Dismembering theory: working notes Fran Martin ©版權所有 In his essay of a decade ago, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Arjun Appadurai proposed a framework for thinking about the disjunctures of globalising culture in terms of five "scapes": ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes. I'm interested here in a related but slightly different kind of cultural flow that might be designated by the term "knowledgscapes." That term might help in thinking through what kinds of scholarly knowledge flow in which directions in today's world, a question that Edward Said addressed, in a different way, as that of "travelling theory."1 Appadurai is one of many commentators to have argued that the current age is characterised by the breakdown of simple geo-cultural divides like "centre: periphery"; "metropolis: margin" and so on - and the emergence of local and regional forms of cultural studies (Taiwan cultural studies; Australian cultural studies; Asian cultural studies) could itself be understood as evidence of such a de-centralisation. Nevertheless, as is the case with capital, people, technology, media, and ideology, knowledge is not entirely free to come and go as it pleases, and there remain discernible trends in its global movements resulting from the unconcluded histories of differential flow in the other "scapes." Disjunctive knowledgescapes 1 The working notes I'm presenting here arise in part from a paper I gave at a recent conference in Sydney entitled "AsiaPacifiQueer: Gender and Sexual Difference in the Asia/Pacific Region: Paradigms and Approaches," and audience discussion in response to the paper.2  Offering a reading of Taiwan lesbian writer Qiu Miaojin's short story "Platonic Hair" in terms of what I argued was its strategic appropriation of fetishism, the paper also foregrounded my trepidation in offering a "theoretical" reading of a Taiwanese lesbian text to an Australian audience. Clearly, "theory" - meaning the broad amalgam of post-structuralist thought that has dominated humanities scholarship over the past two to three decades - is for many scholars in lesbian and gay studies (in Australia, in Taiwan, and elsewhere) a tool whose intellectual and political efficacy is all but taken for granted. But when scholars trained in the techniques of queer theory, speaking in locations ostensibly outside "Asia," turn our attentions to "Asian cultures," the use of these critical tools becomes immediately contentious. Reference to "Western theory" in the discussion of non-Western cultures lays one open to charges of inappropriate methodology, at best, and, at worst, of doing violence to local experience through cultural or theoretical imperialism. Neil Garcia addresses a related question when he writes of the difficulty of "doing theory," "especially since theory itself seems, by its very nature, and certainly by virtue of its historical provenance, already an undeniably Western preoccupation."3 Garcia writes: we now acknowledge […] the unstoppable globalisation of knowledge: the flows of this exchange are far from symmetrical, apparently, as the tendency of the West is to appropriate local forms of information coming from the different parts of the world in such a way as to make this information culturally palatable - to turn it relevant to itself, somehow. The non-West, on the other hand, is likewise caught within this economy, precisely to the degree that it produces, knowingly or unknowingly, just this very information.4 Garcia's project in that essay is to take into account the particularities of bakla culture and identification in the Philippines in order to criticise the tendency to apply contemporary sexuality theory - specifically, Judith Butler's theory of performativity - indiscriminately to sexual cultures everywhere in a way that produces universalising accounts of "how gender and sexuality work." I agree wholeheartedly with Garcia about the importance of taking seriously the cultural specificity of local knowledge systems on gender and sexuality, and it's a project that I've tried to think through elsewhere in writing about cultures of sexuality in Taiwan.5 The question I'm thinking about now, though, is a slightly different one. It involves considering: in what ways do locations that Garcia might classify as "non-West" (like the Philippines or like Taiwan, perhaps), in turn, appropriate globalising forms of knowledge and "turn them relevant to themselves, somehow," rather than being caught up in global knowledgescapes only to the extent that they provide the "raw data" for appropriation by the West? Sexuality studies in Taiwan seems to provide a particularly apposite example of how globalising theory gets taken up within local contexts and turned relevant to those contexts in especially productive and dynamic ways that couldn't