Querying queer cultural politics: partial, composite, contaminated English

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Acknowledgments

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 2009 National Science Council Workshop for Foreign Languages and Literatures, Taipei, 29 November. I thank the organizers for the inspiration to write on this topic, and my fellow presenters on the ‘Translation and Sexuality’ panel and all the participants of the workshop for the ensuing discussion. At the time of rewriting the paper into this essay, I attended two conferences that greatly influenced my thinking, the Cross‐Strait Conference on Gender/Sexuality Deployment, organized by Josephine Ho and the Sex Center, and Querying the ‘Marriage and Family Continuum,’ organized by Naifei Ding and Jen‐peng Liu. I am also indebted to Oliver Ting for his thinking on what can count as political with regard to sexuality and culture in a transnational frame, and to Lili Hsieh for her helpful comments on a preliminary draft.

Notes

1. I am drawing on Kuan‐Hsing Chen’s discussion of the term ‘little subjectivity complex’ in the article ‘The decolonization question’ (Chen 1998).

2. Chandan Reddy is the first person who brought to my attention the connection between gayness and modernity in East Asian cultural production, which he did in the mid‐1990s (personal correspondence).

3. Jenpeng Liu’s paper on the Japanese manga EVA theorizes the melancholic cultural ‘politics’ of what appears to be reticent indifference (Liu 2009).