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At the intersection of the global and the local: Representations of male homosexuality in fictions by Pai Hsien-yung, Li Ang, Chu Tien-wen and Chi Ta-wei

This article seeks to explore the representations of male homosexuality in four Taiwan fictions in relation to how the local and the global intersect. The process of globalisation has become intense over the past fifty years. More than ever space and time seem compressed through the spread of the new communication technology, media, trade, finance and commodity circulation, as well as travel and migration. This does not, however, mean that a homogeneous, integrated global culture is at hand or welcome. Instead, homogenisation and unification are not uncontested, since not only do the non-Western nation-states and cultures talk back to the West, but the West is shown to be heterogeneous. Mike Featherstone argues that the globalisation process actually opens up ‘a dialogical space in which we can expect a good deal of disagreement, clashing of perspectives and conflicts, not just working together and consensus’. There are more and more hybrid sites of meaning. As Homi Bhabha notes in his book The Location of Culture, ‘in the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion’. In the fin de siècle, Taiwan also finds itself in a phase in which ‘globalization and localization are inextricably bound together’, especially in the terrain of gender and sexuality. This past decade witnessed the greatest change in notions of gender and sexuality in Taiwan. With the rise of gay/lesbian/queer movements in the 1990s, male homosexuality, lesbianism and queer sexuality, which used to be seen as unspeakable and unrepresentable in Taiwan fiction, have become one of the hottest subject matters. While one may say that this phenomenon is in part brought about by globalisation, it also has to do with the lifting of martial law in 1987. Moreover, interest in gays, lesbians and queers entails numerous small fights. Sometimes it seems like a sheer contention between the local and the global over notions of gender and sexuality. Closely examined, the dichotomy is too facile, since neither the local nor the global can be seen as monolithic. But the globalisation of gay/lesbian/queer movements does help release what was suppressed and left out in the local. Fictional