Erotic Fluidity and Multiplicity

that could not possibly capture the diversity of their individual and sexual identities.

Thus, a “critique of gendered power relations in contemporary Taiwan” underlies many of Chi’s writings, and is the second major subtheme that we will consider here.

3.3.1 Erotic Fluidity and Multiplicity

As a tongzhi / ku’er author, one of Chi’s concerns is to present a multiplicity of sexual practices, orientations, and identities through which individuals can give expression to their erotic desires. Sexuality is not a binary division between hetero- and homosexual, but a continuum of different desires and performative acts through which individuals invent and establish themselves sexually. It is also important to remember that even those sexual acts that may appear unusual are not given a moral dimension; that is, sexuality is not amoral but rather unmoral, having a place in the lives of individuals without necessarily influencing their moral value(s) based on the choices they make. Sexuality is a freedom, even if it is not always recognized as a right, and we should not be surprised to find consenting adults indulging in it in whatever way best fulfills their erotic needs. The following paragraphs offer a brief discussion of the plurality and fluidity of erotic desires in the works translated here.

Erotic Fluidity and Multiplicity in Membranes

Membranes’ Momo lives in New Taiwan, a society in which people indulge themselves in a variety of sexual activities to satisfy their sexual needs. While Momo is hospitalized to treat her for the LOGO bacterium (and while she is still a human being), she has her first sexual experience (which she innocently believes is “eating”) when she playfully bites off the finger of her android companion, Andy, and Andy attempts to bite off her penis (Momo begins the novel as a biological male). Soon after her surgery takes place, Momo allows herself to be fondled by a male android, experiencing a new kind of pleasure and an intimacy all-too-often denied her by her busy mother. Occasionally she further experiences sexual pleasure from turning the showerhead on her newly female genitalia. Momo’s mother is also involved in at least two lesbian relationships which Momo witnesses, one with Momo’s mother’s friend Tomie that forms part of her birth story, and another with the esthetician Draupadi that Momo covertly witnesses by placing a scanner in her mother’s bedroom when she is ten years old. Yet Momo grows colder as she ages, and this childlike innocence and curiosity about sexuality changes when she imagines that she goes to boarding school, where Momo coldly rebuffs the advances of a young American girl in her beautician classes. She later refuses to become sexually close with any of her clients

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or other individuals as she focuses on her career as an esthetician. Yet when Draupadi brings Momo a product called M-Skin, Momo becomes privy to all of her clients’ physical lives, including their most intimate sexual secrets. She “reads” her clients’ data using a scanner and Draupadi’s M-Skin and experiences in her own body sado-masochistic relationships, homosexual and heterosexual relationships, and even one highly unusual orgiastic (and orgasmic) experience in which Tomie and two companions merge to form bubbles on the surface of the sea. All of these sexual experiences have a darker side, as they are secretly designed to get Momo to steal military information from her clients, who are war androids. Near the end of the story, Momo’s bitter jealousy of her own mother leads her to use the M-Skin to gain access to her mother’s diary; this semi-incestuous act of rape almost leads Momo to realize that she is in fact only a brain housed in an android body, and is only stopped by the timely intervention of Momo’s supervisor, Draupadi. Sexuality thus represents one of the most vivid and significant ways of gaining information about oneself and the world, but it is also a highly transgressive act that breaches the boundaries between people and between the information contained in their bodies.

Erotic Fluidity and Multiplicity in L’Apres-midi d’un Faune

The story begins with the narrator going to a hot springs and finding his young body admired and his movements mimicked by a graceful young man, a scene with faint homoerotic overtones. When the young man, K., later takes the protagonist, A Suo, to a field, A Suo returns the admiring and imitative favor be drawing a freehand sketch of K. as K. dances Nijinsky’s choreography to Debussy’s L’Apres-midi d’un Faune in a field. The dance itself stars an earthy faun, the lusty Dionysian beast of Greek myth, as he chases after a band of nymphs. By putting A Suo in the role of the spectator, K. makes A Suo a passive recipient of the faun’s erotic desires; A Suo’s sketch immortalizes the faun’s amorous gestures but places the focus squarely back on the dancer. By reciprocally placing each other in the passive positions in an erotic dance, K. and A Suo become involved in a very cerebral relationship that is the intellectual counterpart to their physical meeting at the hot springs. When K. later invites A Suo home for the night, A Suo feels that a young man’s hand reaches into his underpants and fondles him before covering him with a blanket, further suggesting that K. has an erotic desire to take A Suo to bed and be with him. When K. invites A Suo to hang the now-framed sketch of him from the day before on the wall of K.’s home, he again moves their still unacknowledged erotic relationship back to the intellectual realm of the sketch. When K. attempts to return to the physical side of the relationship by stroking A Suo’s legs as the latter stands on a ladder to hang the

