Seeing China differently: National contestation in Taiwan's LGBTQ (tongzhi) movement

Abstract

The field of queer/sexuality studies in Taiwan was pioneered in the 1990s by a group of mainly second-generation descendants of Chinese civil war migrants (waishengren) who have problematised and disparaged the post-martial law Taiwanisation of identity and politics. Despite the seminal nature of their ‘sex positive’ work that challenged many cultural orthodoxies, subsequent sociopolitical developments strengthening civil society, visibility of and human rights protections for tongzhi (LGBTQ) citizens, the consolidation of Taiwanese identity, and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) acceleration of revanchist hostility towards Taiwan over the past two decades have coalesced to forge unequivocal rifts between them and a new generation of Taiwanese sexuality scholars and activists. This rupture highlights how “Taiwan's sex/gender/sexualities knowledge production and reproduction have long been intertwined with the [contentious] politics of nationhood, nation-building, and nationalism” (Kao, 2019). In probing these interstices, this article proposes a decolonial approach to tongzhi identity politics in Taiwan.