Mainstreaming female masculinity,signifying lesbian visibility: The rise of the zhongxing phenomenon in transnational Taiwan

Introduction

Take a walk around any bustling urban locale in Taiwan today – popular shopping areas, local night markets, metro stations, or neighborhoods around schools and colleges – and one can easily spot young women sporting a particular gender style leaning toward masculinity. Appearing alone or in groups, the masculine style they perform is homogenous enough to assume a collective and conspicuous public presence. Typical outfits include stylish short hair commonly seen in popular men’s fashion magazines, well-tailored shirts or polo shirts in a masculine style, loose jeans or khakis, name brand sneakers, and sometimes sports bras or breast binders. Swaggering steps and dauntless attitudes often characterize the ways they carry themselves. After I shared this observation with my friends, straight or gay alike, they gave me a fairly consistent response: “Ah, those Ts, now they are everywhere.” T is a term used to identify masculine lesbian women in contrast to their more feminine partner “Po” in local Taiwanese lesbian communities. ¹ The common understanding that these ubiquitous masculine young women are T lesbians suggests a strong and well-acknowledged link between this particular gender performance and masculine lesbian identity in contemporary Taiwanese society.

Meanwhile, the figure of the masculine young woman also appears frequently in Taiwanese mainstream media, and the term “zhongxing” (literally meaning “gender neutrality” and referring to a merging of masculine and feminine traits) has been adopted to describe their particular gender expression. Generally, “zhongxing” also refers to Taiwanese men who adopt the aesthetic, delicate, flamboyant, yet masculine style of “huameinan” (literally “flower-like beautiful boys” in Mandarin), which was brought into vogue by the immense popularity of Japanese and Korean beautiful-boy male idols in contemporary Taiwanese popular culture. The predominant representation of the masculine young women as “zhongxing girls” (“zhongxing nühai”) suggests that these women’s unconventional “gender-neutral” performance is largely understood in terms of the popular “huameinan” style. It seems that this association renders the ubiquitous public presence of “zhongxing” young women as a result of the influence of popular fashion, and many of my friends and informants, while assuming those girls’ T identity, also noted the possibility that “they are not real Ts” for they might adopt the zhongxing style “simply for fun” or “just to be cool.”

Of course, it would not be right to assume that every zhongxing-looking young woman sees herself as a T lesbian, whereas young women who actually use “zhongxing” to identify themselves display diverse sexual inclinations (Lu, 2015). The contradictory but prevalent understanding of zhongxing as embodying and/or feigning T lesbian identity hence points to the complexity in meaning and practice of female masculinity and lesbian sexuality symbolized by the rise of the zhongxing phenomenon in contemporary Taiwan. In Chinese societies, increasing popularity of the zhongxing performance has captured much attention from concerned scholars. Some vent conservative anxiety over how the phenomenon may lead to confusion in gender identification among teenagers (Pang, 2009; Zhao, 2009). More are focused to explore how the emergence of zhongxing female pop singers in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong expands social space for masculine lesbians to negotiate their non-normative identity in everyday life (Kam, 2014), and how the phenomenon distinguishes the queer potential of women’s unconventional gender and sexual performance in mainstream society (Au, 2012). However, caveats about normative accommodation also emerge. It is noted that the growth of the zhongxing performance among young women might simply be a transitory result of popular fashion (Kam, 2014), and popular cultural representations of zhongxing females remain subjected to male gaze and commercialized appropriation (Kuo, 2010; Luo, 2008; Ou, 2007). Central to these debates is the battle fought between queer agency and normative appropriation embodied by the surge in popularity of the unconventional female zhongxing performance in Chinese popular culture.

