 Today's topic is the coloniality of queer theory, the effects of homonormativity on transnational Taiwan's path to equality. We'd like to welcome Professor Gawing-Chal, who's an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. The topic of today's talk is one that has proved very, very popular among our students over the last decades. We've seen growing student interest in terms of their essays and dissertations on gender, particularly LGBT related topics. And this has actually led us to change our teaching so we give more focus to gender issues in Taiwan. And because of that student interest over the last decade, we've had numerous talks that address LGBT related issues. The majority of our talks have come at this topic from the angle of social movement studies. We've also had talks that look at this issue from a more legal perspective. And we've also hosted many practitioners, so social movement activists, many of whom Professor Gaw actually interviewed in the process of his research for today's talk, which has been published in Sexualities. But I think the angle that Professor Gaw takes in terms of looking at this issue from a kind of queer theory perspective is really different. I think that's one of the reasons why I was really delighted that you're willing to come and join us and bring a different perspective. And I think one of the things was quite interesting. I was kind of thinking back to the talks we've had over the last decade. And perhaps the first one that actually addressed queer issues in Taiwan was actually 10 years ago by Herschel Ray. And of course, that's some of the people that you actually do kind of engage with in today's talk. Professor Gaw is gonna speak for about 40, 45 minutes. And then we look forward to a similar amount of time for Q&A. So let me now hand over to Professor Gaw. Thanks for being willing to share your research and your time with us. Thank you so much, Dr. Phil, for the wonderful introduction. And thank you so much, Solace, Dr. Zhang, and Hao Yu and everyone who make this event possible. As I said before the event to Dr. Phil, I'm so delighted to be able to be granted this opportunity to talk with you all at in London or around the UK or maybe around the country because now we are living in the virtual world already because now in 2017, I had a chance to join another Solace conference focusing on the queer-Asians studies by using the decolonial and transnational perspectives. And that also fundamentally inspired my research that I proposed in this journal article. So as Dr. Phil said, my research path is very different from some previous scholars that you may have a chance to heard too, when Taiwan is approaching to the legalization of sex marriage, people tend to use more social policies or LGBT rights perspective to argue why Taiwan deserves to be the first Asian country to legalize sex marriage. This study takes a very different perspective in the way that I exam how the globalization plus localization that I call the localization of some radical queer theories has been influenced Taiwan's LGBTQ rights. So here we go. Just let people know that this article is part of my larger project of a book that I'm currently writing on, which is about the transnational network of anti-LGBTQ conservative movements. So when people ask me if Dr. Gao, you are studying Taiwanese queer studies, I usually say back to them that no, I'm studying Taiwanese anti-queer studies. And I use my queer body to delve myself into the anti-LGBT movement parts and to try to understand how the conservatives may influence Taiwan's future. So this article is a side project from my larger book project. Taiwan was the first Asian country to legalize sex marriage in 2019. After over three decades of queer activism and a decade long anti-LGBTQ battles, many traits of the Taiwanese marriage equality campaigns seem similar to their American counterparts with ubiquitous rainbow flags and love discourses. The similarities has tamed many queer critics to apply the queer homonormativity critics to deconstruct Taiwanese queer activism. So in this paper, I rethink the queer desire of localizing the homonormativity critics to queer Asia and critically exam the colonial effects of the localization of homonormativity in the global South. Following Maria Lugones critic toward the coloniality of gender, this research interrogates the coloniality of queer theory and asks, how does queer theory produce colonial effects on queer politics in Taiwan? I focus on Lisa Dugan's homonormativity critic that she produced in this book, The Twilight of Equality. And I use Lisa Dugan's homonormativity critics to exam the transnational trajectory and consequence. Homonormativity as idea aims at deconstructing three pillars of the perceived American queer activism. First one, the privatization of public problems. Second, the assimilation of middle-class heteropatriarchy. And third, the expansion of neoliberal corporatization in queer activism. So Lisa Dugan proclaimed in her book, Welcome to the New World. Because to some minds that may not be familiar with Lisa Dugan's argument, she used American queer activism as the case studies to argue actually the fight for marriage equality in the US context has been privatizing many public problems like the healthcare, like the incarceration capitalism into the private domain. And she also argued marriage equality is a way to assimilate the sexual and the gender minority people like LGBTQ people into the middle-class heteronormative patriarchal family style. And she also argued that the American queer activism becomes one of the conspiracy of the American neoliberal capitalism. But I use these three pillars to think through the Taiwan's path to census marriage. Does Lisa Dugan's New World claim include Taiwan and Asia's? Now here I use Asia in the plural form following the queer-Asia's initiative to argue that Asia's actually is a plural and highly diverse and heterogeneous area. I also argue and asked what happens when homonormativity critics are not only elite discourses and themselves become pivotal players in Taiwanese Asian politics of sexual citizenship. Queer Asia studies provide triple challenge to the coloniality of queer theory. First, they reveal how queer theory has been complicit in the global asymmetry of cetational politics and colluded with American nationalism and geopolitics. Second, queer theory helps perpetuate Northern theoretical hegemony, as Red Wing called no argue, and queer theory oppresses Asian queer scholarship as only case studies when the North American queer thinkers use American cases to theorize the legitimacy of their own hegemonic knowledge. And third, queer Asia studies expose the disciplinary exclusion that traumatizes many queer Asia scholars. Thus Matthew Wades, no argue in the introduction of this book, Queer Asia's, demands the decolonization of queer knowledge by carefully discussing the meanings and limitations of queer concepts while conceptualize and contextualize the variations in political strategies, human rights and queer politics. So building on the queer Asia studies, I interrogate what colonial effects has homonormativity produced in Taiwan? How can we decolonize queer Asia studies and decolonize queer theory in general? So in this research, no, I said this article is part of my larger book project, right? So in my larger project, no, I first interview English and Chinese speaking people. I also review the English and Chinese language publications that articulated homonormativity with Taiwanese sexual politics, including Justin Hall's article that Dr. Phil just mentioned