Abstract
This chapter investigates the Taiwanese director Zero Chou’s tongzhi trilogy. It begins by suggesting that Chou’s 2004 film Splendid Float, which combines the elements of the real and the fantastic, provincialises Judith Butler’s notions of drag as a discursive practice, adding localised historicisations of queer desire that do not follow Euro-American notions of gender parody. Then, the chapter examines Chou’s 2007 Teddy Award-winning film Spider Lilies, which continues to rework Euro-American notions of gender parody by complicating the T/Po (butch/femme) binary. The chapter also suggests that Spider Lilies repositions the image of the bishōjo back to it queer origins. Finally, the chapter suggests that in her 2009 film Drifting Flowers, Chou employs and reworks both the schoolgirl romance as well as the tomboy melodrama.
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Pecic, Z.L. (2016). Zero Chou’s Tongzhi Trilogy. In: New Queer Sinophone Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94882-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94882-6_4
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