This essay observes and expands these scholarly conversations by approaching the intricate social implications of the rise of the zhongxing phenomenon to women’s non-normative gender and sexual identification through the perspective of the increasingly frequent and complex transnational cultural exchanges. Previous literature has noted how the collective frenzy for zhongxing female singers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China suggests a “trans-regional desire of a female gender style that is interpreted as cosmopolitan” (Kam, 2014: 254), representing a unique cultural sensibility emerging in Chinese societies that defines “how specific practices can be taken up and lived… able to affect people’s places in the world” (Grossberg, 1992: 72–73, quoted in Li, 2015: 84). In accordance with the literature just cited, my discussion elucidates in detail how the zhongxing phenomenon manifests in uneven and convoluted entwinements of global, regional, national, and local cultural discourses of gender and sexuality. My discussion also distinguishes complex influences of transnational cultural discourses on individual identity formation among self-identified lesbian women in Taiwan, showing how the zhongxing phenomenon gives rise to particular forms of mainstream accommodation and appropriation of women’s non-normative gender and sexuality while facilitating a unique cultural space for Taiwanese lesbian women to redefine their identity formation at the same time. With data collected from popular cultural materials and by ethnographic research and in-depth interviews in Taiwanese lesbian communties, ² I show how the Taiwanese zhongxing phenomenon represents a critical node at which westernized feminist and queer politics, commodified Korean beautiful-boy image, and local lesbian subculture featuring opposite-gender T-Po eroticism complexly converge in Taiwan’s nationalistic project of modernization and globalization. I demonstrate that in this intricate exchange of ideologies, young women’s zhongxing performance emerges to be a popular signifier of lesbian identification and queer subversion through capitalistic commercialization of the gender style. I also illustrate how Taiwanese lesbian women take advantage of the emerging zhongxing discourse to incorporate womanhood as an essential part of their masculine identification as well as to redefine queer visibility as an effect of signification. These identificatory practices are significant and unique exercises of subjective agency by Taiwanese lesbian women in mediating conflicting transnational cultural values and creating a livable and intelligible subject position, which further illuminates a dynamic and gender-specific relation between structural cultural transnationalization, pervasive capitalistic appropriation, local social norms and queer subjectivity formation in a largely heteronormative world.

Transnational sexuality, queer visibility, and female masculinity

A central topic of debates in transnational sexuality scholarship is the entwined relation between the emergence of modern gay and lesbian identity in various local societies and the globalization of western gay and lesbian culture and politics. Dennis Altman (1996: 79) initiates the conversation with the question of whether “the extent to which the forces of globalization (both economic and cultural) can be said to produce a common consciousness and identity based on homosexuality.” The struggle between homogenizing global queer modernity and heterogeneous socio-cultural inheritances has since taken a central position in the study of local gay and lesbian subjectivity formation (Boellstorff 2003; Cruz and Manalansan 2002). Two major perspectives characterize the debates that follow. First, a view of multilayered and multidirectional transnational cultural exchange emerges to challenge the oft-assumed global–local binary. Feminist scholars Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (2001) adopt the term “transnational” to indicate intricate flows of forces in globalization, including capitalism, political and economic relations among nations, irregular boundary-crossing movements of peoples and ideas and so on, that cannot be reduced to a simple interaction between the global and the local. Grewal (2005) further proposes the concept of “transnational connectivity” to express how the production of transnational subjectivities relies on uneven reception and translation of diverse transnational cultural influences in local societies that are determined by power-laden connections among cultures and nations. Second, given the seemingly irresistible power of globalization, attentions have been directed to queer subjects’ ability to actively mediate and deploy transnational cultural influences according to the social conditions they are situated in (Povinelli and Chauncey, 1999). An abundant literature has emerged to explore the ways in which self-identified gay/lesbian subjects in local and diasporic societies develop varied cultural practices, subjective understandings, and gender and sexual performances to align their non-normative desires with everyday struggles engendered by disparate racial, ethnic, gender, and religious backgrounds (see, for example, Blackwood, 2008; Boellstorff, 2007 (both in Indonesia); Manalansan, 2003 (Filipinos in New York); Rofel, 1999 (China); Kong, 2011 (Hong Kong, China and the UK); Sang, 2003 (China and Taiwan), among many others).

The way in which “visibility” is understood and practiced in different local gay and lesbian communities underlines the importance of subjective agency and socio-cultural specificity in the formation of transnational sexual subjectivity. In modern gay and lesbian movements developed in North America and Europe, to avoid passing is a principal political goal, and “coming-out” is a key to the formation of a visible and hence eligible “out and proud” gay and lesbian subjectivity (Sanchez and Schlossberg, 2001). Yet, it is argued that the exclusive focus on “coming-out” exhibits a western- and white-centered conception of gay and lesbian visibility, marginalizing the significance of an in-between place between seen and unseen for colored and non-western queer subjects to negotiate with heteronormative regimes in everyday life (Acosta, 2011). To reclaim the cultural legitimacy of this alternative practice of “visibility”, Carlos Decena (2008: 340) proposes the concept of “tacit subject” to reconfigure gay visibility as “an aspect of someone’s subjectivity that is assumed and understood but not spoken about.” Decena (2008: 348) illustrates how a group of Dominican gay immigrants in New York City, who appear indifferent to the idea of coming out, actively give out information about their sexual identity through the intentional manipulation of tacit signs. Hence a space both “in” and “out” of the closet is created as people close to these men are assumed to “have requisite skills to recognize and decode their behavior” (Decena, 2008: 340), although it is also possible that the message will not get across to everyone all the time. In this formulation, queer visibility is no longer defined entirely by self-initiated and straightforward verbal disclosure. Rather, various bodily and behavioral signals facilitate positive knowledge about non-normative gender and sexual identification, especially in social worlds where personal privacy and a sense of social belonging matter more than transparent individuality in terms of queer identity formation and management.