and also many of her followers, including Hans Huang and Petrus Liu and among others. So these texts in my research were interrogated against my firsthand ethnographic data that I collected in Taiwan's anti-LGBTQ campaign, anti-marriage equality campaign for 22 months, along with my interviews with 97 respondents whose political stance ranging from extreme conservatism to queer radicalism, which means it's a super wide political spectrum from the far left to the far right. And I'll be very glad to answer more questions about my methodology in the Q&A section. And just like people know, actually the numbers that I presented in this article has been increasing because I just finished another round of fieldwork in Taiwan, just the end of next year. So the project is moving, right? And before I give you my research findings, now I want to show my feminist self-reflexibility and reflexivity of my positionality as a researcher, as a Taiwanese study researcher who had multiple hats. I entered the field and also this area with multiple identities. I was born into a working class, working class family and I've been a cisgender gay queer for more than two decades. I hopefully I did not look that old, but you know my age. I've been trained as a sociologist using the sociological theories and the methodologies. I've been an openly gay and a permanent nationally, Tongzhi LGBTQ activist since my college life. So that was also roughly two days ago. I was serving as the gender equity educator in the Ministry of Education to help them to publicize the gender equity curricula at the national and county city levels and to educate our seed teachers to develop the curricula of gender equity education and develop their own pedagogical skills now to teach all the teachers within their own cities and the counties. I served that position for 2.5 years before I migrated myself to Rogers, New Jersey in the US, now to pursue my PhD. I have also converted to be a humanitarian Christian. So if you hear some critical analysis about Christianity or Christian conservatism in the research, that is part of the criticism coming from within the community, not far and without. As a Taiwanese studies scholars know I'm also a transnational world travelers who has been raised in East Asia but consistently and continuously thinking across all the national borders. So whenever I talk about my research, my six hats always influence interchangeably and interactively to shape my own thinking. So please help me to put them in mind. Okay, here we go. What I found. First of all, I found this a preemptive deployment of homonormativity critics in the field. Homonormativity as a queer critics in Taiwan spread from a vocal group self-branded as family marriage abolitionist, hui jia fei huen pai. And thanks to their own cultural translation, homonormativity critics in Taiwan were not reactionary. They were preemptive deployment that preceded Taiwan's national marriage equality campaigns. One of my queer activists to interview Yi, actually Wu Shiliang, who has been passed away for us, reflected that, quote, most intellectual theories used in Taiwanese queer activism come from the US. The preemptive deployment in gendered queer theory should be sweetly appropriated by moral conservatives to demonize and demoralize marriage equality and semi-marriage. Both queer radicals and religious conservatives intentionally work together to delay the marriage equality legislation. My research found that homonormativity globalization in Taiwan has produced four colonial effects. For the time's sake, I want to talk briefly about each of them and welcome more questions about the details during the Q&A section. So first of all, I found the globalization of homonormativity has been producing the colonial disrupt between queer theory and queer practices. The preemptive homonormativity critics deconstructed indigenous identities and self-made norms, even before their four constructions. My indigenous interview, Yi, Hanna, who is a Talugu, the Turgu tribe, no, Tai-Lu Ge-Zu, and another anonymous lesbian couple, who both are Amis, Amei-Zu, failed, pressured by preemptive querying. Indigenous queers in Taiwan faced two-fold struggle. Resisting inter-ethnic inequalities, they joined the indigenous rights movement to battle for decolonizing intersectional Japanese and Han Chinese oppressions, pursuing identity reconstruction and reviving cultural traditions. Resisting hetero-patrarchy at the other hand, they endeavored to earn recognition of their own queer desires and identities within indigenous kingships and families while the tribal leaders continued to hold authority over interpreting the tradition in a more heteronormative and patriarchal ways. So here, queer anti-editarianism and homonormativity intervene with double coloniality. They dismantled the already vulnerable Taiwanese indigenous identities before construction and destroyed indigenous queers burgeoning gender sexual subjectivities prematurely with overwhelming deconstructive power. The double coloniality that oppressed Taiwanese indigenous queers echoes the queer Palestinian critic of the Western empire of critic and queer investment in the ongoing settol colonialism and the tension between anti-coloniality and anti-patrarchy in the US indigenous queer studies. So that's the first one. The second effect I found is the universalism of queer theory. The three pillars of homonormativity critics are challenged in Taiwan. First, regarding the privatization of public problems, actually Taiwan's queer activism began with a social infrastructure drastically different from American society. As the table one in my article shows, Taiwanese queer, Taiwanese citizenships had enjoyed the national health care, Sheming Jianbao since the 1990s and over 99% of Taiwanese residents had been covered by affordable health care in 2017, which is very different from the American context. So compared to the US, Taiwanese society has a lower economic inequality in terms of the genie index here, far less military expenditure and a higher employment rate. These constructs with American queer's concerns of health care reform, military expansion, immigration policies and incarceration capitalism before equality. Then second, does marriage equality always come with the cause of heteronormative assimilation? Taiwan posts counter examples. Taiwanese campaigns initiated three pillars, simultaneously including marriage quality, hui yin ping chen, the pansexual partnership system, tong jui ban lü, and polyamorous multi-person household, jia shu zhi du. The three pillar package aimed at legally protect and recognize various family types and challenge heteropatriarchy, homonormativity and monosexism at the same time. However, these revolutionary queer attempts in Taiwan were barred, washed away by many international news, including BBC, CNN and other mainstream media's Orientalist gaze. So those media's not tend to give international people only the rainbow flags, only the love of the kisses of census couples among these other romantic image, but they tend not to report many progressive and revolutionary queer attempts and initiations that Taiwan has been providing to the world. Does marriage equality always benefit the wide and middle class gay men? As the homonormativity critics suggests, Taiwan's campaign has been led by women actually and achieved for women. Women are the campaign faces and voices. The consequences are also gendered. In the first year of the legalization of census marriage in Taiwan, over 2,000 lesbian couples registered to marry at a gender ratio that has over 2.1 times