Narcissists, Lesbians, Shuai T's and so on: The cultural politics of creative taxonomies Amie Parry©版權所有 Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures National Chiao Tung University aparry@cc.nctu.edu.tw  Doing academic work on cultural formations and texts (understood in the broadest sense) with the intention of supporting some type of social intervention requires a theory of culture per se. The question of what has been termed "rhetoric" as opposed to "logic"1 comes into play to complicate strictly ideological readings, however salient. Mainstream or popular culture is messier than ideology; its ideological content is not necessarily seamless or logically coherent; countercultures, in turn, produce resistant imaginaries that are, in precisely their form as cultural objects, more complex than our theoretical tools for examining them. A cultural critic's challenge is to attend to that complexity with theoretically based understandings of the political valence of culture. Doing so further requires some general understanding of how culture articulates with politics in a given historical context. Wang Ping, secretary general of the Gender/Sexuality Rights Association of Taiwan (G/S RAT), has noted that, in the almost complete political and legal silence on the issue of homosexuality that characterizes the field of activism in contemporary Taiwan, queer subjects only become apparent as a "population" (e.g., in the North American sense of "10%") in the evidence of the violation of civil rights.2 I'd like to extrapolate from this to suggest that perhaps in this situation the concept of "rights" itself emerges with the evidence of violation. In other words, we might say that "rights" comes into play precisely as a negative concept, grounded in specific instances of violation, rather than a positive or substantial one based on the ideal of universalized access to possession. This state of affairs may indicate not so much an exception in the logic of rights as an entry into that logic's inherent contradictions, brought to light in a political and legal arena that does not "name" its queer constituents. This situation may change as the movement gains visibility. However, the historical chronology of events cannot change: we are faced with a context for activism-direct engagement with governmental and legal forms of control and violation-in which the identity-based movement has emerged before its subjects have been named by the State or the Law. (Of course they have been named in the much more "rhetorical" arenas of mainstream and alternative cultures). What I want to suggest by pointing this out is that the political valence of culture therefore lies in its capacity to imagine and create open-ended taxonomies for identifications that are resistant to, while not explicitly conceived in, the official political sphere.  Because of this invisibility and silence, writing contextually about queer cultural texts produced and circulated in Taiwan thus presents the researcher with the not unfamiliar problem of historical knowledge and resources; some of the only non-literature based work has been done by anthropologist (and editor of this Newsletter) Antonia Chao.3 In the official public sphere as well as in familial and some cultural apparatuses, the problem is compounded, as Liu Jen-peng and Ding Naifei have argued, by the pervasive silences that actually perform a disciplinary function.4 The disciplinary function of silence and invisibility, perhaps, can be construed as "violation" thus bringing into being a discourse of rights without a prior political subject of rights. For example, a G/S RAT pamphlet entitled "Where We Stand" asserts explicitly that its "subjects" are not a homogenous group even while positing them as minorities that can claim rights violations exerted by silences. Or perhaps the "minorities" come into being as such as their "questions and resistances" call attention to such violations: Through their continuous questions and resistances, these gender/sexual minorities confound the duality of given gender categories (man/woman), while speaking to and from multiple, infinitely different and complex gendered lives and lived sexualities. Theirs are lives marked by deep yet oftentimes invisible and silent, virulent social discrimination. In their situations and experiences, we witness and hear of daily, constant violations of gender and sexual rights. Cultural objects in their complexity as such, thus intervene as knowledge-producing objects into a political arena which disciplines through the "invisible" disavowal of "silence." In the first instance, culture's capacity to sustain and create new taxonomical categories is important precisely in articulation against the violence of silences. And a new significance must also be taken into account. There is a discourse that is anything but based on silence, which we might call that of "the global gay identity," that posits certain formations of gay and lesbian identities as unquestioned universals, understanding others in relation to the norms it sets up.5 It circulates in some circles in Taiwan, as in many other places, producing its own taxonomy that carries the weight and authority of the "modern."6 Because of the legitimacy bestowed on it by virtue of its modernity, which produces the effect of a "positive representation" amidst injurious silences and political invisibility, this discourse is deeply affective. Thus its circulation may have the side-effect of positioning other identifications as, to borrow a term from 19th- and early 20th-century political discourse, atavistic (a term which in the U.S. case especially reflects a proto-fascist concern with racial purity).7 This is not to refuse to recognize the inevitability of historical change, however. Far from arguing that any new identifications should be suppressed, what concerns me is the unequal positioning of certain new ones vis-a-vis others, as sexuality is understood in terms set up in discourses of modernity. If existing categories are not mobilized in the creation of an open-ended taxonomical framework that can account more specifically for "multiple, infinitely