In another vein, female masculine performance and lesbian sexuality characterized with masculine and feminine pairing typically appearing in Southeast and East Asian societies reveal nuanced knowledge of transnational subjectivity formation in the perspectives of region and gender. In studies on gender and sexual diversities in Southeast and East Asia, the idea of “critical regionalities” is advanced to examine how the production of gender and sexuality in this world area is embedded in “networks of material and symbolic relations through which something approximating the ‘local’ and ‘the global’ are made” (Johnson et al., 2000: 367). In line with this focus on regional network, “Asia” is further emphasized as an analytic concept that challenges “the centrality of Western approach and paradigm” and “underscores the way in which both Western and non-Western cultures of gender and sexuality have been, and continue to be, mutually transformed through their encounters with transnationally mobile forms of sexual knowledge” (Martin et al., 2008: 6, original emphasis). The opposite-gender female same-sex eroticism and female masculine practice commonly found in Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, urban China and so on (Y Chao, 1996; Kam, 2014; Sinnott, 2004; Wieringa et al., 2007) represent a crux point to investigate regional connections that questions how “the ‘West’ is the original and authentic model of all transformations in the sexual and gender order of Asia” (Sinnott, 2010: 18). On the one hand, masculine and feminine pairing common to East and Southeast Asian lesbian subculture exemplifies what Peter Jackson calls “the persistence of gender,” by which “the new identity of gay is molded and expressed within a [local] culture that insistently characterizes all sexual relations in terms of gender differentiation” (Jackson, 1996: 117). On the other hand, it is revealed that aesthetic and linguistic practices of female masculinity in contemporary Thai lesbian communities are reconfigured by Korean popular culture, especially the commodified image of “Korean beautiful boys,” which emerges as a powerful and transnationally mobile cultural influence in the region of Asia and transfigures “the image of queer women [as] a commodity embedded within a transnational capitalistic image market” (Sinnott, 2012: 461).

In this exploration of cross-region cultural influences and patterns, a feminist engagement is further distinguished in addition to the tenacity of local cultural forms and the power of capitalism. The focus on the formation of female non-normative gender and sexuality foregrounds a gender-sensitive “woman” rather than the gender-neutral “queer” in the study of transnational sexuality, highlighting critical effects of “particular regulatory practices, state and religious ideologies, and global processes that collaborate with and reinforce each other to produce and reproduce women’s sexualities and genders as different than and distinct from men’s sexualities and genders” (Wieringa et al., 2007: 12). This focus on women’s different gender and social role is critically highlighted in recent studies on the emergence of lesbian-identifying women in contemporary Chinese societies. It is shown that the shaping of modern lesbian identity and community in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and urban China owes significantly to how the post-war politics and the expansion of capitalistic market economy in East Asia transform public discourses and the social status of women and homosexuality (A Chao, 2000; Engebretsen, 2014; Kam, 2013; Sang, 2003; Tang, 2011). Nonetheless, in spite of the political and economic liberation that enables Chinese women to identify and live semi-openly as lesbians, Confucian norms, particularly daughters’ filial and marriage duties, persist to inhibit Chinese lesbian women’s free expression of sexuality (Engebretsen, 2014; Kam, 2013). The way in which Chinese lesbian women strategize to balance queer identification with the culturally mandated filial obligation represents a “Chinese turn” of queer politics in which the western notion of individuality and visibility are challenged and revised through a feminist point of view (Engebretsen, 2014).

My discussion of the rise of the “zhongxing” young women in contemporary Taiwan is situated in these scholarly conversations. In the emergence of the phenomenon, I identify transformations in social understanding and subjective practice of queer visibility and female masculinity that take shapes in the multilayered transnational convergence of globalizing western feminist and queer politics, the commodified regional flow of Korean beautiful-boy image, and local Taiwanese T-Po lesbian subcultures in Taiwan’s modern and international nation building. By exploring the unique effects of the zhongxing phenomenon on the molding of women’s queer subjectivity and visibility in contemporary Taiwan, I aim to distinguish the tangled intersection and merging among diverse transnational influences, to emphasize the uneven and gender specific consequences of the transnational cultural exchanges in lesbian subjectivity and visibility formation, and to delineate the subtle relations between normative constraints and the exercise of queer agency in the condition of ubiquitous cultural transnationalization, robust capitalistic expansion, and tenacious Confucian social norms.