the gay men couples in Taiwan. Taiwan's gendered ratio 2.1 is also significantly higher than its American counterpart at 1.17, in favor of queer women. Does marriage equality in Taiwan enables underprivileged women to put resources together, emancipate from the heteropatriarchal family control and create their own chosen family with legal recognition? Thus, homonormativity's assimilation assumption is falsified by the Taiwanese case. Thirdly, neoliberal capitalism is not universal. Outside queer activism, Taiwan's economy is composed of small to medium-sized family-owned enterprises that count for 97% of all companies in Taiwan. Taiwan's business man objectives census marriage because it would open the door to strangers with different family names who would step into their own family-owned enterprises and threaten their own patriarchal privilege and power. Thus, marriage equality steps the heart of Taiwan's capitalism at the microeconomic level. Inside queer activism, Taiwan's queer organizations tended to be anti-capitalist. While the American population is 14 times that of Taiwan, the annual revenue of the largest American poor equality organization like HRC, Human Rights Council or campaign, it's 56 times greater than that of its Taiwanese counterpart. This disproportionate gap exists because Taiwan is queer. It's one o'clock. Sorry, that's my clock of my amic. This disproportionate gap exists because Taiwanese queer adolescents do not depend on big donors, but mainly built on grassroots micro donations, self-exploited workers with humble salaries and thousands of volunteers that work for queer activism for free. This budget model enables Taiwanese queer activism to focus on serving communities and escape from neoliberalist intervention. Thus, it is not true and not fair to impose Lisa Kudugan's equality ink framework to Taiwanese queer activism. They are closer to what I would call equality, indeed a model of grassroots groups who have collaborated with civil society and the government to challenge heteropatriarchy in both public and private domains. Abundant Taiwanese adolescents falsifies the universality of homonormativity and American queer theory and proves that the humanitarian queer activism can succeed without replicating the US model. The third colonial effect I found in my field is the radical queer temporality. The false universalization of homonormativity relies on a deeper structure of time that I call radical queer temporality. Radical queer temporality is a temporal hierarchy based on queer radicals' American time. A linear imaginary of modern sexuality and futuristic developmentalism while against equality, which is a book, the against equality authors felt tired of, quote, the old rhetoric from the gay marriage movement, unquote. May I ask, gay marriage is old to whom? While American queers claim that we are living in the era after marriage equality, which is a theory of another three books, who are we in these claims? Who has privilege to live in an after era? Radical queer temporality apparently blocked over 87% of the UN countries outside their own after marriage equality club and ignore global LGBTQ people's sufferings of discrimination and deprivation of sexual citizenship. To be fair, it is not normal for American queers to study American society. However, the banality of queer colonialism and queer coloniality operates when American scholars conduct and gatekeep knowledge production without awareness that their own privileged English writing and provincial states may projected imperial power beyond the borders and conscious control. The American centric radical queer temporality has reproduced what Fabian would call the denial of co-evailness. By denying feeding concurrently with Asian and Southern supporters, queer radicals in the US established a temporal boundary between their own grievable inequalities and the ungrievable traumas of those Asian and Southern queers who failed to live in their own after era. This temporal boundary is key that turns queer radicalism to be colonial. The fourth colonial effect I found is double standards. A new set of double standards of sexual modernity is now produced. In the 17th and 19th century, homoeroticism has been prevalent in East Asia. Creation colonizers came and condemned it as a moral corruption and under civilization. As many wonderful books in the pioneering scholarship in the field has been showing here. Now in the 21st century, when many European American countries have legalized this marriage, the Asians that had not followed their own lead are again being framed as conservative and under civilized. The double standards of sexual modernity operate as a colonial trap and an imperial trope to repeatedly backward Asian sexualities. So producing the four colonial effects, a queer theory like homonormativity colludes with American imperialism and creation supremacy to continuously dominate the Oriental Others. So I concluded the article with a call for the Global Queer Scholarship to move toward a decolonial queer theory. So how can we decolonize queer theory? Provisualizing and transnationalizing queer theorization with proper geographic and temporal self-reservations would be an important step. Queer theory should go beyond a quote unquote, a particular brand of U.S. area studies as Debbie Ann and Jessica Parwar suggested in your own recent article. Queer theory must come with Asianizing, Africanizing, Latinizing, and socializing the common sense of queer canons creating South-South dialogues to decentralize imperial aspec- aspec-tymology. Scholars should question Orientalist representations of Asian queers in media and even scholarly work who are producing colonial harm. Thinking concurrently and transnationally with global queer comrades will help reconceptualize the American temporality in relation to various queer time zones at the same time. In this fan, queer theory could be imagined as a grounded radical and decolonial project that is truly fluid, flexible, and intertwined with hundreds of queer timelines flowing in multiple directions toward multi-dimensional queer futures. So this is what I made in the conclusion of this article. And so you can see I use Taiwan as and what sociologist Michael Biroway would call extended case method to challenge, decolonize the epistemology and temporality in queer theory tradition. But in this talk, I want to, I added another new slide just for this talk because I want to put this research in conversation with many pioneering minds in the Taiwanese study area. So I will say, what I found and presented in this article also produced some implications to both the queer scholars and the Taiwanese study scholars. So I think, no, our research approach is to be both querying Taiwan studies and decolonizing queer world views. Let me give you three points. One is, no, when a doctor fell sad, no, the queer scholarships have been a long-term field within the Taiwanese studies. Yet I feel, no, in the social scientific studies, the queer subjectivities and queerness has been long-term marginalized, hidden, or even silenced. So the future of Taiwanese studies, no, can be more fruitful if we can work together to reveal more queer subjectivities in all major Taiwanese physical stages and the key moments, and in all kinds of subtentive sub-areas. So for example, queers are not just someone with no different sexual orientations or with different gender identities. Queer subjectivities and queer queerness has been existing even before the term queer has been incorporated into academic lexicon. So in Taiwan studies, no, we can use the queer