1 Introduction: Queer Sex Radicals and the Post-2000 Political Rift with Tongzhi Activists

In the early 1990s a group of Leftist ‘sex liberation’ scholars (性開放派, xing kaifangpai) returned to Taiwan after completing their doctorates in the West. Having been effectively ‘kicked out of the [mainstream] feminist movement’¹ in 1994 for their unapologetic public discussions of sex and sexuality, in October 1995 they established the Center for the Study of Sexualities (性／別研究室, Xing/bie yanjiushi) at the National Central University (ncu) in Taiwan (Chang, 2018; Chiang, 2019; Liou, 2001). Among them, Josephine Ho (何春蕤) became internationally acclaimed as the doyen of sex-positive feminism in Taiwan and went on to have an illustrious academic career. Ho and her colleagues were truly pioneering in both their scholarly and activist work to forge ‘positive attitudes towards female eroticism, sexual minorities, pornography, and the sex industry’ in Taiwan (Wang, 2021: 213). In 1997, for example, they protested Taipei city mayor Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) crackdown on brothels and fought for the legalisation of sex work, putting Ho and her comrades at odds with many in the mainstream feminist movement (Ho, 2000). In the early 2000s they set up a support group called ‘Taiwan tg Butterfly Garden’ (台灣 tg 蝶園) for Taiwanese transgender and gender-nonconforming people who met in an underground venue near Taipei main station and publicly raised the visibility of transgender people in Taiwan through the writings and activist work of their centre at ncu.² Their bold political activism challenged the homophobic state apparatus of the Republic of China (roc, Taiwan) at the time and they suffered undue legal persecution for their outspoken and iconoclastic views (Ho, 2010). ncu academics became known as the intellectual vanguard that not only challenged traditional mainstream sexual values but also trained and deeply influenced many of Taiwan’s younger generation of tongzhi scholars and activists.³

This article examines the evolution of ‘radical queer’ versus ‘mainstream’ tongzhi politics in Taiwan since 2000; how the divide over what kind of relationship homosexuals should have with the state has evolved into an increasingly vexed contestation over national identity; and how this was galvanised by the debate within the lgbt movement about advocating the legalisation of same-sex marriage. I demonstrate how this is ultimately connected to a broader dissension among radical queers and tongzhi on whether to perpetuate or to discourage Taiwan’s continued political independence from the People’s Republic of China (prc)—what I term the fight for and against tongzhi sovereignty. The primary question I seek to answer is: how and why has a rights-focused sexual citizenship in the post-2000 period become intertwined with nation-building in Taiwan? To unpack this puzzle, I begin with a brief overview of the historical context in which tongzhi activism emerged in the 1990s and expanded in the post-2000 period. I then sketch the contours of tongzhi sovereignty from the perspective of Taiwanese tongzhi I interviewed (approximately 50 people mostly in their twenties to forties) during 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan (January 2020—August 2021), how they respond to the ncu school of ‘radical’ queer thought and articulate their counter-vision for Taiwan’s future. Against this backdrop, I review how US queer cultural theorist Jasbir K. Puar’s concept of homonationalism has been (mis)appropriated by some scholars to cast a reproving glance on lgbt legal progress and tongzhi nation-building in Taiwan, why such conclusions are unfair and geopolitically asymmetrical, and why this matters.

To situate this discussion in its broader historical context, Taiwan’s experience of nearly four decades under martial law cemented political determination by its nascent civil society in the late 1980s and early 1990s to open dialogue on sensitive topics such as the rights of women and sexual minorities. Social demonstrations quickly erupted in the spring of 1990 in what came to be known as the Wild Lily Movement, Taiwan’s first mass protest after the lifting of martial law (Harrison, 2017). This student movement spearheaded important democratic transitions in Taiwan that unfolded in the 1990s, notably the popular election of members of the Legislative Yuan in 1992, mayors in 1994, and finally the first democratic election of the president in 1996. All these political changes transpired during a decade that Sinophone sexuality scholar Fran Martin (2003b: 2) argues ‘marked a radical shift in the way sexuality was thought and spoken about in Taiwan, suggesting the stirrings of a new, public sexual culture’. By the early 2000s, as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (lgbt) organising in Taiwan began a ‘civic turn’ towards sexual citizenship through the pursuit of legal rights (Chu, 2003), a rift gradually began to appear between tongzhi rights activists and those intellectually aligned with the ncu queer sex radicals.