different and complex gendered lives and lived sexualities," then an epistemological violence will ensue that valorizes the "modern" identifications over other formations (including transgendered formations implicitly denied by the categories of gay and lesbian), which, far from becoming more liberated by changing attitudes toward sexuality, may become newly stigmatized as anachronistic.8  The lack of a prior political subject of rights in the official public sphere certainly presents certain difficulties for organizing; however, if as a result "gay and lesbian rights," as I suggested above, are conceived of in negative terms, one fortunate consequence might be the possibility to more effectively block the tendency toward the homogenization of the actual variety of queer identifications, desires and practices into a more acceptable and "modern" gay or lesbian identity. Queer and Class has been singularly exemplary in exploiting this possibility, developing discourses around an impressive range of identifications, including those that are somewhat stigmatized even in the more liberal contingent of academic and intellectual circles otherwise sympathetic to more widely "acceptable" queer identities.  If the aforementioned "questions and resistances" of these variously identified subjects do "erupt in culture" as well as in political activist discourse, it may be because the very silence of the official political terrain "can neither repress nor resolve inequality," especially as a new political discourse appears in movement politics.9 Hence both social movements and culture are faced with a particularly salient taxonomical project. If they are not to be exclusive-or even simply irrelevant to daily life-these taxonomies must draw upon existing discourses in their rhetorical complexity and variety, and at the same time create new categories as necessary, remaining open-ended for new formations as they appear in everyday discourse. And if we take into account Spivak's distinction between logic and rhetoric, and consider the many avenues of rhetorical expression in countercultural formations and texts as opposed to in political discourse, we may find that queer culture is the arena in which this taxonomical project is able to reach a sufficient level of nuance to be relevant to the richly complex and sometimes chaotic depths of daily life. On the one hand, this suggests that cultural formations and objects, in this taxonomical sense of offering sufficiently complex and not always simply positive self-definitions, provide crucial resources for struggle and survival, as well as self-affirmation and pleasure, that can counteract "invisible and silent social discrimination." On the other, the exclusionary process of stigmatization wielded by the "positive representation" of modern gay identities can perhaps also be most effectively countered in culture, in statements, to take one example, like "Queers [tongzhi] are all a bit narcissitic [zilian]-don't deny it!" This statement was made by vocalist B.C. during a recent performance by a lesbian band named T-time. Because (as band members pointed out) the audience immediately recognized the humor, it may be that such a statement, made in a mostly lesbian public space, performs the difficult task of affirming what is difficult to affirm yet resonates with daily practice and self-understandings. Further, as this use of "narcissism" might suggest, since it could be read as indistinguishable from a Freudian medicalized diagnoses of inversion, such a taxonomical practice may require us, as cultural critics, to distinguish between "the modern" and "the Western" instead of taking them as synonymous. The question of whether or not the term should be read as derivative in this instance is beyond the scope of this paper. I bring it up as a question in order to point out that not all things understood as Western are also understood as modern: on the contrary, the West as a discursive entity in Taiwan contains both the modern and the atavistic, and it goes without saying that a narcissistic inversion would fall into the latter category.  Thus I find B.C.'s words about queers being somewhat narcissistic, and especially the warning that this should not be denied, particularly timely. While it is important to challenge negative stereotypes, at the same time there is a silence in positive representations that suppresses the very complexity of many queer identifications, not to mention the different degrees of difficulty faced by differently positioned subjects. (With such silence and disavowal, the relative ease of some gay identifications may be to some extent achieved-especially for those subjects whose social position endows them with cultural capital-while others remain difficult or become stigmatized in new ways, as I suggested earlier.) This double bind is addressed by the enthusiasm of T-time's audience when the song "I'm Narcissistic" is performed, beginning with the opening lines of the lyrics: "Looking at myself in the mirror can take me quite a few hours."10 B.C.'s statement introduced that song at T-time's debut performance last week at a T-bar in Taipei. The song, composed by T-time founder and bass player Dingo, in the lyrics as well in the punk "attitude" of the music, brilliantly and humorously depicts a moment of what might be called, according to B.C.'s declaration, a queer narcissism, and in the lyrics this is further specified as a that of a "shuai T" (roughly meaning "handsome butch"). The laughter and excitement of the audience on both occasions I've seen it performed attests to the power of the cultural resource it provides for its mostly queer female audience.11 In addition to narcissist and shuai T, other songs have other taxonomical elements. A more recently composed song by Dingo mentions, in refrain, "blue-note stone-wall butches" [landiao shiqiang T] and "gallant women" [haoshuang nuren], references to the titles of Chen Ting's Chinese translation (2000) of Leslie Finberg's novel Stone Butch Blues and Ho Cheun-juei's important book on sexual liberation, The Gallant Woman: Feminism and Sexual Emancipation (Crown 1994). These titles carry the authority of the West and academia, respectively; however, both take up remarkably stigmatized subjects: working class stone butchness in the context of the emergence of an academic-based lesbian feminism in the U.S. for the former, and, for the latter, an uncompromising affirmation of sexual practices in contemporary "sex-negative" Taiwan. In the lyrics of just two of these songs, we have narcissists, shuai T's, gallant women, and stone butches; the list is open-ended. My purpose in writing this essay has been to elaborate on the importance of keeping it that way, through a countercultural taxonomical practice.  