theory to reimagine and to reveal the queerness in the stages of Qing dynasty, in Japanese colonialism, to the modern social movements, like Wild Liddy Movement, Wild Strawberry Movement, Sunflower Movement, and beyond. So I borrowed a cover from the book, Dr. Shelley Riggers, Why Taiwan Matter and argue that actually we can think more deeply about why Taiwan queerness matters. And I'm very appreciate about Dr. Shelley Riggers book because in this book published in 2003, actually Dr. Rigger ended her historical development and we use the milestone of the first ever gay pride, LGBT pride parade in Taiwan as one of the milestone but also the beginning of the Taiwan's democratization. So many people in Taiwan, including myself, argue, no, the Taiwan studies should not only focus on the democratization and consequences of that in Taiwan, but also the democratization of intimacy that is beyond the traditional political economic domains and to think about how the culture, intimate sexual gender relationships has been democratized in the Taiwanese areas and the studies. Second, I also want to talk to the queer gender and sexuality studies that we need to work together to decolonize the Euro-American-centric queer feelings and the worldviews. I really appreciate that I had the chance to talk to many British scholars in the UK today because as I just told you a few slides ago, Taiwan legalized LGBTQ inclusive education as early as 2004, which is part of the legalization of Gender Equity Education Act. But we can also found that around 2019 to 2021, there's an official in Scotland argue that Scotland would be the first country in the world to add LGBTQ history to all school curriculum. Well, if Taiwan is a person, Taiwan may say to Scotland, like my body, my people, welcome to join the club. Well, we are so glad that you can join the club of the national Tongzhi LGBTQ education, but you are not the first. So please look at and recognize the existence of Taiwan's contribution. So finally, I will say, no, Taiwan is queer and queer is Taiwan. No, for many Taiwan studies, has been talking about the marginalization, the ignorance about Taiwan in the world. No, actually queer folks around the country and around the world has been suffering from the same actualization, democratization, marginalization to name a few. So Taiwan studies, scholars and Taiwanese people can learn a lot from the queer theories and queer critics toward these multi-dimensional discriminations. Conversely, queer is Taiwan, where many queer folks has been struggling with identities, with invisibility and silence. No, Taiwan studies had a long genealogy and tradition to visualize how a nation has been suffering from the same cases and international and global stages. And queer folks can also learn from Taiwan in terms of the importance of identity, not only the anti-identarianism, but how important the identity, the social solidarity and the different thinking about the left, right political spectrum could be useful to re-transform the queer thinking, feeling and the world view. All right, so those are the three bullets that I want to share with my dear colleagues in Europe. And finally, I want to conclude by recycling and residing this important slogan. Revolution has yet to succeed. Struggles remain for Tongzhi comrades in solidarity. Thank you so much for the listening and I welcome all kinds of questions, suggestions because that will be part of my future book that I'm currently writing so diligently. So I really love to learn from many of your questions, suggestions and comments. Thank you so much. Fantastic. That was a fascinating talk which covered so many different angles. I mean, I was really excited to hear you're working on the book project because one of the things that struck me from your article was how much work was involved in terms of the field work, the number of interviews and the length of your interviews. So one of my first questions that I was thinking about was how did you actually manage to do that kind of integration between a very kind of theoretical approach but also such rich kind of field work data? So that was the kind of the first thing I was thinking about. And, okay, let me just kind of leave myself to maybe one more question. That was about, I thought it was really interesting when you talked about clearing Taiwan studies towards the end of your presentation. I mean, I would agree with you that the topic, I think was quite marginal in Taiwan studies, let's say 10 years ago. The word, you really had to search. But my sense is that the topic has become a lot more covered in, a lot more diversely in the last decade or so. But maybe one of the things that's missing is something that kind of brings the whole field together. A kind of, I mean, in a way that was the kind of thing that I was trying to do with the contemporary Taiwan Indigenous book to kind of look at that topic from different disciplinary angles. Something that could be used almost like as a textbook. So I would be curious about your thoughts on maybe how that could be done. In other words, because you clearly still feel that there's a little bit of marginalization in the Taiwan studies field. So did you have a kind of a solution, something to kind of broaden the kind of appeal? So just two, that's my two starting questions and I'll probably come back with more later. All right, thank you Dr. Phil for the two insightful questions. Each of them may desire another article to finish answering them in full. But let me try to finish that in two seconds, I mean, two minutes. One is how to merge the theory and methods. I need to admit that this article was not coming from a small scale thinking and like a small grand. Actually, the idea has been lingering in my mind for more than a decade. Let me answer your question, not from a trickle down knowledge production perspective, but from a bottom up perspective by sharing you a small story if I may. In the 20th anniversary conference of one of the largest Taiwan Queer Gender Sexuality Studies Center in the National Central University, Zhong Ang Daxue, held by Josephine Hall and many of her wonderful colleagues, this scene took place like this. Dr. Hens Huang, who used the Queer Theory and the Critical Sexuality Studies to study the HIV AIDS policies has been challenged many HIV AIDS adolescents on the ground as one of the bodies of the extension of governmentality, the expansion of Taiwanese government to use those NGOs to control Taiwanese people's body by taking the blood test, by monitoring people's health, et cetera. That's a very clear example about using the Foucaultian Critics Analysis and to impose that upon the Taiwanese NGOs' activities. After that presentation, there are two NGO HIV AIDS activists spoke up and to say, actually, our thinking and our decision-making was not as straightforward, as not as simplistic as your research represented. We take some governmental money strategically and use that in a very queer and sexualized way. If folks are interested in this domain, no, you can Google Song, Why, Why, like a song, the singer song, and Why, Why is the letter and in the Taiwanese language, it's so strong, Why, Why, which means sexual pleasure. So that's the way that use the governmental money in a very queer, radical, and funny way as well. And they also said that we don't take some money that only allow government to use our bodies to monitor Taiwanese people at all. And the scholar, Dr. Huang, said back to the criticisms that he received from the audience, saying, oh, you should write it down. Otherwise, I have no story to study. That was