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picture, A Suo strikes K. on the head with a hammer, killing him and leaving the hammer stuck fast in his skull. This literally cerebral act of penetration again returns their relationship to the intellectual plane. Soon afterward, it is A Suo who wraps K. in the very blanket that had covered him the night before, in a sense taking K. to bed in his final resting place. This constant interplay of the physical and the intellectual in the homoerotic relationship hinted at between A Suo and K. continues as K.’s pocket watch becomes a “living part” of A Suo, while A Suo becomes the watch’s “choice flesh.” The two men are literally joined at the breast by the pocket watch, whose inlaid etching of a faun continually taunts A Suo with hints of an even more sensual, earthy relationship. The watch accompanies A Suo both to school and to bed, further

emphasizing the erotic and intellectual relationship between him and K. and denying A Suo any intimacy between himself and other people. In a grim twist, when A Suo finally decides to destroy “his second heart” by smashing K.’s pocket watch with the hammer, he too falls dead in much the same way that K. had when the latter had previously been struck with it, and the faun rises exultantly from A Suo’s corpse and escapes. The final triumph of the faun and his wild physicality represents a kind of consummation to the erotic relationship that bound the two young men ever more closely in life and ultimately united them in death. The story ends by returning to the sketch, the intellectual symbol of A Suo and K.’s mutual affection for each other, tucked safely under A Suo’s bed, hinting that the relationship’s initial intellectual and emotional stirrings have also been realized by the reunion of the two men in death.

Here Chi reminds us that the erotic can have an intellectual component, while the intellectual can also be erotic, and shows that the lines between these two

components of a relationship are often much more fluid than they initially appear.

Erotic Fluidity and Multiplicity in The War Is Over

Erotic fluidity is explicit in this story, with the ambiguous gender of its “Better Halves” and the neuter gender of the replicants who serve them. Both heterosexual and homosexual relationships of all kinds are possible for the characters in the story, the only limitations being the domineering power of the Better Halves that condemns the replicants to an unequal partnership, and the factory programming of the

replicants, which delimits their intellectual and emotional freedom. Yet even this, Chi suggests, can be overcome through commitment and a willingness to try new things.

When the replicants Meimei and Lola discover an attraction for each other, they begin to transcend both the societal and the programming norms that compel them to “love”

and obey humans. The attraction to one’s own kind is something innate, Chi suggests, whatever their sexual preferences and orientation might be (both replicants, in spite

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of their gender, are named for women, giving the story homoerotic overtones). By obeying this innate attraction, we attain a kind of fluidity denied us by rigid social, familial, and emotional programming that dictates what a “normal” relationship should be, and can attain the true happiness of a full, equal, and loving relationship that is not defined by the overweening desires of someone who is, both sexually and socially, an outsider.

Erotic Fluidity in Nuit et brouillard

As in The War Is Over, the story focuses on the attraction of two individuals to

“members of their own kind,” in this case night owls who have no fixed schedule and thus live beyond the pale of the rigidly scheduled lives of ordinary Taiwanese citizens and so are consequently beneath their notice. But “just because [people] are never seen doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” the story tells us, and the same can be said of their erotic desires. When the protagonist finally invites a guest to his radio call-in show, “Intimacy,” he experiences both physical closeness and an erotic attraction defined by all five of his senses. This attraction enlivens him even as it is hidden from the outside world (who, as demonstrated by the radio program’s final call-in, condemn it as perverted out of hand). Being with one of his own kind enables the narrator to experience a kind of synesthetic eroticism that only someone like himself can bring him, a feeling of intimacy in which the senses themselves are fluid and vie with each other for supremacy. This fluidity ultimately leads both the narrator and his guest to bond even more closely by sharing their stories as well as their space, showing that erotic fluidity can be both an end in itself and the path to a stable, caring relationship so often denied by societal, familial and sexual “norms.”

Erotic Fluidity in 11 Songs for Percussion

The disparate stories in this collection each showcase various forms of

“forbidden” homoerotic love, both between rivals and comrades, between fellow students and between students and their teachers and coaches, between complete strangers, and even between the living and the dead. Chi provides us with a snapshot of each relationship in the roughly 500 characters that make up each “song,” just enough for us to get a glimpse of the profundity and passion behind each relationship before we move on to the next one. We as readers become voyeurs and spectators, forced to confront and be complicit in each different erotic relationship no matter what our own sexual orientations and feelings may be. We are made not only to see, but to see within a normative framework this vast array of erotic desires, challenging us as

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readers to redefine the boundaries of what is a “normal” or “acceptable” erotic desire each time a new one is presented to us.

Section Summary

The erotic fluidity of the characters in Chi’s early works translated here once again highlights the complexity of his characters and the dangers of reducing them into simplified or convenient categories to fit preconceived notions of what sexuality ought to be. The characters thus invite readers to consider their own sexual and individual complexity, and to understand that there is no one “right” or “wrong” way to feel about one’s fellow consenting human beings. Sexuality is a natural part of the human condition, and only when it is revealed and accepted in all of its diversity can all individuals experience the joy and freedom of the sexual act and embrace the responsibility of healthy, loving, committed relationships.

3.3.2 A Political Critique of Sexual and Gendered Power in Contemporary