In 2003 Taiwan held its first official lgbt Pride Parade in Taipei; despite this momentous event, historian Howard Chiang (姜學豪) reminds us that ‘the political mobilization of tongzhi was overwhelmingly driven by lesbian and gay interest before 2000’ (2021: 173), including the work of Leftist ‘sex liberation’ scholars and activists in the 1990s. Josephine Ho and her colleagues were among the earliest vocal supporters of a visibility politics that Pride represented. In 2009, however, with the rise of anti-tongzhi conservative Christian opposition, a few days before the annual Pride Parade in late October, Ho wrote an editorial in the Apple Daily decrying tongzhi for what she believed was a lack of ‘consciousness to take a stand against’ (抗爭意識, kangzheng yishi) these forces, saying ‘the sense of resistance has not penetrated and strengthened the parade content in the same way that it has been “commercialised”’ (商業色彩, shangye secai).⁴ That same year the Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (台灣伴侶權益推動聯盟 or tapcpr) was founded as the first legal organisation dedicated to litigating for legal rights to protect same-sex relationships. In 2012, as the lgbt rights movement amplified their calls to legalise same-sex marriage in Taiwan, Ho and her colleagues (including other prominent Leftist queer activists such as Ping Wang (王蘋) from the Gender/Sexuality Rights Association, Taiwan 台灣性別人權協會) became increasingly frustrated with the parade when the organisers chose ‘Marriage revolution: Marriage equality and diverse partnerships’ as their theme.⁵ That year Wang took to the main stage of the parade and, to the surprise of many, declared: ‘We must have the right to marry, and the right to divorce!’ (要有結婚權，也要有離婚權).⁶ They were adamantly against what they saw as a subversion of the ‘radical’ potential of queer activism by a turn to homonormative politics of same-sex marriage activism (Kao, 2021). They confronted what they believed was the homonormative capture of tongzhi politics in Taiwan by channelling the ‘queer attack on heteronormativity [which] rejected the limited liberal aspirations of ending state-sponsored homophobia and installing principles of toleration in its place’ (Currah, 2013). In short, they wanted the tongzhi movement to prioritise more structural issues of inequality. Resisting what Marxist political scientist Peter Drucker (2015) calls a warped politics of ‘gay normality’, Ho and her partner, philosopher Yin-bin Ning (甯應斌), identify themselves as queer deconstructionists (酷兒毀廢派, ku’er huifeipai), Leftists (左派, zuopai), and radicals (激進派, jijinpai). They are fundamentally against the institution of marriage in any state-regulated form (Ning, 2018a) and define ‘queer’ as marginalised tongzhi who reject the mainstreaming (主流化, zhuliuhua) of the lgbt movement (Ning, 2018b: 235).

This public split with tongzhi activists was largely based on their opposition to those they call ‘same-sex marriage progressives’ (進步派、同婚派, jijinpai, tonghunpai) who were taking the movement in a direction Ho, Ning, and their intellectual community opposed. Criticising their capitulation to homonormativity by working hand in hand with the state to promote gender equality and legal rights for same-sex couples (Ho, 2017), Ning and Ho took umbrage with what they believed was the silencing tactics of Taiwan’s lgbt civil society groups (Ho, 2016). Ning (2013) accused lgbt rights activists of breeding what he termed a position of ‘neo-moralism’ (新道德主義, xin daode zhuyi) which ideologically oppresses its detractors as it is fixated on changing conservative Taiwanese people’s traditional beliefs about the family through legal and educational changes aimed at promoting a tongzhi-friendly ‘modern individualistic family concept’ (現代個人主義的家庭觀念; 2018a: 88). Ning has also termed this the deployment of ‘social civilisation’ (社會文明, shehui wenming) posturing by the Democratic Progressive Party (dpp) as a political ruse and presumably disingenuous tactic ‘to further separate the two sides of the Strait, widen the gap, or gain international recognition and show itself as the progress of democratic civilisation similar to the West’ (Ning, 2018b: 236).

In other words, in Ho’s view, Taiwan’s sociolegal ‘striving for progress’ is really just a formulaic performance of Ning’s ‘social civilisation’ discourse in order to be seen as ‘protecting’ human rights and thereby strategically grovel to the international community for support of its disputed sovereignty as a contested state (Ho, 2018). Whereas Ho shuns what she views as the ascent of tongzhi legalism and its state capture, many lgbt activists would argue that legal change (including, but not limited to, same-sex marriage) is absolutely critical to realising greater equality in society.

Ultimately, Marxist radicals like Ning believe that the tongzhi activist strategy of focusing on marriage and other legal rights for individuals is futile and unsustainable ‘because capitalism cannot resolve the gap between the rich and poor’ (Ning, 2018a: 88). Promoting a form of queer anti-capitalism with a professed attachment to anti-nationalism,⁸ they advocate a politics of ‘radical’ ideological purity that their lgbt rights opponents believe is overly idealised, absolutist, and largely bereft of practical relevance to the daily struggles of the average tongzhi citizen in Taiwan. Furthermore, as literary scholar Li-fen Chen (陳麗芬) counters in her incisive study of the intellectual disposition of these queer scholars in Taiwan, the reductive ‘equation of nationalism with the state apparatus is problematic’ (2011: 394); not only is it an essentialist and oversimplified framework, it also works to pre-emptively dismantle potentially emancipatory forms of agency by tongzhi in contemporary Taiwan.