only one of the few, one of the many examples that has been observing in the LGBTQ activism in terms of the tensions between queer scholarship and the queer activism. And I was part of the queer activism as well, because no, I organized many press conferences, no, and I also, my body was also in the first ever legislation against public hearing held by Xiaomei Qin. In back in 2006, no, that's the first ever Taiwan's Congress had a public hearing about census marriage in 2006. So I can see both world. Then, by writing this article, I need to go back to read all the genealogy of queer criticism about census marriage and to understand how can I put my grown up, imperial data collected from Taiwan in the conversation with the American queer genealogy. Yeah, both work. So, no, the constant travel between your field, to put your own hands dirty and your own studio to put your mind fussy. So I hope that answered your first question. The second question is about, how to queer Taiwan studies. Well, this is a kind invitation. Maybe some like strong minds in the queer studies should start to read some cutting edge queer theories and studies as the first step. Then your mind will be queered or unqueered or dequeered or semi-queered to some extent way. So, and I try to use my body, my back as the bridge, to bridge the two fields, but I welcome more people to join the bridge camp. Okay, let's open up now then to audience members. So the floor is yours. Please, if you'd like to raise a question, just raise your hand. And then you should be able to open your mics. Okay, yeah, Cheng Yu, would you like to go first? Yes, okay, hear me. Yeah, thank you so much, Professor Gao. It's such an exciting and fascinating talk. And I was just, yeah, I'm so excited in talking like listening to your research. So my question is more or less on the methodological level. So as you said, that you spent like 20 months on site, but also like online ethnographic research. So my question, my first question is like, how do you regard this online or cyber space kind of ethnographic site? And how would you, like in your research, like how you like connect or, you know, enter like wandering in between onsite ethnographic site and the digital site. Do you think that like, and also like what kind of ethnographic data you are focusing on when you are like researching it? Is it the narrative you are focusing on or their practices? Is that like the movement, the strategies or everyday resistance you are focusing on? Like what kind of data you are focusing on? Yeah, maybe just one question first, thank you. All right, yeah, one by one, that's yeah, to the role. So to answer your question about how to shift between online ethnography and onsite ethnography, that's a wonderful question. And I hope in my appendix of my book can elaborate that point further because, you know, the methodology issue is quite complex in my own field, right? I have, I told you that I have so many different heads and also using multi-site as well. You know, in my article, I really had a very limited space to explain my methodology because, you know, the first draft of this article was like 15,000 words and sexualities also give you 7,000 words to elaborate. So yeah, well, I can report from a more like empirical way. I, my first longer stage about the field work, took place between 2015 and 2016, which is the second peak of the Taiwan's cultural war, which means, you know, the debate between poor and anti LGBTQ human rights, right? If people remember, you know, 2015 is the moment when Taiwan witnessed the first ever creation-based party, Xinxi, Ximang, Lianmeng, the faith and hope league. And some people in my field marked it as like a no-love league. So that's the first peak. I spent almost a year in my field, you know, to study the publications of the Christian conservative journals and magazines. And I accumulated questions, you know, toward the later stage of my ethnography to really call out to those people to see if they want to be interviewed by me. And that was the first part. But you know, our study is always following the evolution of Taiwanese case, right? So around 2017, you know, the Supreme Court announced the ruling in favor of since couples, right? So-called Shi Ziqi Si Ba, the Supreme Court interpretation number 748. Followed by another huge backlash of the conservative pushback by using the newly formed referendum law, right? And we witnessed the devastating pushback and, you know, voting against census marriage, you know, in late 2018. Then in the 2019, we had a successful legalization of census marriage by the cooperation between the legislation Yuan and the administrative Yuan, executive Yuan. So, you know, my own field need to follow all kind of pics to be able to document all kind of data, if I may. So during the summers and the winters, if I had a chance, you know, I will travel back to Taiwan and to accumulate more, the follow-up interviews. But when my body is limited to serve as the TA shift, you know, when I was, you know, still a bloggers, PhD sociology students know I need to TA or to write up my dissertation or find a job. Or now I'm teaching as assistant professor at VCU in Richmond, Virginia. So I will use the online ethnography to collect more data. And you don't know what? And sometimes, you know, in the traditional minds, you know, some people may look down the online ethnography, but I found sometimes it's not true to my own research in the way that no more people pretend or they know conservatism is very performative. So they try to occupy the rhetoric and discourses domains online, you know, Huayu Quan, the hegemony of discourse. So they are very talkative and they want to be heard. And so sometimes the own public discourses are very rich to some extent. But that is not to say that online ethnography by study the discourses can be substitute to the online ethnography, no. So sometimes the interviews are performative as well. They try to play that kind of nice guy figures, no, to be as liberal as open minded as decent as well. But sometimes ethnography, no, if they did not know, there's a critical mind existing in the field, no, for example, in the church, in the own public rallies, they imagine they are talking to their people. And so their own language will be very straightforward, more spiritual and religious, and more, well, also carrying or dictatorship in the spiritual and political way as well. So that's why, no, I would say I would self-friend myself as the mixed research methods scholar. So no methodology can replace each other. So we need to put those data together. But you are right. No, when the data are overwhelming, the writing part is also not that easy. No, it is not like you run a regression model report, you report how many starts and significance, right? And you test the models, that will, statistical work is equally important, but no, the muddy and the maxi collective data has its own challenge to figure out the social patterns and to find a story to tell. Did I answer your question? Yeah, like I have a follow-up if I may, because I was also using this quite hybrid, like digital ethnographic method, both in my BA dissertation and currently in my MA dissertation. So sometimes I just feel like for a ethnographer that when you are doing digital ethnographic interview, it is very kind of hard for me to like really situate or doing this quite immersive, like observation on my intellectuals, especially when I trying to write something, like some tales upon these interviewees. I found I'm quite an armchair anthropologist sometimes. You know, I'm not sure if you are