be totalised as examples of the effects of "theoretical imperialism" or "self-colonisation." I'm thinking here, for example, of the spate of work from locally-based scholars and activists in Taiwan that coincided and produced a dialogue with the work of Judith Halberstam on female masculinity (Halberstam visited Taiwan in 1999 and presented at the same conference at which Garcia also presented a version of his paper cited above).6 The work of Taiwan Central University's Centre for the Study of Sexualities in organising annual conferences with international speakers like Halberstam, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Cindy Patton over the past three years has consistently stimulated responses from local students, activists and academics whose work engages with this "global theory" while also tailoring it to fit the requirements of local contexts. The point here is certainly not to proclaim then celebrate the universal applicability of Euro-American forms of wisdom, in an uncritical repetition of what Garcia astutely describes as the performative strategy of white, Euro-American academia effectively globalising sexual categories by pronouncing them already globalised.7  Rather, I want to make the point that "glocalised" knowledges - global knowledges appropriated locally - are not the same thing as global knowledges: knowledgescapes, like Appadurai's other "scapes," mutate and hybridise with alterations in cultural location.8 Disjunctive knowledgescapes 2 In discussion following my paper theorising Qiu Miaojin's story in Sydney, an interesting question was raised that further complicated my account of the enduring unevenness of knowledge flows between Taiwan and Australia. It was commented that while the flow of post-structuralist theory from the Euro-American contexts of its initial production, to the Taiwan contexts of its appropriation and localisation, has been in progress for at least a decade and a half, knowledge of that fact has yet to make its way "back" through the twists and turns of transnational time-lag to contexts like Europe and the USA, or Australia. Put more simply, we're still witness today to the lingering effects of a global order in which it has been more crucial for the periphery to know what's going on in the global centres of knowledge production, than for those at (or who like to emphasise their proximity to) the centres to have any idea of what's going on anywhere else. As a result of this, it can still appear slightly weird to discuss Taiwan queer cultures, in Australia, using methodologies derived from post-structuralist theory. In Taiwan, on the other hand, such an enterprise appears far less weird (or at least weird, if at all, for slightly different reasons - in that context the weirdness might inhere in the question of my stake, as an Australian researcher, in studying Taiwanese lesbian fiction. That is, the alignment of researcher and subject matter might provoke questions, rather than the alignment of subject matter and methodology). So I realise in writing these notes for posting on the Taiwan Cultural Studies Association website, that in this context it would appear equally odd for me to belabour the fact of Taiwan's critical cultures' linguistic and epistemological hybridity (as I felt I needed to do in Sydney) by drawing attention to commonly-used neologisms like houxiandaizhuyi, postmodernism; houjiegouzhuyi, poststructuralism; jiegou, deconstruction; xinli fenxi, psychoanalysis; xingbie biaoyan, gender performance, xingbie xuancheng, gender performativity; ku'er lilun, queer theory, and so on. For scholars working in many areas of the humanities and social sciences in Taiwan - perhaps particularly in sexuality studies - it's a self-evident fact that most of these vocabularies have been a central part of local discussions of culture for over a decade. Equally misplaced in the current context, probably, would be the obvious observation - perhaps quite unexpected in Sydney - that Qiu Miaojin's work is itself heavily informed by aspects of modern Euro-American thought, from psychoanalysis to literary modernism; hence that it’s not only doing no violence to her texts, but that it's also eminently appropriate to approach them from the angle of contemporary critical theory (as, of course, do Taiwan-based scholars including Liou Liang-Ya, Ding Naifei, Liu Jenpeng and Hong Ling). Dismembering the alien beast9 Given the existence of these global knowledgescapes, then, the goal for sexuality studies in those contexts in which globalising forms of theory make their presence insistently felt cannot realistically be to get "outside theory" and start afresh from the perspective of some imagined pure local culture - a project attempted infamously by Chau Wa-Shan in his proposal of a distinctively and uniquely "Chinese" form of