Zhongxing: Between homoerotic masculinity and new womanhood

The emergence of the all-female music group “Misster” epitomizes the entwined relationship between the zhongxing gender performance and changes in conception and practice of female masculinity and lesbian visibility in contemporary Taiwan. My interest in this group was first triggered in 2009 after I attended a small amateur talent show called “MissMr.” held in a famous nightclub in Dongqu (“Eastern District”), a central shopping area in Taipei City known for its vivacious nightlife. I became aware of the show when I visited a lesbian bar – or “T bar” in local language – with a Po lesbian friend and spotted a huge poster featuring young women with masculine expressions hung conspicuously on the wall above the basement stairs leading to the dance floor. My Po-identifying friend got excited immediately when she saw the poster and invited me to go to the event with her. I gladly agreed. On the night of the show we arrived at the club early and a large crowd consisting of chic young women was already amassed at the entrance. Some of them were accompanied by masculine-looking female friends/lovers, and among them, opposite-gender female same-sex eroticism similar to that popular in local T bars prevailed in their interactions. After about an hour of waiting we were led into a dark nightclub full of loud music and neon lights. Everyone in the room was dancing, smoking, drinking, and chatting with each other, waiting for the show to begin. Giant pictures of the masculine female contestants hung from the roof against the walls. Seeing them, my friend whispered at me excitingly: “They are all so very handsome, don’t you think? I would totally love to date any one of them!”

Then the show began. Contestants sang and danced individually and in groups, while the judges sat in front of the stage to evaluate the performances. The setting resembled those of the larger professional talent shows televised by mainstream TV channels, except that all of the contestants were biological women who dressed and performed like men. Interestingly, it was made clear in the beginning of the show that the contestants were not transgender men or drag kings in spite of their fancy black suits and male-styled demeanors. In her opening remarks, Anna Dai, the founder of the event, specified that these contestants were “zhongxing girls” who desired to display their unique female selves to the world with pride and confidence, and this competition was designed to provide a stage for “girls like them.” Given this emphasis on the contestants’ girlhood, a dynamic of opposite-gender homoeroticism dominated throughout the show. The host constantly stressed the sexual appeal of the contestants’ masculinity, exclaiming things such as “there are so many pretty girls here today because these zhongxing contestants are way too cute” and “who says that only men can be our lover? Look at these MissMr.s who are even cuter.” The audience never failed to respond with enthusiastic shouts. In these on-site exchanges, a strong feminist consciousness was clearly implied in the founder’s emphasis on the show as a means to empower zhongxing young women to recognize and celebrate their unconventional selves, while the interaction between the host and the audience shifted the meaning of the contestants’ zhongxing performance from an alternative and progressive womanhood to homoerotic masculinity with the T-Po opposite-gender eroticism popular in local lesbian communities as a critical referent. The fact that the poster for the show was displayed in one of Taipei’s most famous lesbian/T bar attests to the connection.

The two framings of new womanhood and homoerotic masculinity steered popular cultural representations of a pop music band called “Misster,” whose members were all recruited from the finalists of the MissMr. competitions. Debuting in January 2011, Misster distinguished itself from numerous other girl bands by its group members’ unique zhongxing gender expressions. A feminist sentiment was enhanced in the manufacturing of these young women’s public image, as their zhongxing expression was consistently represented as the result of conscious insubordination and resistance against stereotypical femininity. For example, in their debut press conference, Misster was depicted as a “super girl band… [that] bids farewell to women’s fragility, demonstrates a new way out for young girls, and exhibits girls’ glamorous courage.” ³ In subsequent interviews and promotion campaigns, Misster’s zhongxing performance was unexceptionally situated in this framework and emphasized as an alternative gender identification option for modern young women who found themselves restrained by normative femininity that often prioritized sweetness and sexiness. This popular cultural representation echoes the way in which female zhongxing stars are positively recognized as an embodiment of women’s autonomy and individuality in contemporary China (Li, 2015). Moreover, the fact that this image was created and disseminated by the band’s publicity team further explains how raised intelligibility and eligibility of feminist consciousness is employed to support the destigmatization and promotion of these young women’s cross-gender performances in the mainstream Taiwanese society. ⁴