facing the same like problem when you are writing your tales or your ethnographies. Do you have any like solutions on that or yeah? Oh my dear, you will be a wonderful ethnographer and you have been a wonderful ethnographer just by saying so. And I can tell you that is lingering and chronicle anxiety that you always would have as a wonderful outstanding ethnographer because no in the field, no, well, in your studio or your own qubit in your own office, you will feel anxious just not putting your body in the field that you imagine you can observe the firsthand data, which is partially true. So yeah, with that said, if you immerse yourself too long in the field, no, sometimes no, it's you'll be amazed by the complexity and the fruosity of the ethnographic data. Yet that is also important. No, as a researcher, you are not a journalist, you are not only a storyteller, you are not only one of the people that you study, right? You need to put into a conversation between the empirical data and the theories and no, the genealogy of the scholarship that you try to contribute to. So I also found myself, no, when I immerse myself too long in the field, I lost track of reading the most cutting-edge books and journal articles. And so I need to like extract myself from the deep mud in the fieldwork and put myself into my studio with hundreds of books to study another field of knowledge. And I think that's one of our challenges, but also the pleasure as well, by shifting between the studio and the field. I just had a follow-up question to tell you about, my sense is that often sociologists to work on, sociologists in Taiwan find it hard to work on conservative groups. In other words, my sense is that often they find it hard to gain trust of interviewees. I was wondering, was that a problem for you as someone who's kind of openly LGBT to gain the trust of someone who's project is basically against you? That's a very reasonable and a wonderful question, Dr. Fell, and you are totally right. I need to explain that, knowing the appendix of my book and I had. Let me share with you a bit. Well, first of all, I want to start with a question to all the brilliant minds here. Do we have enough studies about Asian conservatism? Right, that fundamental question is a problem per se. Now, I have one small cube on my bookshelf that documents, for example, Japanese colonialism or Chinese colonialism, sorry, Japanese and Chinese conservatism. Well, but the articles are very few. I think it's very problematic in many ways. One is, no, Asianists tend to be conservatized in the Western mind, right? So Asian tradition, Confucianism, blah, blah, blah. And two, the European or American minds tend to impose their own left and right political spectrum to consider East Asia. For example, when Taiwanese nationalism, fight for independence, no fight for the self-government, governance and sovereignty, was considered conservative in American left-wing minds because they think nationalism is always bad, and they think that nationalism from the far right or Trumpist perspective, they cannot imagine why Taiwan as a country want to establish itself based on Taiwanese nationalism. So that's why I conclude with the speech only with one sentence saying that many Taiwanese scholarships can contribute to reshaping the American thinking of left-right political spectrum. No, it's really just being their own minds and to put their own worldview upside down. And they cannot imagine why communism or socialism could be conservative. Yeah, I will just put the words there. We can have more, another hour discussion about this part. And to answer your question about mythology, no, you are right that sometimes, because of my openness of my queerness and the creative and participation, I was rejected by some conservative groups. One funny story I tend to share is like, I call to a conservative church-based group who tend to train thousands of parents, including conservative moms, to disguise themselves as teachers, rainbow moms, and they want to tell the story to the children in the morning time. But under the table, actually, they are evangelizing those kids in the elementary or junior high schools and to recruit them into the church. Well, there's a larger genealogy about the neoliberalization of the Christianity around the world. No, well, I saved thousands of words about that. But when I was rejected, also some doors were open just because of my openness. So for example, this underground creation focus group, closed-door focus group, the leader of that group invited me actively to join the creation-only group because he tried to establish a platform for Christians in different political stance to be able to talk to each other in a relatively safer sphere. And he found that the group was too moderate. People tend to be polite and to hide their own real thinking, so they need a stimulus like me to stimulate their own conversation. And as I said, some conservatives are not that protective of themselves. They are very vocal and they are, I don't want to say they are attention seeker, but they need attention. So they are very vocal in the way to spread their own words. So that's how I can study part of them. But I also witness the study and data collection is not perfect. Then as feminist positionality and epistemology taught us, no research is 100% objective and neutral. And so that's why I have one slide to tell you my positionality and allow my audience and readerships to evaluate the contribution and the biases of my knowledge production. Fantastic, okay. So would anyone else like to kind of chip in with questions or comments? We still have a good 20 minutes or so. If you're, okay, yeah, Leon, go ahead. Hi, yeah. Can you hear me okay? I thought it was super fascinating talk. So thank you for that. And yeah, I learned a lot and that's a lot of food for thought that I would have to digest. I think it was quite a dance in a way. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about sort of comparison to the PRC because I would imagine that that's quite a common comparison in the sort of conventionally discourse sort of fitting Taiwan and its progress on the linear path towards sort of queer modernization with China and its perceived backwardness in the path and also other authoritarian states like Russia and so on. Well, I guess queer people and bodies and subjectivities have become sort of part of that struggle in a sense between democracy and authoritarianism often very bad consequences for these communities. And I was hoping that it's possible to sort of complicate that a little bit. But yeah, could be really interested in hearing your thoughts. I've not really thought about it in that to be honest but it's a great to hear what you think. Thank you. Thank you, Leon, for the thought-provoking question. I think someone should write a paper about that and let me give you only two layers of thoughts by addressing both the similarity and the differences. The similarity part is no, well, some people can study the shared identity like Tongzhi across the street. Recently, one of the pioneering sexuality scholars in my field, Travis Kong, who is also one of the co-editor in the journal Sexualities, published two articles. One is the long ethnographic encyclopedia entry and the other is the journal article, I believe in Journal of Homosexuality, talking about the transnational trajectory of the idea Tongzhi. And we know Tongzhi directs from the communist origin in the comrades, right? And the Hong Kong film festival makers like Lin Yihua or Mike, has been sexualized and queered the term Tongzhi to co-name the