In many ways, the Marxist sexual liberation critique from Ho and Ning is not that different from arguments against same-sex marriage and the neoliberal ‘politics of inclusion’ made by antinormative Marxist queer theorists in the West, such as Drucker (2015), Rosemary Hennessy (1994), Lisa Duggan (2003), Holly Lewis (2016), or the ‘Against Equality’ collective founded in 2011 by Yasmin Nair and Ryan Conrad.⁹ Repudiating political and social assimilation, these critics of ‘queer liberalism’ (Eng, 2010) are motivated by a suspicion that the activist chasing of legal recognition perversely functions to water down and weed out non-normative forms of queerness. Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash suggest that these queer critics of same-sex marriage fear that such a focus, in fact, conflates homogenisation with ‘equality’ and ends up surrendering the radical political potential of being different. In doing so this process of legal normalisation is believed to ‘privilege[s] certain forms of “homosexual” expression and regulates bodies and practices within neoliberal privatised norms’ (Browne & Nash, 2010: 6) to render those who were once sexual outlaws palatable to a heterosexual society. If that were the primary thrust of Ho and Ning’s contention, then it would not be particularly unique or noteworthy. Where Leftist sex radical politics diverge in Taiwan, however, is the way their ‘queer’ critique has departed the realm of sexual politics and morphed into a sustained attack against the post–martial law era’s movement to localise Taiwanese identity (本土化, bentuhua). That is to say, the ‘China factor’ (中國因素, zhongguo yinsu) has come into play in a very conspicuous way.

Taiwan’s inchoate and contested statehood renders it a site of intense debate (and military posturing) over the nature of its identity.¹⁰ A decade or so ago what ostensibly began as a split over views of same-sex marriage has developed into a contentious politics of Chinese versus Taiwanese national identity and the country’s future. This has resulted in a situation in which the views of Ho, Ning, Petrus Liu (劉奕德), and their intellectual community—both towards Taiwan’s lgbt rights movement and the country’s ongoing political separation from the prc—continue to be widely circulated in English-language scholarship of sexuality/cultural studies while increasingly no longer representing the way the majority of tongzhi interpret recent lgbt progress and their desire to defend de facto independence (i.e. maintaining the status quo of a democratic Taiwan; see Chen-Dedman, 2022). In other words, for some time now there has been a lopsided representation problem in how Taiwan and its legal progress on lgbt rights are articulated in cultural studies scholarship, an issue that historian Mark Harrison (2009) and literary scholar Li-fen Chen (2011) first alluded to over a decade ago. This has led to what Taiwanese sociologist Ying-chao Kao (2021: 4) refers to as these queer sex liberation ‘scholars’ glocalisation of homonormativity critiques’ rooted in US-centric queer theory. These decontextualised framings have discursively functioned for many years to cast ‘mainstream’ tongzhi who support same-sex marriage as irreparably assimilationist and posits a false choice between either being a ‘queer sex radical’ or a ‘homonormative liberal’ tongzhi. Moreover, the latter are deemed to be colluding with the state apparatus to foment what these scholars interpret as pesky Taiwanese nationalism—now seemingly cloaked in ‘queer liberalism’—that perpetuates political independence from China.

2 Tongzhi Sovereignty: Protecting Taiwan to Protect lgbt Rights

In a context far removed from Taiwan, political anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla (2015: xiii–xiv) observes that ‘the majority of Caribbean polities are non-sovereign societies; even those that have achieved “flag independence” still struggle with how to forge a more robust project of self-determination’. Elsewhere Bonilla (2013: 156) clarifies: ‘Classical political theory has posed a definition of the modern sovereign state as imbued with a form of power that is singular, absolute, territorially confined within the space of the nation, and vertically rooted in the apparatus of the state.’ By engaging with Caribbean political actors such as Guadeloupean labour activists in the French Antilles, Bonilla works to unsettle popular Westphalian understandings of sovereignty as universally embraced by demonstrating how her interlocutors ‘contradict the telos of postcolonial history by not having followed the path of independence’ (2015: 188). Bonilla’s insights reorient our attention towards another way of thinking about sovereignty as residing in the people as opposed to being constituted solely by the state.

In another problematisation of a statist framework, political theorist Robert Latham (2000: 15) proffers that ‘states are only one among a number of actors’ which co-produce sovereignty. And Aihwa Ong (2000: 56) argues that conceptualising other forms of sovereignty ‘requires an understanding of the different mechanisms of governance beyond the military and the legal powers’. What Latham (2000) refers to as ‘social sovereignty’, Ong (2000) calls ‘graduated sovereignty’, and anthropologist Pinkaew Laungaramsri (2015) labels ‘commodifying sovereignty’ all reflect efforts to theorise neoliberal market penetration of sovereignty into our understanding of state power. One of the intellectual contributions we inherit from these scholars is their emphasis on non-state actors as key agential drivers reworking sovereign permutations of social life. With these insights in mind, this section offers a novel reformulation of sovereignty in the Taiwanese context. More specifically, tongzhi in contemporary Taiwan seek to interrupt what can be thought of as a Beijing-designed non-sovereign future for their country by engendering an imbricated sociopolitical project aimed at defending the roc’s political sovereignty from prc takeover while simultaneously transforming the roc apparatus into an inclusive Taiwanese sovereign polity that embraces sexual and other minorities. Destabilising hegemonic notions of sovereignty as the purview of the state yields an important epistemological framework for understanding how the tongzhi social movement imagines new futures for Taiwan.