1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak contrasts the formal qualities of rhetoric to the "content" of logic, arguing that the latter is an important part of the meaning produced in any statement. Please see her essay "The Politics of Translation" in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993).【回本文】 2. "Invisible Citizens: On Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights" [Kanbujiande gongmin: tan tongzhide minquan]. A paper delivered last September at the international, Taipei city government sponsored conference, "Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Movement, 2000." A notable exception to this silence in the political sphere was Taipei Mayor Ma's speech given at this occasion, in which he emphasized the importance of recognizing gay and lesbian rights as a part of human rights in general, while noting that he had received criticism for taking up this position.【回本文】 3. Please see her dissertation Embodying the Invisible (Anthropology Department, Cornell University, 1996) and related articles on T/po identifications and cultural formations in Taiwan. 【回本文】 4.  Liu Jen-peng and Ding Naifei, "Reticent Poetics, Queer Politics." Working Papers in Gender/Sexuality Studies Nos. 3 & 4. "Queer Theory and Politics" (September 1998) 109-155.【回本文】 5. Lisa Rofel has provided a thorough critique of this discursive phenomenon, especially as it is practiced by Western academics. Please see "Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in China" (GLQ 5: 4; 451-474). Rofel begins this article "with a deliberately provocative problematic: what kinds of investments lead to the assumption that such a subjectivity-a global gay identity-exists?" in order to "argue that the emergence of gay identities in China occurs in a complex cultural field representing neither a wholly global culture nor simply radical difference from the West" (453). She also remarks on the process of "linguistic appropriations" (465) and persuasively demonstrates that "[t]he insistence on identities that do not break down and on categories that are self-contained ignores the discursive processes of exclusion and differentiation" (470). It is partly to take issue with the exclusionary differentiations brought about by the appeal of global gayness as a self-contained and universalized identity category that I argue for the importance of an open-ended taxonomical project in cultural criticism.【回本文】 6. Antonia Chao persuasively makes this point in "US Space Shuttles Going to the Moon: Global Metaphors and Local Strategies in Building up Taiwan's Lesbian Identities." Unpublished paper presented at the Second International Conference for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.【回本文】 7. Please see Jonathan Yeh's MA thesis, in progress under the title, Perverse Nomads in Exile: Multiple Technologies of Sexual Policing and Discipline in Crystal Boys (English and American Language and Literature Graduate Institute, Central University), for a discussion of the unequal positioning (in contemporary queer communities) and representation (in literature and literary criticism) of homosexuality per se as opposed to underage gay prostitution and S/M practices. Yeh convincingly situates this unequal positioning in relation to discourses of "sexual modernity."【回本文】 8. In her book Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam explores many formations of female masculinity, refuting their stigmatization and asserting their viability as identifications and sources of pleasure. In doing so she draws on Eve Sedgwick's concept of "nonce taxonomies." In Halberstam's words, these are "categories that we use daily to make sense of our worlds but that work so well that we actually fail to recognize them." Their political function is to operate as "classifications of desire, physicality and subjectivity that attempt to intervene in hegemonic processes of naming and defining" (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998; 8).【回本文】 9.  In the opening chapter of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), Lisa Lowe writes: "Where the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity and public life are imagined. This is not to argue that cultural struggle can ever be the exclusive site for practice; it is rather to argue that if the state suppresses dissent by governing subjects through rights, citizenship and political representation, it is only through culture that we conceive and enact new subjects and practices in antagonism to the regulatory locus of citizen-subject, by way of culture that we question those modes of government" (22).【回本文】 10.  The lyrics for "I'm Narcissistic" are as follows (translation by Jonathan Yeh): "Looking at myself in the mirror can take me quite a few hours/ The left side of my face looks good; even when the light dims its very cool/ I walk into the bathroom and wash my face; I stroke my hair, turn around, and shake my head/ Imagining she is standing right in front of me, saying to me that I'm a good-looking butch/ I'm narcissistic I'm narcissistic/ I'm narcissistic, incurably narcissistic/ I'm narcissistic, I'm narcissistic/ I'm narcissistic, fucking narcissistic"【回本文】 11. This song was originally written when Dingo was with BBM, which has since disbanded. BBM independently produced one CD, however, which contains "I'm Narcissistic" as one of its tracks. The CD, also called BBM, is available at Fembooks and Gin Gin bookstores in Taipei and through the band's website. T-time is planning to record a CD this fall.【回本文】