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Why (not) Queer?: Ambivalence about “Politics” and Queer Identification in an Online Community in Taiwan

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Abstract

It is perhaps not widely recognized that queer travels across the traditional boundaries of time, language, culture, geography, and history, as a coping strategy for LGBT people around the world to find a point of departure in dealing with their experiences of social oppression or marginalization. Considering specifically queer’s translingual and transnational aspect, I set out in this chapter some discussions of queer/toagzhi/tonxinglian in contemporary Taiwan society, where the traveling of queer is simultaneously framed in the dialectics of “the East and West” as well as of “China and Taiwan. “ Giving an example to illustrate my arguments, I focus on participants in an online community named Spiteful Tots, where people collectively keep away from the politics of naming, such as tongzhi and queer. By looking into some of the problematics of queer’s traveling in this chapter, I hope to shed light upon the many faces of queer in a socioculturally glocalized context.

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Thomas Peele

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© 2007 Thomas Peele

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He, T. (2007). Why (not) Queer?: Ambivalence about “Politics” and Queer Identification in an Online Community in Taiwan. In: Peele, T. (eds) Queer Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230604384_14

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