Queer Indigeneity and Racial Capitalism in the Recent History of Taiwan

This paper inserts the study of settler colonialism in Taiwan into a global dialogue about queer indigeneity. It makes two related observations to help chart a new field of inquiry into queer indigenous Taiwan. First, indigenous epistemic formations—such as the Paiwanese notion of a-dju (or “cross-gender sisters”)—operate in coeval terms as the conceptual force of Two-Spirit in Native America. On the one hand, these terms trouble Han or White settler scholarly assumptions about gender and sexual categories, such as berdache, tongxinglian, gay/lesbian, and transgender, reflecting a growing trend of queer indigenous critique. On the other, they make possible new conditions of coalitional politics: intersecting forms of oppression animate queer indigenous subjects to upend diverging roots of subjugation and structures of social inequality (e.g., to resist settler sexual normativity through the lens of indigeneity or to challenge Han-centrism from the viewpoint of queerness).

Second, relatedly and specifically, such intersectional experience highlights the vector of race in class-based conceptualizations of citizenship. The biography of Matalaq Danubak will be used as a case study to explore the convergence of queer Austronesian subjectivity with the evolution of gender ideology in Han settler society. The history of transtopian activism surrounding the Yeh Yung-chih incident (and the subsequent legislation of the 2004 Gender Equity Education Act) had a significant impact on Matalaq Danubak’s tongzhi identity. The trajectory of a-dju from an anthropological term to a politicized concept converged with the life experience of such exemplary activists as Danubak in the 21^st century. By calling attention to indigenous dispossession, this paper argues that a sorely needed angle in the history of racial capitalism comes from the Asia Pacific.