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.