gays and lesbian and more sexual and gender minorities in the group. So that is a sexualization of a traditional orthodoxy political term. But the term did not win enough readership and popularity until the term traveled from Hong Kong in late 1980s to early 90s in Taiwan in the 1992 Ging Ma, the Golden Host Award in which they have a Tongzhi in Zhang, a Tongzhi film festival. So the Tongzhi as a term, as an umbrella term and collective identity to call LGBTQ, QIAA, and plus sexual identities has been winning the largest population first in Taiwan in terms of the Taiwanese Tongzhi literature, right? Like Ji Dawei's Tongzhi Taiwan, Tongzhi Wenxue Shi, Taiwan's family, the history of Tongzhi literature, the invention, innovation of in Taiwan. In media, in pop culture, in queer activism as well. In the recent queer Asia studies, scholars argue Tongzhi as the term may be the only and the most powerful alternative identity that could challenge the American centric queer. And the term has been traveled back from Taiwan and Hong Kong to the mainline, right? So you can see like a Beijing Tongzhi Zhongxing, like a Beijing's LGBTQ center, which received the funds from the Western in terms of HIV AIDS prevention programs and along with other film festivals as well. So that's the similarity part. So, and in Charles Kong's article, they discuss the similarity in terms of the confucianism, the traditional traditions, Chinese history, et cetera. But we also witness the divergence of the LGBT development across the street in Taiwan and China. Now, when Taiwan stepped on the path to marriage equality and LGBTQ citizenship in general, now at the beginning of last decade, around 2012, the PRC government, actually the central government, pretended to be open-minded and liberal. A prominent case would be Li Keqiang, you know, the secondary powerful figure had a closed door meeting with the Chinese LGBTQ activists to show that kind of openness. But whenever presidency, you know, tried to expand his own power and to go toward the end of authoritarianism and, you know, the expansion of digital surveillance and the dictatorship. The past was totally, you know, 150, 180 degree reversed. So, you know, you may have the chance to hear some examples like the term, many sexual minority term like even Tongxin Lian, the term was banned in many digital platforms in China, like in Weibo or in WeChat. Usually the universities and colleges in China enjoyed a larger space for the freedom of speech and assembly. That was not the case anymore in recent two years. So, more than two dozens of the LGBTQ student groups and their own like a public accounts Weixin Gong Zhonghao were also recently banned by China. I believe recently there's another news total toward the negative end as well. So, I think one, there are many factors may explain why the two countries, you know, has been going on in the divergent way. And I believe one of the keys would be nationalism. No, to me, it is not an incident. It is not surprising to see the year 2019 we witness the legalization of this marriage in Taiwan along with the rise of anti-China solidarity the anxiety about Hong Kong's protest and so-called mango gun, the national sensibility of losing Taiwan as a country. So, no, it is not surprising to see not many politicians using the case Taiwan's legalization marriage as the way to rebuild Taiwan as the liberal beacon for Asians and for Asian gaze because after more than three decades of Taiwan was framed as the democratic beacon as the window as the window model for the Western democracies. No, marriage equality becomes a new brand to follow that trend while the Chinese nationalism was at stake. So to ban and to suppress many LGBTQ rights along with many other political, sexual, colonial, decolonial incidents becomes one of the way to reconcelerate its own legitimacy of control and governance. So that's just my two stance and I assess that someone need to write later articles about this very complex question. I hope that answer your question. Great, thanks Leon for that question and be you. Hello, thank you very much. It's really a fascinating talk, I really learn a lot. I have to say also giving us some sort of inspiration I would say to rethink how we approach theories, right? As well as how we can subvert some of this kind of Eurocentric way of thinking. So thank you very much, I really enjoy it and it's really packed with stuff, really fantastic. So I have two questions because I have to think about what my questions are. That's why I waited so long to organize my mind. So I got first question. Have you had, I would say, have you had any trouble or being criticized to some degree by your own use of queer theories? Okay, because that's using Western theories to challenge. Another, the second question following that is that what is your strategy to decolonize Western theories and make it your own? So actually I think you're quite successful in terms of doing your own way, but would you like to just share it with us? Thank you. Thank you Dr. Zhang for two wonderful questions. First, no, let me, well, actually I did not receive any troubles or criticisms by using queer theory in this way. Maybe I think it is because I enjoy a kind of climate when many of my American queer theorists and study scholars shared a climate of that kind of political correctness. The Southern voices, the decolonial attempts tend to be more tolerated within this field in which they self perform or self portrayed as progressive, far left wing, progressive in many different ways. I was a bit shocked by your use of a global South. I thought, is it applicable to Taiwan? So sorry, carry on. No, that's a wonderful question, right? So actually, in another small talk that I gave at the Taiwanese Ministry of Science and Technology, I say, so maybe they can answer your second question. I say Taiwan is a wonderful case, not because I'm Taiwanese, I was born in Taiwan, so I say so. If you think from the social scientific ways, many basic and fundamental frameworks that we have been using to think about the world in our societies are not only American-centric, but also they do not fit in Taiwan's case, or Taiwan's case did not fit in. Let me give you some quick examples. No, one is, no, the left and right political spectrum, right? As I said to Dr. Phil, nationalism is not conservative in Taiwan's case and socialism is not that idealistic or utopian at all. Taiwan had a very realistic understanding about those terms. So that one, that can challenge their own basic left and right consideration. And two, as Dr. Chang Yuxie said, where is Taiwan in the global north and south map? And my interview is also had the same question. Like, whenever they try to represent the global south to like the UN woman or UN-centric conferences, they were treated as southern because other deeper southern LGBTQ activists did not enjoy the privilege that they can, one, be coming up because they will be receiving the strides of homicide, no, strident or even a spilt from their own country. So Taiwan was one of the, at least Taiwan is not white, not northern, at one hand. And is Taiwan northern? Economically speaking, Taiwan is strife, but Taiwan is not, no, West Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, et cetera. So I encourage my LGBTQ activists friends, we do not need to squeeze Taiwan into the list of limitations of the global south slash north diagram. Taiwan is in the middle of nowhere. And no, we can use the Taiwanese case to learn and to put that into the conversation with another group of studies, which is transnational feminism and so-called