During my fieldwork research in Taiwan from 2019 through 2021, I repeatedly encountered tongzhi making broader claims about their country. This complements what Hong Kong sexuality scholar Travis S. K. Kong (江紹祺) discovered in his interviews with younger gay Taiwanese men. He writes: ‘Taiwanese born in the 1990s have developed a distinct Taiwanese identity that is radically different from Chinese identity’ (2019: 1913). Many of those I interviewed emphasised that not only are they not Chinese (中國人, zhongguoren) but that Taiwan’s tongzhi freedoms and legal protections have been made possible because of its vigorous civil society and democratic system (Figure 1).

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Rucksack of a tongzhi youth participant at the Taichung lgbtq Pride Parade in central Taiwan, 14 November 2020. The top sticker reads: ‘Taiwan is Super Cool/Queer [a play on the character ku 酷]. I’m Taiwanese, Not Chinese, and I’m Proud of It.’ The lower sticker with a cartoon of President Tsai Ing-wen is a reference to the 2020 presidential election and says ‘2020: Tongzhi support Tsai’.

Citation: International Journal of Taiwan Studies 6, 2 (2023) ; 10.1163/24688800-20221267

credit: author.

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From the perspective of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp), ‘the Taiwan issue is a legacy of the Chinese civil war’; as if this historically reductive framing were an irrefutable matter, former Chairman Hu Jintao proclaimed that ‘to return to unity is not a recreation of sovereignty or territory but an end to political antagonism’ (Huang & Tan, 2019: 58). The ccp’s ethnocentric fusion of Han ethnicity with a politically unitary Chinese state seeking to monopolise the parameters of Taiwan’s sovereignty for its own autocratic vision of the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ (中華民族偉大復興, zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) is an anathema to the vast majority of Taiwanese people who want to be seen in their own right and not merely as a ‘reactionary’ subset of China. Their version of liberal nationalism defines what it means to be Taiwanese more in terms of a project to expand Taiwan’s adherence to human rights and eschews the kmt-ccp mutually reinforcing discourse of an ethnically inflected Chinese nationalism that ‘has long been characterised by a “strong state complex”’ (Hughes, 2005: 249).

During fieldwork in Taipei amid the 2020 Taiwan presidential election, one tongzhi postgraduate student retorted: ‘I find it both offensive and essentialising when the international community interprets our votes for President Tsai Ing-wen and her more progressive vision of Taiwan as nothing more than a reaction against Chinese pressure.’¹¹ On the night of President Tsai’s re-election, he further added: ‘I am just worried that people would take it [her re-election] at face value and call it a win for Taiwanese nationalism. I haven’t seen many conversations about how we are voting for an inclusionary identity instead of an exclusionary one.’ This calls attention to a key theme among my informants who consistently spoke of the need to amplify ‘Taiwanese values’ (台灣價值, taiwan jiazhi), which they understand as a progressive-oriented liberalism that foregrounds social inclusion and multiculturalism over exclusionary forms of nationalism.

Eminent sociologist of ethnicity and citizenship Tariq Modood, in repriming multiculturalism as a positive force for what he calls ‘acceptable nationalism’, tenders that ‘multiculturalism is a mode of integration that does not just emphasise the centrality of minority group identities but argues that integration is incomplete without remaking national identity so that all can have a sense of belonging to it’ (2020: 308, emphasis added). Likewise, political philosophers Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka cautiously note that, despite its difficulties, ‘“multicultural nationalism” . . . may be needed to ensure that the privileging of national identity does not come at the expense of minorities’ (2017: 20). Seen from this angle, the remaking of Taiwanese identity to include tongzhi through the struggle for legal recognition of their sexual citizenship offers a salient example of multicultural nationalism that effectively dislodges the monocultural nationalism inherited from the martial law era under the kmt. Even liberal intellectuals, such as Martha Nussbaum, who once abjured nationalism as an irredeemable concept, now embrace inclusive forms of it. In her book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Nussbaum speaks about the power of ‘patriotic emotions’ to overcome racial animus. She writes that ‘one way to overcome it is surely to link the narrative of the full humanity of the denigrated group to a story of national struggle and national commitment’ (2009: 211, emphasis added). In many ways a similar linking and articulation of rights for sexual minorities with the broader national resolve to shore up Taiwanese self-determination under siege epitomises the essence of tongzhi sovereignty.

Such a depiction should not be read as hyperbolic fearmongering but the sobering reality that animates the multifaceted practices of defending sovereignty in Taiwan.

