Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture, by Fran Martin Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004 xii + 358 pp HK$29500/US$3950 (hardcover) Fran Martin's Situating Sexualities traces the history of homosexuality in the emergence of Taiwanese modernity and provides an excellent account of the impact of shifts in political and economic power on cultural understandings of gender and sexuality Martin achieves a rare balance in studying both male and female homosexuality as elements of broader patterns of same-sex representation and cultural formation, and reveals the rich potential of historically and politically informed cultural studies analysis of Asian literatures, cinemas and popular cultures Situating Sexualities is much more than a history of homosexuality Through detailed analyses of recent novels and cinema, Martin also describes how the recent history of Taiwan-its anxious relationship to the PRC, recent democratization and rapid economic globalization-has been lived and imagined by the island's inhabitants Chapter 1 considers Pai Hsien-yung's novel Crystal Boys, which Martin describes as the first modem Chinese novel to make homosexuality its subject The novel became an iconic representation of homosexuality in 1980s Taiwan Martin focuses on the "dehomosexualisation" of this important novel by critics who interpret its narrative of a banished homosexual son as a political allegory of Taiwan's historical exile from the homeland of Chineseness on the mainland Chapter 2 summarizes the efflorescence of critical social movements, including the tongzhi movement, after the lifting of martial law in 1987, and considers the policies of Chen Shui-bian, then Democratic Progressive Party mayor of Taipei City Government and subsequently first non-KMT president of the Republic of China on Taiwan Focusing on Taipei's New Park, the site of national memorials as well as a homosexual cruising ground, Martin describes the intersection of political and sexual cultures in the closing years of the 20th century These opening chapters reveal how Taiwanese politics-caught between rival efforts to assert an autonomous national identity and the claims of Taiwan as a site of authentic Chineseness-provides a powerful metaphor for the relation of the island's homosexual minorities to the dominant heterosexual culture There are queer resonances between tongzhi sexual identity and Taiwanese nationalist imaginings, with the tongzhi's dissident relation to heteronormativity coming to symbolize the uncertain place of the Taiwanese national subject in the geo-polity of greater China Chen Shui-bian's taking up of tongzhi as a sign of Taipei's global modernity in the 1990s can be understood in this context, where some heterosexual Taiwanese detected echoes of their own stories in the tongzhi homosexual culture that emerged in that decade In Chapter 3, Martin uses Ang Lee's 1993 film The Wedding Banquet as a lens to focus on 1990s queer Taiwan, interpreting this film as marking "the triumphant entry of the 'Chineseness' of Taiwan into a global present, where 'tolerance of homosexuality' works as a marker of a newly liberal, democratic state" (p 143) She also interprets Lee's internationally acclaimed film as staging "a kind of postcolonial cultural clash between two regimes of sexuality: broadly, a 'Chinese familial' regime, and a regime of'American gay identity'", (p 143) The first wave of Asian cultural studies in the early 1990s was often marked by well-intentioned but naive attempts to "apply" Western critical theory which reproduced Eurocentric conceptions in the name of critiquing empiricist area studies Situating Sexualities is part of an important corrective move that responds to these excesses by localizing and refashioning poststructuralism in historical, discursive/linguistic and cultural contexts Martin asks the crucial question of whether the ideas of the Western queer theorists she engages-Foucault, Butler, Kosofksy-Sedgwick and others-map adequately the cultural and discursive terrains of sexuality and gender in Taiwan …

Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture

TAIWAN FILM DIRECTORS: A TREASURE ISLAND Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 296 pp. Reviewed by Yu-Jyuan Jian Through the study of selected directors and the investigation of social contexts in cultural reproduction, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island explores how the concept of Taiwan is represented and reinvented on the cinematic screen. Early sixteenth-century Portuguese traders named Taiwan "Formosa," and ever since, the image of exotic beauty has been emblazoned in the cultural memory of Taiwan. As a "treasure island," Taiwan has also been an "island of greed," namely a desirable colony in the devouring gaze of its foreign occupants. Evolving from the correlation between the colonial background and the contested nationhood of Taiwan, Taiwan Film Directors presents a storyline of Taiwan film culture since the New Cinema movement of the 1980s. With an authorshiphistoriography framework, co-authors Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis move from historical description to in-depth analysis of directorial style and film form, effectively demythologizing the myths of national cinema and over-romanticized auteurism. As a work centering upon the cross-pollination of culture and cinema, Taiwan Film Directors remaps Taiwan film history through a strategic analysis of historiography and authorship. Distancing itself from the homogenizing project of nationalism in cinema, Taiwan Film Directors places Taiwan film culture under the umbrella of formal analysis and historical investigation. The first two chapters, "Parallel Cinemas: Postwar History and Major Directors" and "Challenges and Controversies of the Taiwan New Cinema," explore the cinematic, cultural, and political contexts of the New Cinema Movement. As a collective movement tackling socio-political issues from indigenous perspectives, Taiwan New Cinema freed the taboo subjects of a local past from the hegemonic authorities. Partly due to the inspiration of the nativist literature of the 1970s, and partly due to the relaxation of censorship in 1983, the New Cinema movement flourished in an atmosphere of cultural liberalization and put Taiwan cinema on the world map at international film festivals in the 1980s. Instead of pinning down the New Cinema as a directordriven achievement, Yeh and Davis provide a detailed account of the collective endeavor by off-screen participants, including lesser-known artists and critics and the public, supported by interviews and biographies. In addition, by returning to the historical moment, the authors broach not only the issue of historical revision and identity politics in the change of the cultural atmosphere, but they also show how the New Cinema represented Taiwan as a "nation" through film form. As the meaning of Taiwan is open to various interpretations, the notion of national identity, always already split in itself, can be co-written by different ethnic groups through cultural reproduction. In this sense, the authors reject the generalization of national cinema and remap the multiple layers of Taiwanese identity by exploring the vestiges of lost history and cultural patrimony and by incorporating directors of diverse ethnic backgrounds. Yeh and Davis turn to the demythologizing act of national allegories in their third chapter, "Navigating the House of Yang," which deals with the director Edward Yang. Through an overview of Yang's productions, the authors associate his visual aesthetics of time and space with historical and social specificity, thereby rebutting Fredric Jameson's generalized postmodern reading of Yang's The Terrorizes. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic Jameson fits the film into the unified world-system by positioning it as a national allegory of a post-Third World country in the age of late capitalism. With detailed research into local production factors and major Taiwan directors, Yeh and Davis demythologize the totalizing project of national allegories, while also pointing to the multifaceted nature of Taiwanese identity-including Taiwanese, Hakka, mainlanders, indigenous people, and foreigners as they are represented in cinema. …

Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island

Following the recent success of Taiwanese film directors, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwanese film is raising its profile in contemporary cinema. This collection presents an exciting and ambitious foray into the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan film that goes beyond the auterist mode, the nation-state argument and vestiges of the New Cinema. Cinema Taiwan considers the complex problems of popularity, conflicts between transnational capital and local practice, non-fiction and independent filmmaking as emerging modes of address, and new possibilities of forging vibrant film cultures embedded in national (identity) politics, gender/sexuality and community activism. Insightful and challenging, the essays in this collection will attract attention to a globally significant field of cultural production and will appeal to readers from the areas of film studies, cultural studies and Chinese culture and society.

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This Time He Moves! The Deeper Significance of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Radical Break in Good Men, Good Women

This thesis concerns the theme and form of “wandering” in Taiwanese cinema. It focuses on selected films by three major directors: Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Edward Yang. These three directors are not only the most critically acclaimed from Taiwan, their films also share more than a few characteristics. Their narratives often involve wandering, whether it be in content or form. I argue that this wandering is presented as a way of experiencing the world that can lead to greater agency within it. In “Edward Yang’s Yi yi: Everyday Adventure in the Idyllic City”, I use Bakhtin’s chronotope to observe how wandering in the city can transform the everyday into an adventure that leads to greater knowledge and happiness. In “Tsai Ming-liang: Wandering through Dystopia”, I draw on de Certeau’s “pedestrian speech act” to contend that characters in the director’s films approach their dystopian environment from a wandering perspective, which allows them to create new possibilities within the constraining order. In “The Perpetual Present: Mythic Time in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo”, I use Barthes’s concept of mythic time to claim that Hou offers a text that is already reread, thereby allowing the viewer to experience a time without before or after. In these films, urban wandering is a process of self-discovery that is necessary to determine one’s place within the surrounding community (familial or affinitive) and in the world at large.

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Sylvain Verstricht

Papers

Spaces, Tactics, and Time: City Wandering in Taiwanese Cinema from 1992 to 2006