sexuality, and by Bret Hinsch in Passions of the Cut Sleeve.10 In fact, as both Chau's work and Garcia's ironically illustrates, for sexuality studies in many locations today, Euro-American writings on sexuality do seem to loom as a kind of eerily unavoidable presence. Even where these writings are only one possible interpretative framework among several, nevertheless analysts of sexual cultures often appear bound to respond to them in some way - even if simply by outright rejection, as in Chau's case. I think the most productive responses to the situation of globalising theory in sexuality studies, though, take the form not of unconditional rejection but rather of critical reconfiguration. In fact, while at times Neil Garcia's paper, cited above, seems to ask for a rejection of the theory of performativity for a Filipino context, I think one might also read his argument as suggesting a radical re-writing of that theory in the light of local bakla histories. In arguing that the intentionality behind the bakla performance cannot, unlike Butler's examples of American drag, be read as ironic, Garcia implies interesting questions about how the theory of performativity might be pulled apart and re-assembled differently in relation to the essentialism of baklas' self-explanations in terms of "psychospiritual [gender] inversion" (279). For as a reproach to the uncritical application of performativity theory to non-Western cultural contexts, Garcia's fruitful discussion is nevertheless enabled in large part by its positioning in relation to the theory it critiques. To suggest this is not, I hope, to negate the force of Garcia's argument or, worse, to imply that bakla culture and writing about it are only interesting insofar as they can be "turned relevant" to a "Western" preoccupation with theory. I guess the central question I'm working around here is whether "theory" in sexuality studies is in fact readable today as always and only "Western"; whether we could hope that in moving - albeit at differential speeds - along the pathways of global flow, it might sometimes, in Homi Bhabha's words, "find itself strangely dismembered"; beyond the control of the distant sites of its initial production.11 If that's the case, then maybe the task for studies of sexuality in the light of the disjunctive knowledgescapes of the present is neither simply to apply theory indiscriminately, nor to reject if wholesale, but rather to undertake the grisly labour of dismembering it - in preparation, perhaps, for as-yet-unimaginable future incarnations. 1. Said, "Travelling Theory" in The World, The Text and The Critic, Cambridge Mass: Harvard U.P, 1983. [back] 2. University of Technology, Sydney, Feb 16 2001.[back] 3. Garcia, "Performativity, the bakla, and the orientalising gaze," Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1:2 (Aug 2000): 265.[back] 4. Ibid., 266.[back] 5. For example Martin, "Surface Tensions: Reading Productions of Tongzhi in Contemporary Taiwan," GLQ 6.1, (Jan 2000): 61 - 86; and "Chen Xue's Queer Tactics," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7.1, (Spring 1999): 71 - 94.[back] 6. Taiwan-based scholars who presented work on lesbian gender at the same conference (The Third International Super-Slim Conference on the Politics of Gender / Sexuality, National Central University, Centre for the Study of Sexualities, 27 November 1999) include Antonia Yengning Chao; Ding Naifei and Liu Jenpeng; and Amie Parry.[back] 7. Garcia: 265.[back] 8. See also Said on this point: 227.[back] 9. I owe this title to Hong Ling, who used it as the title of a collection of her queer fiction (Zhijie Yishou, Taipei: Yuanliu, 1995.) [back] 10. Chau, Houzhimin Tongzhi (Postcolonial Tongzhi), Hong Kong: Xianggang Tongzhi Yanjiushe, 1997; Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1990. [back] 11. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994: 92.[back] 　 Fran Martin has published essays on lesbian and gay sexualities in Taiwan in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, GLQ, Communal/ Plural, Intersections and Critical InQueeries, and her work has appeared in Chinese translation in Chungwai Literary Monthly and Youth Literary. She wrote the foreword for Ta-wei Chi's most recent short story collection, Fetish (Lianwupi, Taipei, 1998). Her translation anthology entitled Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan, is forthcoming with Hawai'i University Press. She is currently co-editing a collection with Chris Berry and Audrey Yue entitled Mobile Cultures: New Media and Queer Asia (forthcoming, Duke University Press). Her Ph.D. thesis in Cultural Studies (2000) was entitled Situating Sexualities: Queer Narratives in Contemporary Taiwanese Fiction and Film. Fran Martin currently lectures in the Cultural Studies program at the University of Melbourne.