Given this progressive public image as resistant new women, these young women’s zhongxing gender performance continued to be represented as homoerotic female masculinity implying opposite-gender eroticism in popular cultural productions. Music videos for Misster’s more romantic songs often featured one of the zhongxing group members engaged in affective exchanges with a normative feminine-looking female actor. The images and the plots of the music videos recalled a common narrative of a T-Po love story – the intimate and erotic interactions imply romantic feelings between the masculine and the feminine characters, while the intimacy could also be understood as close friendship if a clear statement of love is not made. This reference to T-Po lesbian sexuality was reinforced when the zhongxing members of the Misster band appeared on famous TV shows and encountered the typical question of whether they were sexually attracted to women. Some insisted they preferred men, others confessed they were courted by other girls when they were younger, and still others professed they were open to choices, but no one ever directly admitted to the possibility of their lesbian identity. These elusive responses suggested a conservative cultural atmosphere in which homosexual identification could only be inferred but not directly affirmed in public, which partly explains the strategic delineation of the zhongxing gender performance as feminist insubordination. However, persistent curiosity regarding the sexual orientation of the zhongxing band members elucidates the fact that it is exactly the potential of female same-sex desire that instigates and reinforces public interest in the figure of zhongxing young women.

Mainstreaming of female masculinity in the changing global-local relations of gender and sexuality

Although Misster was not very successful in their music career, their emergence in Taiwanese popular culture emblemizes an ongoing “zhongxing” phenomenon, in which young women’s ambiguous cross-gender expressions surface in the eyes of the mainstream public as an active challenge to heteronormative gender binaries and, at the same time, as homoerotic female masculinity suggestive of lesbian sexuality. In recent public culture, growing visibility of zhongxing young women has been considered a symbol of advances in social acceptance of women’s cross-gender identificantion and performances. In an interview with one major newspaper, You-Mei Lai, former secretary in chief of the Taiwan Gender Equity Education Association, stated that mainstream popularity of the image of zhongxing young women “enables a progress in public perception [of female masculine performance] from disdain (‘how come there are girls like this?’) to acceptance (‘there simply are girls like this!’)” (Liang, 2008). Prestigious feminist and cultural scholar Hsiao-Hung Chang (2010) also contends in a public commentary that “the contemporary generation of ‘zhongxing’ translates women’s ambiguous gender expressions from stigmatized ‘queer eccentricity’ (yinyangguaiqi) to a charming ‘androgyny’ (yingyantongti), and replaces the derogatory label of ‘neither-man-nor-woman’ (bunanbunü) with the positive notion of ‘tomboyish girl’ (sinanhaide nühai).” Meanwhile, this celebration of zhongxing as a symbolic transgression of normative gender binaries is typically intertwined with consistent conjectures about zhongxing young women’s potential same-sex desires. Speculation and insinuation of zhongxing young women’s lesbian inclination prevail in popular representations, mostly through ambiguous language such as “they just don’t speak about it explicitly and continue to be mysterious [about their sexual identification], probably because of the negative effects that coming-out would incur” (Yuan, 2011).

The amalgamation of homoerotic female masculinity and subversive gender androgyny in popular imaginings of female zhongxing performance creates a critical shift in the relations between westernized feminist and queer politics and local T/Po lesbian sexuality contextualized in Taiwan’s postcolonial pursuit of modernization and globalization as a less-than-sovereign nation-state with dubious international status. Taiwanese cultural anthropologist Antonia Chao (2000) has pointed out that the T-Po lesbian community and subculture first emerged in the liberal bar culture facilitated by American GIs stationed in Taipei in the 1970s. ⁵ However, despite this connection to western and hence “modern” cultural forms and a tendency to tell T-ness apart from maleness common in the T-Po community, T-Po eroticism was denigrated as an outdated replica of patriarchal heterosexuality when an influx of western feminist and queer politics and theories defined the contour of women’s and gay and lesbian movements burgeoning in Taiwanese universities and lesbian activist groups in the early 1990s (Y Chao, 1996; Jian, 1997; Zheng, 1997). This tension exemplifies a queer version of “domestic colonialism,” – T-Po lesbians hanging out in local bars are construed as an uncultured, subaltern group excluded from the construction of a modern national identity by elite college lesbian feminists, which “validates the superior cultural and economic capital controlled by both pre-liberation colonists and postcolonial elites eager to be adopted into the global community” (A Chao, 2000: 387). As a result, new sexual identities such as bufen (literally “not distinguishing”), lazi (a local term adopted from the English “lesbian”) and nütongzhi (“woman comrade”) proliferated to decentralize T-Po eroticism in Taiwanese lesbian identity formation (Jian, 1997; Zheng, 1997). Queer women inclining toward masculinity are further marginalized in this climate, entering into an imaginary realm of ghosts (“wangliang”) where confusion, stigma and shame mark a T-like masculine lesbian body (Ding and Liu, 2007; Martin, 2006).