Proud of their Taiwanese values, tongzhi categorically reject ‘radical’ queer critics who pejoratively depict the younger Taiwanese generation as suffering from a ‘nihilistic outlook in the form of queer liberalism’¹⁴ which scholars like Petrus Liu contend fuels the ‘expression of anti-Chinese sentiments in Taiwan’ (2012: 81). What are we to make then of this rhetoric of ‘Taiwanese values’ as employed by many tongzhi? Are they merely homonationalist sentiments deployed to distinguish ‘liberal’ Taiwan from authoritarian China or might they be rooted in more intrinsic qualities habitualised through affective attachments to democracy, a concern for social justice, and the desire to keep Taiwan free? And if so, what is wrong with that?

3 Jasbir Puar, Homonationalism, and the ‘Radical Contextualism’ of Taiwan

In her seminal book Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Jasbir Puar unpacks how homosexuality and liberal rights discourse have been appropriated as a barometer of ‘civilised’ societies by the United States, Europe, and Israel in their collective post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’. In doing so, she develops the concept of homonationalism as an analytical framework that couples homonormativity with nationalism to synthesise ‘the historical convergence of state practices, transnational circuits of queer commodity culture and human rights paradigms, and broader global phenomena such as the increasing entrenchment of Islamophobia’ (Puar, 2013b: 337). Israeli scholars Gilly Hartal and Orna Sasson-Levy (2017: 745) clarify that homonationalism is not an identity nor a type of politics but rather ‘a disciplining ideology and regulatory regime within the structure of citizenship’ that is fundamentally predicated on ‘dynamic binary processes of inclusion and exclusion’.

By reformulating her concept beyond the strict imbrication of imperialism and racism as the linchpin of homonationalism, Puar expanded her concept’s analytic purview to include a broader ‘critical assessment of the successes of lgbtq + liberal rights movements’ (Winer & Bolzendahl, 2021: 3). A recent example of this interpretation of homonationalism can be seen in Xuekun Liu’s work on Hong Kong, a besieged city whose democracy movement has been ruthlessly quashed by Beijing. Arguing that Christian organisations and anti-Beijing lawmakers should be blamed as ‘the most formidable forces opposing lgbt rights in Hong Kong’, Liu (2021: 2, 7) castigates pro-democracy lgbt activists in Hong Kong for what he asserts is their ‘homonationalist representation of Mainland China and the cpc as inherently opposing lgbt rights by implying an “anti-cpc as liberating” narrative’.¹⁵ While anti-PRC (“mainland”) Chinese xenophobia is real among some people in the pro-democracy movement, it did not emerge in a vacuum. Liu embraces Kong’s (2019: 1916) description of ‘a “weak” version of homonationalism whereby the “evil other” is mainland China and Hong Kong is the culturally superior’. In doing so, he conveniently fails to differentiate between Chinese people (from the PRC) and the authoritarian Chinese state/regime in his analysis. Liu (2021: 2, 5) renders a lopsided ‘homonationalist’ verdict of these activists as simply ‘unreasonable’ (given the legal ‘fact of Hong Kong being part of China’) and racist (‘[b]y othering Chinese people and distancing themselves from this category’), without articulating the context and severity of Beijing-induced political repression, its broken promises to Hong Kong, and the imbalance of power that generate complex/conflicting sentiments and the unwavering desire for an alternative political future.¹⁶

A purer case study of ‘hard’ homonationalism would be Israel—one of Puar’s primary examples—which has projected the image of ‘liberated’ Israeli gay men as evidence of how ‘progressive’ it is in the face of surrounding oppressive Arab regimes that foments a broader discourse which functionally operates to diminish and obfuscate the valiant ways queer Arabs live vicariously, despite the challenges they face (Haddad, 2017). Moreover, in his study of hundreds of US liberal news reports on the 2016 shooting at Pulse night club in Orlando, Florida, Doug Meyer (2020) highlights Muslim homophobia as the unmistakable idée fixe of these media representations. He argues that a homonationalist mentality among lgbtq ‘progressives’ in the US contributes to ‘discourse on the left that positions Islamophobia as problematic while simultaneously linking Muslims with pathologizing characteristics’ (262). By minimising the Arab-American shooter’s ‘Americanness’ and focusing on his crime as both an act of homophobia and terrorism—rather than being that of a ‘lone wolf’—Meyer (256) concludes that ‘the articles generally decontextualized what he did from larger US policy [in the Middle East]’. The problem, he suggests, is a homonationalist one (and not exclusive to the political right) abetted by US imperial policies that encourage a mindset of conflating Islam with homophobia and terrorism in contrast to a more ‘enlightened’ West. Peter Cherry (2018) discovers similar ‘homonationalist binaries’ in his analysis of Muslim young men in British cinema that, at least in part, stems from a pro-lgbt ‘moral panic’ portrayal of the dangerously homophobic Arab ‘other’. In this sense homonationalism, rooted in an imperialist and self-righteous form of geopolitics, permeates contemporary Western liberal democracies through its cultural reproduction in the media, film, and presumably through the discourses and practices of some ‘homonormative’ lgbt activists.

