Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan

Examining the deployments of gender and sexuality over the past five decades in Taiwan, this book chronicles a queer historiography that illuminates the production of sexual identities and the formation of sexual modernity. Through primary research and historical investigation, Hans Tao-Ming Huang offers a contextualised study of Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys, one of Taiwan’s first recognized gay novels, as he critically engages disparate discursive fields of dominant legal and medical discourses of sex, lesbian and gay activism, as well as mainstream feminist politics. He shows that the construction of male homosexuality as a term of social exclusion is historically linked to the state’s banning of prostitution, further delineating a moral-sexual order that has come to be buttressed by the hegemonic rise of anti-prostitution state feminism since the 1990s. In exploring the imbrications of male homosexuality, prostitution and feminism in Taiwanese national culture, Huang boldly ventures a politics of sexual dissidence that contests state-inspired heteronormativity.

Hans Tao-Ming Huang is an assistant professor in the English Department of National Central University, Taiwan, where he is also affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Sexualities.

“Hans Huang’s book is a rare combination of significant primary research into a variety of published texts and theoretically informed historical analysis, covering the period from the 50s and 60s to the present. The result is an account of some key discursive formations within which different forms of sexually defined selfhood are produced, attitudes to forms of sexual behaviour are encouraged among the general population.” —Chris Berry, Goldsmiths, University of London

“This books is very erudite: intellectually acute, it is theoretically informed and sophisticated, with lively and intelligent engagement with key words in a wide range of relevant fields, in both English and Chinese.” —Fran Martin, University of Melbourne