Reticent poetics, queer politics

Bibliographic Data

ID12671925
AuthorsLiu Jen‐peng, Ding Naifei, Naifei Ding
Year2005
Volume6
Issue1
Pages30-55
Publication date2005-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInter-Asia Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-9373 • E-ISSN: 1469-8447
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1462394042000326897
OpenAlexW2026416180
LanguageEN
Citations received64
References cited6

This is a preliminary rethinking of the interface of tolerance and reticence as a dominant aesthetic‐ethical value with the maintaining of ‘proper’ sexual relations and the keeping of deviant sex(ualities) in the realm of ghosts and wangliang. The paper is a descriptive analysis of certain effects of homophobia as the latter is re‐figured through ‘silent words and reticent tolerance’, passing for the most ‘traditional’ of virtues in modern ‘democratic’ guise. We think that just as person‐hood is in Taiwan (and perhaps in other Chinese‐ness marked worlds) inextricably entangled with paternalist familial relations in impure modern forms, so too have the rhetoric and politics of tolerance and reticence retained seemingly old powers while articulating new disciplinary and rhetorical forces, especially in the field of sexuality in and around the family. Contemporary novelistic representation, such as the acclaimed popular novel of ‘queer’ desire, The Unfilial Daughter, may be read as both representing and complicit with just such reticent aesthetic and political powers. We are also concerned with how new regimes of progressive knowledge‐production in the fields of gender and queer theorizing and historical analyses can be inadvertently complicit with these same reticent shadowy homophobic forces to the extent the former posits culturally essential ‘Chinese’ non‐homophobic subjects and situations

Aesthetics · Art · Human sexuality · Literature · Phallic stage · Poetics · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Queer theory · Realm · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Gender Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Psychology