For Puar, the concept’s focus is on process and originally was meant as ‘an incitement to generative and constructive debate’, not as ‘another marker meant to cleave a “good” (progressive/transgressive/politically left) queer from a “bad” (sold out/ conservative/ politically bankrupt) queer’ (2013a: 28, 25). As is now well known, homonationalism has become a key (and semi-sacrosanct) concept for theorising queer rights in cultural studies and related disciplines. Despite its centrality, Puar has acknowledged problematics arising and clarifications required due to what she calls ‘the “viral” travels of the concept of homonationalism’ (2013a: 42). A critical awareness that the conceptual oversimplification of homonationalism has led to its widespread popularity (Ritchie, 2015) can help us better identify when and how the concept is useful or not.

In a later elaboration to her original 2007 formulation, Puar submits that ‘the insidious collusions between racism and liberalism are the core critique of homonationalism’ (2013a: 26). Sexuality scholars Paola Bacchetta and Jin Haritaworn explain that although the term has subsequently been flattened and expanded by many ‘to describe the convergences and complicities between homonormative and nationalist projects’, in a wide array of contexts, we must not forget that homonationalism equally stems from ‘a resurgence in militarism, nationalism and imperialism, and a shift in white European identities’ (2011: 131). Thus, to sustain the coherence of homonationalism as a useful and relevant analytic, we must take stock of power differentials across specific spatial and political contexts (Hartal & Sasson-Levy, 2018). The combination of Taiwan’s geopolitical marginalisation and its legal progress on lgbt rights (imperfect as it still is) offers fertile ground for examining the limits of homonationalism as an analytical tool. In the tradition of radical contextualism—articulating ‘the relationships that have been made by the operation of power, in the interests of certain positions of power...’—that Stuart Hall insisted is the core concern of cultural studies (Grossberg, 2010: 21), the relevance of homonationalism as an insightful framework must be submitted to an empirical examination of power dynamics that is context-specific (Smith, 2017).

To date, Travis Kong’s 2019 article is the only scholarly work in English which explicitly seeks to tease out and theorise connections between sexual and political identities among young male tongzhi in Taiwan. He acknowledges that ‘young Taiwanese gay men [link] their sexual identity with their pride in their national identity’, yet curiously dismisses this as a form of homonationalism which he claims ‘is part of the larger Taiwanese independence movement’ (2019: 1914). This assertion perpetuates a problematic hermeneutics of Taiwan’s political context and the nuanced feelings most Taiwanese have about ‘independence’ and what such a loaded term means to them.¹⁷ We should not ignore ‘[t]he fact that power relations that do not fit the homonationalist script fall entirely from view’ in Kong’s analysis, as legal scholar Aleardo Zanghellini (2012: 363) warns happens in many decontextualised usages of the concept.

Despite his own explanation that homonationalism was conceived by Jasbir Puar to apply to ‘how the US as a nation justified the War on Terror by positioning itself as cultural, morally and politically advanced, as evidenced by its tolerance of queers and incorporation of certain queer rights’ (Kong, 2019: 1914), Kong nevertheless applies it to Taiwan. Engaging in a reductive interpretation of Taiwan’s tongzhi legal progress, Kong alleges that ‘by aligning homosexuality with nationalism and viewing mainland China as the “evil other,” the Taiwanese version of homonationalism tends to conceal the conflicts between the Taiwanese government and tongzhi’ (2019: 1914–1915). Yin-bin Ning, however, appears to acknowledge the problem with a concept like homonationalism formulated to analyse Western powers being directly applied to the Taiwanese or Asian context. Nevertheless, in an attempt to reconstitute Puar’s concept as inherently connected to liberalism and racism, he insists that ‘while Taiwan may not have installed a homonationalist form of modernity [like Western countries], it does not lack a racialised other that is the Chinese people’ (2018b: 242).¹⁸ Together with the notion of ‘pinkwashing’,¹⁹ Ning believes homonationalism is useful as a lens for comparing what he avows is American imperial manipulation of Taiwan and Israel, two ‘gay-friendly’ US allies. To this end, Ning declares that ‘in fact, Taiwan is the second Israel that the United States intends to create in East Asia’ (2018b: 242). For these scholars, criticisms of the Chinese state are elliptically collapsed into the ‘Chinese people’, and political autonomy and defence are recast as problems of Taiwanese nationalism and American imperialism that ‘enable’ it. Any attention to the prc’s hegemonic ideology of Chinese ethnonationalism or its revanchist threats to invade Taiwan and obliterate its democracy are completely absent.

