Perverse Penumbrae in Exile: Multiple Technologies of Sexual Policing and Discipline in Crystal Boys

• Main Authors: Yeh Te-hsuan, 葉德宣
• Other Authors: Naifei Ding
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/35834661929139621474

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 英美語文研究所 === 89 === Abstract This project is an attempt to demonstrate the ideological continuity between the family and the state in terms of their joint discipline and surveillance of perverse sexualities. Crystal Boys remains a favorable text of study, for it is rich not only in the problematic manifestation of familialist ideology, but also in a detailed representation of how fascistic nationalism or the disciplining force of the state like the police plays out in and through one’s body. By structurally and thematically triangulating the above disciplinary network into three kinds of agencies — i.e., the family, the state, and the perverse (non)subjects, my study seeks to delineate the processes in which the state and the family join forces against queer adolescents through a whole plethora of disciplinary techniques, e.g., discursive familialization by professional or lay critics of the perversity represented in the novel, parental verbal preaching, fascistic militarized training of bodily submission, or police interrogation that works on a complicated entanglement of guilt and criminality. On the other hand, the adolescent homosexual hustlers’ campy resistance to state and familial discipline, as embodied in their grotesque parody of state and familial vocabulary or conventions, is also a matter of importance that has been treated extensively in this project. Situating both the disciplinary layout and the queer (non)subjects’ much-neglected, penumbra-like identities as sex workers and adolescents in a historical and epistemic field of sexual modernity, this project also brings into relief an erotophobic asceticism inherent in liberal and fascist models of sexual citizenship, both of which are arguably central to Taiwan’s mainstream definition of normative subjectivity or legal subjecthood, and to Taiwan’s self-justification of all the disciplinary control imposed by the state and the family over those illicit (non)subjects. Juxtaposing both this historical/philosophical outlook with the intricate disciplinary functions specified in each chapter, this project thus provides both a macro-political and a micro-political overview of how sexual policing and discipline is carried out in Taiwan’s fascist and familial regime.