CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Dissection, Animality, Anachronism and
Murder: Dangerous Bodies in Discourses of Modernity
Organiser: Amie Parry
Lin, Spencer Yuh-jyh (National Central
University, Taiwan) SPACING THE BODIES
Offering a comparative reading of the dissection scene that forms the first page
of Johannes de Ketham's Fasciculo de Medicina (1493) and the frontispiece to
Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), the paper situates late
medieval and early modern anatomy in the cultural construction of distance and
space. Space and distance must be organized and managed because the co-presence
of the dead and the living is charged with tension, because proximity is
dangerous to difference and distinction, because co-presence and proximity
invite contact, exchange, or mutual "exposure." Vesalius's new
practice of dissection entails proximity to the "abnormative" body, so
this new art has to find strategies to extricate the anatomist from the body.
The dead body, in effect, has to be "transfigured" into something
almost opposite to its bodiliness in a process that involves the materialization
of the authoritative text and the resurrection or monumentalization of the body.
Ding, Naifei (National Central
University, Taiwan) BIRD-ANIMALS, ANDROIDS AND CROCODILES: YINFU FOGURATIONS,
QUEER MUTATIONS
In present-day Taiwan, sex workers and queer fictional protagonists have
resorted to the use of animal imagery, perhaps influenced by the cultural memory
of how instrumental sex has been historically and culturally tainted. This
strategy can be seen as similar to the reclaiming and recoding of
"queer" in the US, where what had before signaled social and sexual
stigma, is now insistently made to work against the "humane" order
that insists on placing such sex and such persons in an inferior, tolerated but
encompassed position. For the Taipei licensed sex worker movement in the late
nineties, one event and coinage is of sex workers as "flies" that
harass the mayor who had decided peremptorily that licensed sex work was to be
abolished. In queer fiction, various transmutations of persons have helped to
signal the continuity of non-personhood and hardy survival tactics of lesbian,
gay and queer lives.
Parry, Amie (National Central
University, Taiwan) NARCISSISTS, QUEER VAMPIRES, SHUAI T'S: THE CULTURAL
POLITICS OF CREATIVE TAXONOMIES
Empowering political strategies for sexual minorities in Taiwan, as in many
other places, are necessarily caught up with discourses of modernity. Especially
influential and effective stands of these discourses, for example, aim at the
legitimization of concepts such as "the global gay identity." This
paper attends to the ways in which certain queer identifications and embodiments
may be anachronized by these discourses, and how this is challenged in cultural
texts that take, and name, as their queer subjects vampires, narcissists, T's
(roughly translatable as butches) etc., and collectively produce open-ended
taxonomies. Texts include songs by lesbian bands BBM and T-time and Hong Lin's
Cosmic Odyssy-Queer Tales in a Sterile Universe.
Liu, Jenpeng (National Tsing Hua
University, Taiwan) SEX AND MURDER IN A TAIWANESE CLASSROOM: THE POLITICS OF
eXistenZ
How can sex and murder be discussed in the classroom? A case in point: going
over Cronenberg's eXistenZ with graduate students. This paper explores how the
radical virtuality of, say, the new game system and neo-sex can be co-opted by
old ethical frameworks that actually reaffirm a clear boundary between
"reality" and "game" in questions such as, "What can we
do when to kill someone is just a game?" This mode of questioning typifies
Taiwan's educational system's appropriation of postmodern culture. eXistenZ is
used here as an example of how the ethics of sci-fi travels and takes on
specific, unanticipated discursive functions in the context of Taiwan.
Barton, David (National Central
University, Taiwan) HOW TO SLAUGHTER TIME SO THAT IT FLIES BLUDGEONED
The purpose of this paper is to explore a differential sense of time in Taiwan's
experience of globalization. As China undergoes transnational capitalization, a
monolithic operation with its own perimeters of time/space, a strange interlude
allows for what I would call the fetishization of time, 7/Eleven time.
Pornography and advertising specifically are to be examined as they relate to
Taiwan's position as a stateless state caught outside the vying national-state
histories but fully exposed to the transnational commodification of time. Using
the artwork of Yang Mao-lin, I will try to point out Taiwan's in-between
mediation of 7/Eleven time as it absorbs the cultures of Japan and the United
States. How can an artwork express the sense of a ruptured time frame? When the
subject is something like dissected, dismembered dolls.
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