Yet, the emergence of the zhongxing discourse shows a critical realignment of antagonistic and hierarchical relations between local T-Po subculture and westernized feminist and queer politics. No longer seen as gender and sexual outcasts, female masculinity and T-Po opposite-gender eroticism are now joined with feminist celebrations of defiant womanhood and queer endorsements of gender ambiguity to undergird social understandings of the figure of the zhongxing young woman. This realignment critically mainstreams the socio-cultural status of female masculinity and T-Po sexuality embodied by young women’s zhongxing performance as far as westernized feminist and queer politics continues to symbolize political modernity and international recognizability in contemporary Taiwan. In this mainstreaming, homoerotic female masculinity in the form of zhongxing expression surfaces as a modern and politically progressive gender performance that young women can now freely adopt without previous stigmatization. Public visibility and intelligibility of T-Po lesbian sexuality is also significantly enhanced, which explains the prevalence of zhongxing young women in public spaces, assumed, as described earlier, to be T lesbians.

When beautiful boys meets zhongxing girls: The commodification of young women’s zhongxing performances

Alongside the entwinement of westernized feminist and queer politics with local T-Po lesbian subculture, a critical transnational cultural force that has influenced the current formation of popular cultural imaginings of zhongxing young women is the regional flow of Japanese and Korean popular culture. In particular, the immense popularity of beautiful-boy idols (translated as “huameinan” in Mandarin), and the soft, exquisite and aesthetic masculine style they embody, not only redefine imaginings and practices of normative masculinity in Taiwan (Huang, 2007), but also circumscribe the molding of the contemporary zhongxing gender expression for young women. Considering diverse forms of female masculinities substantiated by historically specific gendered and sexualized power relations (Halberstam, 1998), it is important to note that the homoerotic female masculinity mainstreamed by zhongxing young women does not refer to any form of merging of masculine and feminine traits embodied by a woman. Rather, it only pertains to the one that resembles the Korean beautiful-boy style as we have seen in the popular production and image-work of Misster. Not only is their first single, “Bomb Bomb Bomb,” a direct adaptation of a hit by a famous Korean beautiful-boy group with exactly the same title and similar choreography, but their members are also styled with the exquisite beautiful-boy look. These Korean pop cultural elements are always forcefully highlighted in the promotion of the band. Moreover, the term “huameinan” (“beautiful boys”) is employed as a common language in popular TV shows and mainstream media coverage to delineate and conceptualize their zhongxing gender expressions.

The parallel of young women’s zhongxing performance to Korean beautiful-boy masculinity does more than describe and promote the particular female gender style in the mind of the public. Rather, the capitalistic nature of the transnational expansion of Korean popular culture, as Sinnott indicates, has complicated the progressive implication of the cultural popularity of zhongxing young women. Concerned scholars have long been wary of capitalistic appropriation of queer and feminist subjects and the mitigation of their transgressive potential (Hennessey, 2002; Yang, 2007). Yet, in his study of parallels in western and Asian sexual cultures, Peter Jackson (2009) maintains that participation in a local market economy as workers and consumers is a key to queer women’s identity and community formation, for “national varieties of capitalism may produce novel cultural forms locally and also reveals the extent to which a market economy may enhance queer autonomy” (2009: 364). The way in which Korean beautiful-boy masculinity undergirds popular cultural representations of zhongxing young women elucidates a local sexual culture formation that is intertwined with both the consumerist appropriation of non-normative female gender and sexuality and the expansion of queer venues for young lesbians to achieve autonomous identity formation.

For example, I attended several of Misster’s fan meetings and made conversation with some of the girls in the audience in my fieldwork. My question of why they came to the events was often met with the response: “I like them so much! They are so cute and handsome!” These girls’ enthusiasm does not readily evoke an appreciation of an alternative womanhood that would liberate them from the constraint of normative femininity. Rather, the onsite dynamic resembled that of the MissMr. talent show, and these girls acted just like fans of any popular male idols, revealing how the cultural appeal of zhongxing young women is largely founded on opposite-gender sexual attraction, regardless a homo- or hetero-erotic one. Considering the resemblance of zhongxing female masculinity to the beautiful-boy image, female homoeroticism displayed by Misster’s young girl fans appears to result from a commodification of the zhongxing female masculine expression in virtue of the profit entailed by the immense cultural popularity of Korean beautiful-boy idols. However, it is also evident that the commodification serves as a critical alternative channel for female same-sex eroticism to flow, enabling young women to publicly express and satisfy their queer desire through their consumption of popular cultural productions of zhongxing female stars.

