In Search of Lost Homosociality: Female Bonding and Alternative Nationhood in Zhu Tianxin's Writing and Activism, 1977–2009

This paper seeks to situate and contextualize the recurrent engagement of female same-sex desire and attachment in Taiwanese writer Zhu Tianxin's writing—novels, cultural criticism and participation in social movements—since late 1970s to the present, with the specific focus on relating them to her varied stages of formulating national identities for residents and diasporic subjects tied to Taiwan. Questions to be explored include: How can we read historically her characterization of lesbian love, utopian as well as agonizing, in top-rated high school and college in late Cold War Taiwan? What are the cultural resources cited for expression, articulation and justification of those unruly desires? How do these channels and floods of desire inscribe politicized abjections she faces as a paternally-defined mainlander descent?  What might be the reasons for her quests for non-heterosexual bonding ending up getting lost in time and space, and how may these shed creative lights on resisting modernity-as-singular-temporality from the case of postwar Taiwan?