Mourning Love: Queer Performativity and Transformation in Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies and Splendid Float

This paper looks at the role of gay and lesbian performativity, mourning and individual and communal) transformation in Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies (2007) and Splendid Float (2004). Chou shows us the close relation between loss of the love object, the ambivalence or destabilization of self-identity and the need for mourning that marks the gay and lesbian collective imagination. On the line between male/female, straight/gay, life/death and mourning/melancholia, the lesbian Po (Femme) in “Spider Lilies” and gay drag queen in “Splendid Float” perform a hyperbolically feminine role, thereby confusing heterosexual desire and parodying the binary logic of heterosexual representation. Also, through the force of their queer performativity, they transform their own shame and grief. Little Green as Po transforms her shame and is reconciled with the inner child of her past, thus re-affirming her lesbian desire and identity. Ai-wei/Rose and his drag queen friends open up a space of hybridization: their nightly show absorbs the force of communal, native Taiwanese village culture, and the patriarchal Taoist funeral for Rose’s lost love Sunny is infiltrated with queer desire, proliferating the possible forms of gay performativity and representation.