination ofZhao Nandongin the social context ofmi-yidiscourse to frame the erased labor and violence, the ways in which the histories of these labors have been doubly obscured by the conflation of nationalistic historiography and positivist knowledge production of sociological categorizations of Taiwan's modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to discuss the institutionalization of the studies of Chinese American literature/Asian American literature in Taiwan from the perspective of a Sinophone Malaysian, focusing on the motivation of local scholars to work on Chinese American or Asian American literary works. I argue that claiming that it is the ethnic, cultural and affective affinities that manifests the pertinency of Chinese American or Asian American literature as the object of study might fail to see the cultural heterogeneity and generational difference sitting in the racialized space within such texts. In reading Chinese American or Asian American literature, while a Taiwanese scholar might underline Asian affinities, a diasporic Sinophone Malaysian would stress the textual difference in linguistic medium and multiculturalism within the American context. Furthermore, it is significant to observe comparatively Sinophone literary texts of Chinese American or Asian American produced in Taiwan and Sinophone Malaysian literary works published in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The valorization of 'bad taste' has emerged as a central element in Taiwanese subcultural and avant-garde style since 2000. This paper looks at the politics of this emerging sensibility by analyzing the performances of two theater troupes that rework opeila, a formerly abject form of Taiwanese local opera. The Golden Bough Theater's opeila-inspired comedy series is characterized by both sincere nostalgia for working-class culture and an ironic and exaggerated citation of opeila's pastiche of mass-media cliches. The Formosa Zephyr Opera Troupe attempts to reconstruct the queer charisma of opeila's stars - the female actresses who play the male leading roles - while simultaneously emphasizing the phantasmatic nature of nostalgic, iconic roles and the costs of trying to embodying them, especially for 21st-century educated Taiwanese youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postcolonial Taiwan, although Taiwan-centric consciousness is the dominant discourse, it does not exclude but often conforms to transnational capitalism. Nativism and globalism combined form a powerful hegemony. Taiwanese television 'idol dramas' endorse the status quo, justifying and propagating desire for the Occident; yet such idealization of the West cannot fully silence skepticism and aversion. This paper examines Green Forest, My Home (2005), to explore the Occidental myth and its discontents. In binary opposition, (quasi-)Westerners are portrayed as rich, beautiful, and refined; locals as malicious, simple, or ludicrous. Race is conflated with one's socioeconomic and cultural status, one's language, and one's moral standing. Frustration and resentment are projected onto the minor roles played by authentic Westerners: authoritative yet anti-romantic, they represent the West with negative connotations. The drama's double-faced portrayal of Westerners betrays a profound ambivalence toward the self and the Western other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common for academic institutions in latecomer countries to emulate the Western model. The recent wave of neo-liberal globalization has only intensified the Western impact. This paper examines this process, in particular, of how methods of conducting academic evaluation were adapted and the implications for local knowledge production, using the field of economics in Taiwan as an example. It is shown that some kind of pseudo 'globalized' evaluation criterion, such as inclusion in SSCI journals, was adopted to judge the 'global competitiveness' of local knowledge production. It often leads to devoting academic resources to follow issues raised in the West, and neglecting studying local problems. It is argued here that the latecomers can only make contributions to the world by theorizing our own development experiences. And that is the right way to globalize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper refutes the dominant assumption that Taiwan, unlike Mainland China, has developed a greater degree of tolerance for non-normative sexual expressions as a result of its democratization. Recent legal and cultural changes indicate that Taiwan's democratization consists of tendencies and repressive countertendencies. At the same time, this contradictory development has uniquely enabled a body of indigenous Marxist writings that mobilizes different senses of 'queerness' to demonstrate that the official celebration of diversity and human rights has actually further alienated and disempowered sex workers, promiscuous homosexuals, gay drug-users, and other social subjects that are considered to be a threat to the liberal-democratic order. I offer a reading of the critical writings of Josephine Ho, Yin-bin Ning, Ding Naifei, and Wang Ping since the 1990s to explain why Queer Marxism in Taiwan is founded on a strong a-statist discourse. I argue that a Queer Marxist intellectual practice emerged in Taiwan because liberal pluralism, institutionalized in what these critics call 'state feminism,' has failed to redress effects of social exclusion that (1) persist not despite of, but precisely because of, post-martial law liberal reforms, and that (2) diverge in significant ways from individual experiences as members of officially defined minority groups (women, aborigines, migrant workers, or homosexuals). If social structuration is not always synchronic or isomorphic with state-engineered legal changes, this difference also provides the occasion for Queer Marxists to interrogate the intellectual division of labor between feminism, assumed to be the analysis of gender as a non-pluralizable category, and queer theory, assumed to be the analysis of sexuality as a non-singular but personifiable category. Only by distinguishing between social relations and social identity can we comprehend how the rise of the Taiwanese Independence Movement played a key role in the naturalization of homosexuality as a fictive ethnicity, to which Queer Marxism developed as a historical response. As a geopolitically specific analysis of the aporia of substantive personhood, the Queer Marxism in Taiwan I re-historicize is also a significant contribution to Marxist critique of liberal formalism that is of use to readers across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘A soul trapped in the wrong body’ is a common description employed by trans subjects to explain their unusual condition. While useful in illustrating the often contradictory feelings, perceptions, self‐images, and social expectations that trans subjects have to negotiate as they move through social space; the body–soul imagery also obscures the manifold differences in endowment and resources among trans subjects that may limit their embodiment. Important aspects of contemporary socio‐cultural culture also add to the complexities of trans existence or even seriously hamper the logistics of their body/identity‐construction. The present paper demonstrates such specificities of Taiwanese transgender existence in relation to body‐ and subject‐formations, in the hope to not only shed light on the actualities of trans efforts toward self‐fashioning, but also to illuminate the increasing entanglement between trans self‐construction and the evolving gender culture that saturates it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a preliminary rethinking of the interface of tolerance and reticence as a dominant aesthetic-ethical value with the maintaining of 'proper' sexual relations and the keeping of deviant sex(ualities) in the realm of ghosts and wangliang. The paper is a descriptive analysis of certain effects of homophobia as the latter is re-figured through silent words and reticent tolerance', passing for the most traditional' of virtues in modern 'democratic' guise. We think that just as person-hood is in Taiwan (and perhaps in other Chinese-ness marked worlds) inextricably entangled with paternalist familial relations in impure modern forms, so too have the rhetoric and politics of tolerance and reticence retained seemingly old powers while articulating new disciplinary and rhetorical forces, especially in the field of sexuality in and around the family. Contemporary novelistic representation, such as the acclaimed popular novel of `queer' desire, The Unfilial Daughter, may be read as both representing and complicit with just such reticent aesthetic and political powers. We are also concerned with how new regimes of progressive knowledge-production in the fields of gender and queer theorizing and historical analyses can be inadvertently complicit with these same reticent shadowy homophobic forces to the extent the former posits culturally essential `Chinese' non-homophobic subjects and situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to review the historical research on Taiwan's colonial architecture and urbanism during the Japanese Occupation and to theorize further our understanding of Taiwan's specificities.1 It is expected to open up a vision of world history for examining and comparing the colonial architectures and cities in the Third World. The ultimate goal is to enhance our ability to 'see' our architecture and city. I focus on the contested structural historical meanings of the colonial architecture and city and analyse their historical contexts, content, processes, challenges, consequences and effects in order to have a critical reflection upon Taiwan's colonialism. How did these meanings articulate with the social process of modernization? How did they transform and rewrite Taiwan's landscape? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]