英文摘要 |
Focusing on the main figures of Yi Muk and T Mama in recent queer documentaries: Troublers (2015) and Small Talk (2016) produced by South Korean and Taiwanese independent directors, this paper speaks to recent work in queer theory and historiography on the potential for ''queer modes of life''. Yi Muk and T Mama were born and lived in South Korea and Taiwan during the 1945-1970s, when the two societies were undergoing drastic political and economic transformations: from Japanese colonialism, the Cold War system, to the authoritarian regimes, as well as the peak period of the economic development and industrialization. Against this backdrop, the two protagonists demonstrate a critical lived experience of precariousness in terms of gender/sexuality and labor work. I argue the ''precarious memory'' embodied in the documentaries present a useful analytical framework for examining the dominant mode of history writing. To facilitate this argument, I will trace the shifting paradigms of sexual norms from the legacy of colonialism, the cold war ideology, to the precarious present when the knowledge production of sexuality is passed on to subsequent generations. To be more specific, I will discuss the issues of gender norms through the reading of the liminal subjects of pajissi and chhēng-khò-ê (both means Mrs. Pants in Korean and Taiwanese language), the precarious lives of these non-normative subjects under cold war system, and how the directors (as subsequent generations of Yi Muk and T Mama) integrate this socio-history into the present and future, to approach a reparative reading of queer history. |