Moreover, the popular association of young women’s zhongxing performance with T-Po sexuality further incorporates young masculine lesbians as potential consumers for the huamenan-like zhongxing female masculinity. In my fieldwork in 2009 through 2010, I visited a famous online lesbian forum named “2Girl” very often to observe and participate in virtual lesbian communities. ⁶ At the time the website was filled with advertisements from various online stores that sold “small-cut male apparel” (“xiaoban nanzhuang”), “zhongxing clothes” (“zhongxing fushi”) and a “T style breast binder” (“T style shu-xiong”). These advertisements typically featured zhongxing-looking female models alongside taglines accentuating the stylistic adherence of their clothing products to Japanese/Korean fashion. As far as online forums are critical portals for younger generations of lesbian women who go online to explore and establish their non-normative gender and sexual identification, prevailing advertisements for “small-cut male apparel” and “zhongxing clothes” promote a universalized imagination of desirable T lesbian masculinity and propel collective performance of zhongxing among young lesbians inclining toward masculinity. This phenomenon tends to render young lesbians’ adoption of the zhongxing masculinity as a pursuit of popular fashion (Kam, 2014), motivated by consumerist desire rather than a manifestation of enhanced masculine identification, which, as mentioned earlier, casts doubts on the authenticity and stability of their T lesbian identification. Nonetheless, the commercialized association of zhongxing with T lesbian masculinity creates, in the meantime, an opportunity for young lesbians to consolidate a sense of queer self and community, for their consumption of the zhongxing clothes and items enables them to cultivate a masculine identity not only acceptable to the general public but also symbolic of their participation in the urban T-Po lesbian subculture.

Negotiating female masculinity and refiguring lesbian visibility

The association of young women’s zhongxing performance with popular Korean beautiful-boy style and homoerotic female masculinity illustrates dialectic dynamics between commercialized appropriation and the exercise of queer agency through “creative engagements that take advantage of opportunities provided by the growth of a national market economy” (Jackson, 2009: 362). Nonetheless, as Povinelli and Chauncey (1999: 445) contend, the shaping of newly emergent localized gender and sexual subject positions cannot be understood “without any model of subjective mediation… [that] relates the orders of discourse to the subject of discourse to the subject’s practices.” In other words, the real effects of transnational cultural exchanges cannot be determined without taking into account how local queer subjects mediate transnational cultural discourses in the practice of their subjectivity formation. This emphasis on subjective agency is testified through the ways in which my informants take advantage of the popular and commodified zhongxing style to redefine their masculine identification as well as to reconfigure the meaning of lesbian visibility as they attempt to make sense of and situate their non-normative identification in the tangled network of transnational ideologies. Whereas my informants’ collective adoption of the zhongxing expression appears to indicate their compliance with a commodified cultural discourse, the way in which they use the zhongxing performance to negotiate a livable and meaningful non-normative identification amidst diverse and contradictory local and transnational cultural values suggests how seemingly conformative acts may encompass active agency and lead to subtle interruption and the transformation of normative regulation.

This dynamic is first illustrated by how my informants utilize the popular zhongxing discourse to facilitate a coherent relation between their masculine inclination, their female-sexed body, and their identification as a woman. Given all the queer extolment of the subversive potential of female masculine performance, most of my T-identifying informants admitted that their primary concern in shaping their masculine style is simply to look as “handsome” (“shuai”) as possible. The contemporary popularity of Korean beautiful-boy masculinity hence acts as a convenient and inevitable resource for my masculine lesbian informants to mold a “handsome” and attractive masculine appearance. My informant Anne specifically stresses how the shift in male fashion to Korean beautiful-boy style helps her to coordinate the disparity between popular masculine aesthetic and her slender and small female body. Recalling her college years when American hip-hop culture dominated male fashion, Anne comments:

You know, clothes of hip-hop style – caps, hoodies, loose jeans and sneakers – were so big and loose. As skinny as I am, those clothes would literally hang on me like a sack dangling on a tiny stick. Frankly, it was so ugly that I can’t bear to look at my old pictures! Now I prefer male clothes of more English or Japanese and Korean style, because they are designed with a smaller and narrower cut, which fits a T’s body, that is, a woman’s body, more.