the borderline studies. I'm not sure if people in UK read this group. No, because there's a huge borderline between the US and Mexico, right? So the borderline studies, like Maria Lugunas, among with many others, now visualize and theorize the borderline studies. And one of the followers in the Taiwanese queer studies is Fountain Chen, no, Zheng Fountain, who is an associate professor of, I forgot, is a Taiwanese culture or the performance arts being the national Taiwanese city, now created a new term called Taiwanese, oh, sorry, Queer Island Disidentification to reimagine how Taiwan provides the rethinking about identity by putting itself between the margins of both Chinese modernity and American modernity. So that's another way that Taiwanese scholars can learn from the queer theories. We do not, well, queer scholars do not love to be put at the center. They enjoy their own positionality at the margins and use the margin of the margin positionality to critique the complexity, the inconsistency, and heterogeneity and self-conflicts for those who were center at the center. So yeah, so it's the way that Taiwan can challenge so many different spectrums, north and south, left and right, progressive and conservative, et cetera. So that's why I feel Taiwanese study is exciting. It is not just a way to justify that Taiwan is important. People look at this, no, hey, don't ignore us. It is also, no, Taiwan, again, using the Michael Biroway term, Taiwan is an extended case method that can be used to bridge the macro level structural analysis and the macro level process discussions and also try to challenge the blind spot of many basic theories and use Taiwan as the extended case method to transform the theories for the global audience. Thank you. Okay, so we're kind of running out of time, but I think we might have time for one more question. We would like to give us a final question for today's session. How about Professor, I think it's, sorry. Were you kind of thinking about Professor Santilan? Yeah. Hi. Hi, everyone. Hello. I do have a question. So in your talk, oh, first of all, it's really nice to see you again. I think we met a few years ago. So I really enjoyed this talk and there's one detail in your talk that really intrigued me. You mentioned that most of the activists who led the marriage equality movement in Taiwan were women. Could you comment on that? Why do you think that was the case? Hello, Dr. Santilan. I'm so glad to see you here. And your pioneering book is one of my expiration sources. So this is really my great honor to see you here. Thank you. In terms of women's participation, that's a good question. And let me give you a funny way to answer it before I give you the theoretical thought. The funny way is, if you like me interviewed my LGBTQ activists to interview East, like the prominent leader, Jennifer Lu, Lvxinjie, Xinjie's answer will be very short and quick because lesbians love to marry. And you know what? Based on the ethnography, I found actually the gay man's part had more skepticism about sexist marriage, right? That totally challenged the American queer civilization which argues that marriage is always the patriarchal heteronormative institutes, right? And the ownership of the marriage is the way to replicate the patriarchal heteronormative inequality and that may replicate the male domination of women's body, which is totally not the case in Taiwan. The numbers that show you women are the major leaders and the major beneficiaries of the marriage equality in Taiwan. Then, so really, for example, if you calculate the two major leading organizations for marriage equality in Taiwan, including Huayin Pingquan Da Pingkai, Marriage Equality Platform, now rebranded as Huayin Pingquan Da Pingkai, Rainbow Equality Platform, and the other, Ban Rui-mong, the Alliance for the Partnership Rights. I cannot memorize all this thing, I always need to look into it. But you know the case. But two major leaders in those two major organizations, including Victoria Xu, Xu Shouwen and Lv Xinjie, they both are cisgender women, right? And many of the own workers are women in different ways, including cisgender women, lesbians, special women, trans women as well. And one of the factors why gay men were not that passionate about since marriage is, one is don't forget no Taiwan's temporality also flipped the American-centric thinking about history. Taiwan's criminalization of marriage adultery was not decriminalized until since its marriage, one year later. And no, when many Western countries has been decriminalized the adultery many years ago before the marriage equality, Taiwan was not the case. So many gay men had a more actuarial relationship, open relationship or polyamorous interactions. They don't want to put their own bodies, self and intimacy into the present selves of marriage or the metaphor. Then, so they have a less passion and more skepticism about marriage as the institution. That's one, but with that said, no, many gay men also enjoy more power and the freedom in terms of the own mobility and the financial resources. So they also become one of the major supporters to the marriage equality campaigns, including donating the money or put their own bodies at the MRT stations, the Jie Yunzhan, as the Huayin Pingquan Xiao Mi Feng, the marriage equality campaign, bubble bees to distribute the flyers, to convince people to vote against the conservative referendum, et cetera. So I would say the gender really had a heterogeneous impact in the marriage equality campaign in different ways. No, but in this article, I only highlight the woman's part who challenged American civilization. But I agree that we need a deeper analysis about the gender dynamics and the gender equality that has been both challenging, but also replicated in the Taiwanese marriage equality campaign. That deserves another chapter in my book to describe that, but I will save the words here. Wonderful, thank you. Fantastic. Thanks a lot and thanks, Professor Sun, for that question as well. It's always good to see you. So because of time, we're going to have to greet things to a clone. But could I ask people to turn on your mics and give Professor Gao a very big, so-asked round of applause? Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation. And thanks to all of you for your fantastic questions as well. I should say that we're going to be doing more at the centre next week. Next week, we actually have four Taiwan Studies events. On Tuesday, Beatrice Zani will be doing her book launch. On Wednesday, that will be an online talk. Then on Wednesday, we have two in-person events. We have Felix Brenda speaking about transitional justice. We have a history talk by Cheboshi from Cambridge. And then the fourth event will be Joseph Wong speaking on Friday about his new book with Dan Slater, which looks at development and democratisation in East Asia. So we have a packed set of events next week. Biu, you want to say something? I would just want to remind Haoyu, maybe we can take a group photo. So if our audience can switch on your camera, that would be great. I love that. After Zhang, you can reach my mind. Thank you. All right. Three, two, one. We do have a blank. Zhao, S-Y Zhao. Can you switch on your camera or turn it off? At the moment, it's blank. Oh, OK. OK, thank you. OK, it's Hong Kong or Taiwan? Three, two, one. Thank you. Thank you. Fantastic. OK, have a great day, everyone, and see many of you next week at our four events. Thank you so much. Have a good day. Thanks. I look forward to the book. Trying. Yeah, we'll have another launch for your book. Thank you so much.