In Taiwan’s case, certain scholars have either inadvertently or deliberately ignored the imperial component of Puarian homonationalism and often cite dated examples to demonstrate how ‘anti-queer’ they think Taiwan is; this is what Kong, as noted above, refers to as ‘concealing the conflicts’ (with no nuanced discussion of these examples, historical context, or acknowledgement of subsequent social/legal changes). The infamous government crackdowns on lgbt events and establishments in the late 1990s and early 2000s and the casting of tongzhi as ‘a kind of collective perversity’ (Wong, 2017: 221) by some sectors of Taiwanese society should be condemned. To the extent that ‘homonationalism portrays the state as tolerant and liberal, while simultaneously marking other states as intolerant, undemocratic, and illiberal’ (Hiller, 2022: 860–861) the argument that the Taiwanese government’s more recent promotion of lgbt rights stems from an obsessive desire to distinguish itself from authoritarian China (Liu, 2012) does, at first glance, seem convincing. Yet one of the major problems with such a homonationalist conclusion is the circular reasoning it occludes as these critics begin by assuming the very premise that is meant to be proven by the analysis itself. These scholars are a priori convinced that Taiwan’s desire to sustain the status quo of its self-rule is fundamentally the product of a fossilised ‘Cold War mentality’ that demonises ‘communist’ China (Ho, 2017; Liu, 2019), not the other way around. Thus, in seeking to generate international support for its embattled survival, all liberal-facing policies a dpp government enacts are inherently suspect and therefore should be interpreted as essentially anti-China political calculation.

How this reductive logic, which effectively erases tongzhi civil society’s role in fostering what most people understand as an innate desire to live in a freer society with more rights, or the hackneyed and largely obsolete examples of a homophobic roc state demonstrate that Taiwan is therefore homonationalist is altogether unclear. Does this satisfy Puar’s definition of homonationalism as a racialised ‘sexual exceptionalism’ or ‘regulatory script . . . of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality’ (2017: 2) that emanates through imperial power structures? The argument that Taiwan is homonationalist (or stiflingly homonormative for some tongzhi) is a dated one; the past decade has seen substantive change on these issues, and thus our critique should be revised. The real ‘enemy’ lurking in these homonationalist analyses is, as C. Heike Schotten (2016) suggests, imperialism—and in this case Chinese military threats to annex Taiwan. This must be the focus of our analysis rather than obfuscate the reality of Taiwan’s marginalisation by stripping tongzhi activists of their agency and collapsing all lgbt progress as a cunning government plot to distance itself from an illiberal party-state in the prc.

Coming back to Hall’s attention to radical contextualism, we must keep in mind that Puar’s take on homonationalism was an organic development in response to what she believed was a sinister appropriation of multicultural politics (and concomitant warmongering) in the West. In essence, homonationalism is part of the critical response to the representational approach of mainstream lgbt politics. Queer theorists writing against this trend (e.g. Jasbir Puar, Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson, Chandan Reddy, David Eng, Petrus Liu, etc.) maintain that we must revisit sexuality as an important vector of power in order to probe how social structures and political systems reproduce exclusionary hierarchies even when cloaked in feel-good bromides of diversity and inclusion. Although queer theory has a diverse intellectual genealogy, one of the most important influences has been French poststructuralism which posits a ‘deconstructivist conception of representation’ (Thomassen, 2017: 540) applied to all forms of ‘presence’, whether they be individual subjects, national identities, or political structures. Or, as queer theorist Annamarie Jagose (1996) simply puts it, ‘queer is less an identity than a critique of identity’ that abandons essentialisms and spawns a ‘non-identity politics’ (Lloyd, 2005).

This affinity for a non-identitarian and anti/post-nationalist orientation in much of queer theory is evident in Puar’s work as well. She writes: ‘Aspects of homosexuality have come within the purview of normative patriotism, incorporating aspects of queer subjectivity into the body of the normalized nation’, and goes on to caution that ‘nationalizing queerness has primarily served to reiterate discourses of American sexual exceptionalism’ (Puar, [2007] 2017: 46, 48–49). While Puar targets nationalist projects’ co-opting of queerness for perverse statist purposes, the overarching thrust in her work is that it is a critique produced with a context in mind.

Homonationalism was originally envisioned as a conceptual tool—‘foremost a theory of US racial formation’ (Puar, 2022: 3)—to disrupt the ‘progress narrative’ of lgbt politics and what Puar saw as the Western liberal state’s celebratory embrace of sexual minority movements which served to further neoliberal restructuring, reinforce social control (through conservative institutions such as marriage), and legitimise its ‘civilising’ interventionism against ‘backwards’ Muslim nations. Puar’s key takeaway here is that US homonationalism insidiously serves the nation as it ‘fosters nationalist homosexual positionalities which then police nonnationalist non-normative sexualities’ (2006: 73, emphasis added). We can see clear traces of Puar here in how Josephine Ho, Yin-bin Ning, and Petrus Liu frame lgbt politics in Taiwan. Yet it should also be clear by now that queer theory’s deconstructive critique of the ‘normalised nation’, while helpful in uncovering nationalistic rationalisations for racist and imperialist othering within particular contexts, should not be flattened and superimposed on Taiwan.