The way in which my informants use zhongxing performance to signify a visible and intelligible lesbian identification also shows how they actively deploy transnational cultural influences in their subjectivity formation. In line with transnational scholars’ complication of queer visibility, how to define and enact an “out” identity represents a thorny issue in the emergence of a modern Taiwanese LGBT subjectivity. In a society where the heteronormative regime is undergirded by a Confucian emphasis on filial responsibility and harmonious social relations, direct and confrontational disclosure of non-normative sexual identity defined by “coming out” is often discouraged, while a range of bodily and behavioral signs are devised to “tell” about the existence of LGBT subjects symbolically (Chou, 2000; Martin, 2000). This formulation of queer visibility serves the purpose of maintaining peaceful social and familial relations when one’s queer identification is insinuated circuitously through symbolic signs. However, a key problem in this formulation is the indefinite possibility of interpretation, as it is highly likely for the audience to read the sign in a different or even contrasting way. The instability of signification partly explains Taiwanese queer scholars’ suspicion of the ambiguous in-and-out position to actually dovetail with social indifference and ignorance and aggravate queer invisibility rather than defeating it (Chu, 1998; Liu and Ding, 2005).

The reinforced popular association of zhongxing young women with T-Po lesbian sexuality offers a critical means to mediate the discontinuity between sign construction and interpretation. The way in which my informants understand and practice queer visibility clarifies how the zhongxing gender performance is turned into a coded signifier of masculine lesbian subjectivity, by which the paradox between seen and unseen is coordinated and the desire for both queer visibility and social integration is satisfied. Sky, a T-identifying lesbian in her early 20 s, who looked just like those female zhongxing celebrities in mass media, responded as follows to my question of whether she had come out:

Come out? You mean telling people that I am a lesbian? They should know when they see me, shouldn’t they? I mean, isn’t my look obvious enough? Why do I have to go around telling people that I am [a lesbian]? Don’t get me wrong. I am very proud of being who I really am, but it is one thing that people think I am [a lesbian], and it is another thing if I say I am. You can never be sure whether some people would stab you in the back.

These life strategies and experiences clearly illustrate how the emergence of the popular zhongxing performance and discourse intervenes in the struggle of local queer subjects’ visibility formation. In addition to the enhanced association between the zhongxing performance and lesbian sexuality, the mainstreaming of zhongxing as a progressive and modern manifestation of female identification contributes to the freedom of contemporary lesbian women to publicly enact zhongxing as a seeable and readable symbol of their same-sex desire. The process of subjectivity formation elucidates a gender-specific dynamic of revelation and concealment in local lesbian women’s complex reception and mediation of transnational cultural flows. In spite of the capitalistic appropriation, my informants accept and adopt the zhongxing gender performance to negotiate with structural containments on their masculine lesbian identity and to initiate a positive and agentive construction of a visible and meaningful lesbian identity. The particular struggle between my informants’ subjectivity formation and normative cultural accommodation hence provides a gender-specific perspective to consider the dialectic relationship between queer agency and structural constraints in the context of multilayered transnational cultural exchanges.

Conclusion

With a focus on the emergence of the zhongxing young women in Taiwan, I have explored the multifaceted interactions and negotiations among global, regional, national and local discourses of gender and sexuality, and emphasized the exertion of subjective agency by Taiwanese lesbian women to mediate diverse and contradictory local and transnational cultural values to establish a livable and meaningful female masculine and lesbian subject position. To conclude my analysis, I intend to stress how Taiwanese lesbian women’s subjectivity formation potentially redefines queer agency as day-to-day conducts that appear complicit to mainstream and normative ideologies and discourses. Critical race and queer theorist Jasbir Puar (2007: 23–24) has once questioned that “[i]ndividual agency is legible only as resistance to norms rather than complicity with them… leading to an impossible transcendent subject who is always already conscious of the normativizing forces of power and always ready and able to subvert, resist or transgress them” in her reflection on the idea of homonationalism. In line with Puar’s interrogation, the nuanced impacts of the rise of the zhongxing phenomenon on social conception and subjective practice of women’s non-normative gender and sexuality elucidate how relations between binary notions of resistance and complicity are confounded and conceptions about liberation and constraint are altered in the intricate process of transnational subjectivity and sexuality formation. As my discussion in this article only touches upon the subject matter, I propose that further scholarly examination along this line would provide invaluable insights regarding convoluted, uneven, and dialectic relationship between agentive queer subjectivity formation and structural containment of normative appropriation in the context of cultural transnationalization nowadays.