A Political Critique of Sexual and Gendered Power in

Although Taiwan prides itself (with some justification) on being an open, tolerant, and democratic society, there nevertheless remain serious imbalances of power, particularly in the area of sexual and gender relations. As a Chinese-speaking society, Taiwan has a tendency to 重男輕女 zhong nan qing nü, or “give preference to males over females.” This goes hand in hand with traditional societal pressures for men and women to marry and produce male heirs to carry on the family line, and for a

consequent disapproval of sexual relationships not conducive to the production of offspring. The military also remains the exclusive purview of males and is compulsory for all males who have attained the age of at least 18 and are not attending college.

Additionally, as Fran Martin has noted, “police persecution of cruising under statues of crimes against ‘cultural decency’ remain disturbingly common,”²⁰; she further notes that “the increased visibility of tongzhi cultures within Taiwan’s public sphere has also precipitated the emergence of new forms of homophobic violence.”²¹ It is against the backdrop of these social and cultural pressures that the work of Chi and other tongzhi and ku’er authors make their critique.

Critique of Sexual and Gendered Power in Membranes

20 Angelwings, p. 11.

21 Ibid., p. 15.

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One of the most powerful ways Membranes critiques the imbalanced dominance of male-dominated, conservative viewpoints on gender and sexuality is by doing away with straight male characters entirely: not a single straight male human

character appears in the work²². Instead, lesbian characters like Momo’s mother and Tomie Junji and gay characters such as the gardener Paolo Pasolini are presented as the norm, and there are no stereotypical males to challenge the sexual freedom and comparative gendered power they enjoy. Momo herself is a young boy turned girl turned android turned genderless brain, and so straddles virtually all of the gendered and sexual roles presented in the story. The only child born in the novel is Momo, and her life is a tragic, imagined fantasy in which no future is possible. Traditional family and gendered relationships, the story seems to say, are a dead end that produces not healthy offspring but rather the sterile dreams of selfish or absent parents. The

military is similarly so violent and merciless that humans no longer can participate in it, leaving their future entirely in the hands of machines. The only true source of

happiness and enjoyment, the story tells us, is in the kind of cultural and sexual liberalism that the society in the novel makes possible. Although this society, too, is only the author’s fantasy, a life happily imagined is always better than one lived under repression, and a bird that can fly freely is always happier than one locked up in a gilded cage, a lesson Taiwan’s male-dominated, family-centric society would do well to take to heart.

Critique of Gendered and Sexual Power in L’Apres-midi d’un Faune

The story takes place in the countryside, far from the power of the protagonist’s families or government control. K.’s family is absent, while A Suo’s family is in the city and thus too far to exert any real influence on him during his trip. K. can dance and A Suo can draw freely as their passions dictate, free from the obligations to do military service or attend a school of their family’s choosing. Yet this freedom is soon marred by the abortive intimate advances of K., which are murderously refused by A Suo. Yet though A Suo’s violent response to K.’s touches temporarily restores his sense of being a real man with a proper heterosexual orientation, he is also a murderer, both of the young man he has killed and of his own repressed sexuality. The fact that he can no longer have normal relationships with his classmates shows just how worthless and unproductive such relationships can be when one’s true passions have been violently repressed. That A Suo later chooses to take his own life by smashing his

22 Prefatory Material, p. v.

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“second heart” and releasing the libidinous faun hidden beneath his urbane exterior are a further testament to the often fatal repression of perfectly natural desires

imposed on us by society, and offer a damning critique of a world which would rather see its sons dead than involved in sexual partnerships with one another.

Critique of Gendered and Sexual Power in The War Is Over

The War Is Over offers perhaps the most nuanced critique of gendered and sexual power of the works translated here. The human characters are referred to throughout the story as 外子 waizi, a term that generally refers to husbands and emphasizes the gendered and sexual power men wield as masters of the house. In a twist, however, the term waizi is made a designation for military personnel (a male sphere in Taiwanese society) who may be of either male or female (or even

theoretically transgender); at the same time, the gender of the protagonist’s waizi is never explicitly identified, leaving open the possibility that the waizi openly engage in homosexual or other “abnormal” (不正常 bu zhengchang) sexual practices and relationships. Thus the military becomes a place where male gendered power is still nominally the norm but where females, too, can exercise dominance by virtue of their humanity. In the story, however, the waizi are also dehumanized to almost the status of wild beasts, incessantly craving food and sex. The android replicants who are supposed to satisfy these desires all bear female names but are referred to throughout the story using the pronoun 它 ta, a term of neuter gender generally reserved in Chinese to describe things. The nominally “female” replicants are thus objectified and turned into chattel belonging to their human masters, a placement that may be seen as a critique of the dominant patriarchal modes of thought that still govern many modern Taiwanese families. When the two replicants with feminine names begin a relationship that seems genuine and caring, they are denounced by the waizi as “immoral, abnormal, and not fully human,” even though they, like the humans, are only trying to have a relationship with members of their own kind. Indeed, it is the human waizi who have “abnormal” relationships with machines to satisfy their own cravings. Chi’s point is clear: society places control over what is “right” both in terms of gender and sexual identity in its own, all too human hands, even when what is right or normal is clearly not a natural relationship between two consenting human beings. Chi goes even farther by showing that the waizi are in fact useless without the constant war against the Other that gives them their power. Similarly, there might be no use for the imbalanced gendered power structures in Taiwanese society if it were not always preoccupied by war with its outer neighbors (most notably China) or by vicious internal political strife between nativist and more pro-China political parties.