The Taiwanese lgbt rights movement has taken place in tandem with a struggle first against the lingering remnants of an authoritarian sociocultural tradition shaped by a formerly unitary roc state and now over the past few decades an increasingly bellicose ccp party-state that seeks to absorb Taiwan into its autocratic orbit. This calls for a situated and empirical analysis rather than projecting onto Taiwan what queer scholars say about the West or imagine about China. With this in mind, I argue that we must scrutinise the applicability of a homonationalist framing of Taiwan from a largely literary and cultural analysis standpoint as not doing so evades an honest reckoning with the very real imbalance of military power in the contemporary cross-Strait dynamic between Taiwan and China (Harrison, 2009). To this end, we must build an analytical framework based on epistemic and political justice for Taiwanese people that, as Mark Harrison exhorts, refuses to ‘efface political implications of scholarship and to replicate and participate in the unequal distribution of power between Taiwan and the rest of the world’ (2007: 253). Queer theory does not always travel well, especially in contested states like Taiwan where ‘homonationalism sees its limits’ (Chiang, 2021: 175).

4 Conclusion: Does It Matter if Taiwan Is ‘Homonationalist’ or Not?

For Taiwan’s post-1990 generation, fighting for the legal protection of tongzhi rights by ‘decenter[ing] heterosexuality as an essential component of citizenship’ (Josephson, 2017: 18), when read through the prism of ‘Taiwanese values’, is today deployed not to ‘other’ Chinese tongzhi, ‘party and play’ queers, or other ‘perverse’ citizens as sexually backwards, but to make Taiwan a less homophobic place to live. The real-life impacts of this progress reverberate beyond Taiwan’s own borders. Ting-fai Yu (余庭煇), for example, in his ethnographic research with lgbt students from Malaysia, reveals that his ‘informants chose Taiwan as their destination for further education because of its progressive human rights development and friendly public attitudes towards queer people’ (2021: 3550). These impacts are significant, and they matter.

This aligns with observations by sexuality scholars Wen Liu and Charlie Yi Zhang of what they call ‘the broad spectrum of the [tongzhi] movement’ (2022: 39). The binary of liberal tongzhi civic activism as a stifling form of assimilationism that breeds exclusionary Taiwanese nationalism and ‘queer sex liberationism’ as an authentic form of radical ‘post-national’ queerness that epistemologically and materially intervenes in social structures of domination is a false dichotomy. And, lest we forget, ‘post-national’ should be read here as symbolising the profound discontent certain scholars feel about the Taiwanisation of the roc and its continued separation from ‘China’, not the prc’s weaponisation of ethnonationalism against Taiwan nor the imagined potential of China as a liberatory site of ‘queer Marxism’ (Liu, 2015).

As ‘the movement shifted from making tongzhi visible [1990s] to the “sexual citizenship” of legal rights’ (Chen & Fell, 2021: 198) in the post-2000 era, marriage equality became symbolically important but did not limit activists. In fact, as many critics overlook, in 2012 tapcpr first proposed three bills of diversified family formation (「多元成家」三法, duoyuan chengjia sanfa) that would have given heterosexual and homosexual couples alike the ability to choose equal marriage rights, civil partnership rights, or multiple-person household rights. Their bill received the support of nearly 400 civil society groups and over 150,000 individuals but finally was not taken up in the national legislature, yet not for a lack of trying (Hsu, 2015). This underscores Kao’s important observation that ‘Taiwan’s progressive movements fought to reform heteronormative marriage, but they never focused only on monogamous marriage’ (2018: 88). And as tongzhi equality activist Jennifer Lu (呂欣潔) noted in an event to commemorate the second anniversary of same-sex marriage in Taiwan: ‘Marriage equality was never the end game for us, it was always just a beginning for the many issues our movement still needs to address.’²⁰

And thus, although homonationalism can be illuminating in certain contexts, Zanghellini cautions that ‘insufficiently careful uses of this concept, both in the activist and academic contexts, risk cheapening its currency’ (2012: 369), highlighting the need to dismantle formulaic accounts of homonationalism in the utterly sui generis case of Taiwan.

As such, by strategically entangling the expansion of individual rights with the consolidation of their contested national sovereignty, the discursive and political practices of the Taiwanese tongzhi I have examined activate their citizenship by exercising ‘the right to be moral subjects’ (成為公民—道德主體的權利, chengwei gongmin—daode zhuti de quanli; Wu, 2020: 39) through resisting their own legal and national erasure. As I have demonstrated in this article, how we narrate Taiwan as a contested nation matters to many tongzhi, reminding us that national identity and sexual citizenship must not be conceptually siloed. It is time that cultural and sexuality studies give tongzhi activists the credit they are due for their positive sociolegal contributions over the past several decades. Their articulations of tongzhi sovereignty work to advance a more inclusive vision of the Taiwanese nation. Our analyses of tongzhi liberal nation-building practices and their civic activism should reflect a scholarly commitment to radical contextualism and a preferential option for self-determination that disavows the obliquely Sinocentric configurations of ‘radical queerness’ which ultimately seek to erode the sovereignty of Taiwanese subjectivity.