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Premiered in 2016, Ear East Ensemble's Dress in Code sets its stories across the late Ming Dynasty, the White Terror period, and contemporary Taiwan, weaving together issues of queer and national disidentification. Critics question the legitimacy of actress Ying-Xuan Hsieh playing a cross-dressing male Kuomintang detective, arguing that her comedic dansō reijin performance eclipses the themes of political and sexual violence as imposed by authoritarian regimes and patriarchy. Yet this essay argues that her presentation ironically enables the theatricality of a multilayered gender performance to reach its climax through the feminine fascinations mobilized by the audience and the performer and, simultaneously, activates wild femininities that problematize the logocentric progressivism promoted by pro-China officials since 1949. Specifically, this essay investigates the theatrical and the performing texts, as well as analyzing the ways in which the multilayered gender performance, as a parodic tactic, protests a possible contemporary queer pop theater that not only amplifies the diverse critiques of queer studies but also responds to the current impasse of feminist movements in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a long fight, same-sex marriage in Taiwan became legal on 24 May 2019. This milestone does not however address the hegemony that exists inside queer communities, namely, the idea that femininity is the excluded other in gay communities and that femmes are perceived as potential traitors within Taiwanese lesbian society. Such misogynistic ideologies render queer communities less democratic and egalitarian than imagined. This paper coins the term "butchiarchy" as part of an analysis of the Thai lesbian film, Yes or No 2.5 (2015), a box-office hit in Taiwan, in order to reveal the hierarchical structure pervasive within lesbian communities. While reinforcing a butchiarchal norm, the film also mobilizes a femme gaze that plays with the scenes depicting the ambivalent affection between the two butch characters, which echoes the BL (Boys' Love/Yaoi) fever that has swept the popular culture industry in East Asian countries. To distinguish from BL, this paper intends to adopt the term "TL," as T stands for butch in East Asia, to describe the concept of "Butches' Love," which differentiates from BL that emphasizes Boys' love. By rethinking terms through which femme is represented as well as experienced, this paper points out how, on the one hand, femme is constantly abjected in order to affirm a constructed lesbian sexuality that problematically recognizes butch as the priori lesbian agent. On the other hand, the femme gazes troubles the butchiarchal surveillance that denies homosexuality in femmes and thus creates a possible scenario that recognizes the operative power of the sub-minority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

, a 2016 Taiwanese feature-length documentary film, records the process by which the director, Huang Hui-chen, attempts to repair the traumas that have alienated her from her mother A-nu, a butch Taoist priestess, through a series of recorded conversations and monologues. Critical concern over the ethics of the documentary, largely concerning issues of informed consent, arose quickly after its premiere. Such critiques, however, assume the existence of an omnipotent, monophonic, and dominant documenter and thus fall prey to a linear understanding of history that disregards the dynamic tactics deployed by the individuals documented in the film. The film never solely represents A-nu's history, but rather consistently features the improvisatory process of filming itself. Furthermore, this queer documentary allegorizes what I call a queer khan-bong practice and a reflexive backstage. The former refers to a local practice of resistance that appropriates Taoism, folklore, and the popular codes of working-class queer communities; the latter encapsulates a semiotic networking among a feminine community, which constantly reflects upon its own operation and structure. It is through these two tactics that Small Talk activates an approach to queer documentary that underscores the ways in which queer histories are constructed and mediated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political traumas and ethnic antagonisms in Taiwan emphasize the need for a reconsideration of the intervulnerable relation between island imaginaries and mainland ideological violence. Premiered at Metropolitan Hall in Taipei City on 28 October 2011, Golden Bough Theatre's musical Pirates and Formosa presents images of pirates of different races and genders surviving on the island, theatricalizing an islandscape that challenges the official, Kuomintang-advanced, historical grand narrative that has relied upon Confucian gender norms and the exclusion of women as subjects of nation-building processes. Combining local queer debates and camp discussions with island theories, this project sees the performance as a queer, de-hegemonic, and postcolonial discourse, which fashions a queer island disidentification that undoes the truth-claims of nationalist identitarianism and queers the Chinese-centrist identity as the ‘descendants of dragon’ that the Kuomintang has promoted for the past sixty years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]