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Critique of Gendered and Sexual Power in Nuit et brouillard

Though the story focuses on an encounter between two night owls with homoerotic overtones, the protagonists are literally placed in a closet—a cramped radio studio humorously dubbed a “music box”—from which they cannot emerge for the two hours of a radio program. They are denounced as “perverts” when they ignore the calls from the outside world that flood in, and the reader gets the impression that their relationship would be frowned upon by the highly patriarchal Taiwanese society.

But Nuit et brouillard’s critique goes beyond the stern disapproval seen in other stories such as The War Is Over and focuses instead on the outright, willful ignorance of the Other in Taiwanese society. People who do not conform to regular

schedules—and hence regular patterns of sexual and social behavior—are

completely marginalized to the point where some even begin to question their very existence. Just because they are never seen does not mean that they do not exist, the story tells us; and if you look hard enough, you may have “friends waiting for you in the shadows.” Chi’s critique of Taiwanese society here is twofold: on the one hand, it overlooks those who refuse to conform to its social or sexual dictates; on the other, it refuses to look inward and see or recognize those of its members who deviate from its dictates in even the slightest way. Like The War Is Over, Nuit et brouillard

emphasizes the naturalness of finding a relationship with members of one’s own kind and the unnaturalness of denying such relationships just because they are different from what one knows, does, or believes in one’s own life. In a sense, then, the true sealed “music box” is Taiwanese society itself, and it is only by relinquishing its

vise-grip on normality that it can hear the stories of all of its members and become the truly open, democratic society it claims to be.

Critique of Gendered and Sexual Power in 11 Songs for Percussion

The characters in these eleven short stories exemplify many of the traits of the other works by Chi translated here: characters experience sexual desires and act out gender roles that are different from those expected and accepted by society. Chi’s critiques are especially harsh: patriarchal power is placed in the hands of a dying leader of a traditional band of martial artists whose prized sword and secret teaching are forbidden to female disciples; yet they are ultimately transmitted to the sole surviving female disciple, as she is the only one who can survive and perpetuate her master’s teachings (full equality for women is still an unrealized reality in

contemporary Taiwan). The two surviving male disciples, meanwhile, face death and

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so have no opportunity to be true “heirs” to their master or to recruit disciples of their own. In another story, two homosexual characters are threatened with flogging for their acts and denounced as “not fit to be men,” only for the context of the story to make it clear that their denouncer is a proud supporter of the Nazi regime. In another story, two military men find love on a doomed and sinking submarine, the company of their own kind their only consolation for the death and oblivion from which their own society cannot or will not save them. Still other stories have the characters forcibly driven into the open and gawked at by modern Taiwanese onlookers, a possible reference to some of the homophobic violence mentioned by Martin. Another

character experiences no love for his marriage and finds solace only in homosexual encounters in a men’s room; while other male characters find their sexual desires fulfilled only in the confines of a locker room, a sauna, or even a remote spacecraft.

As in Nuit et brouillard, these men are all individuals whom society refuses to

acknowledge, who have been driven to seek solace with members of their own kind by their own natural impulses, and whose place in society is confined to the margins because of it. Chi writes in his Prefatory Material to the collection that he wrote 11 Songs without knowing where his audience was;²³ but after reading the stories, one gets the sense that they are applicable to all sections of Taiwanese society, whatever their position on the spectrum of gendered or sexual power.

Section Summary

Without a committed critique of gendered and sexual power in a deeply

traditional and patriarchal society such as Taiwan, there can be no real possibility of a change in the balance of power. Such a change may be unnerving and even

frightening, Chi shows us, but it need not be impossible or even, for that matter, necessarily destructive. It is only when all members of a society, male and female, tongzhi and otherwise, are able to contribute equally to that society’s development without fear of repression and discrimination that society has a chance to truly grow and become better. Rather than being closed and exclusive, Chi suggests, societies should remain open to the possibilities of differences among their members, and of engaging in a productive dialogue about these differences to produce positive social change. The 1990s in which Chi Ta-wei wrote itself bore witness to some of this productive dialogue and change; but as Chi’s writings vividly show us, much work still remains to be done.

23 Ibid., p. vi.

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