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Terri He

Abstract

In this paper I direct the focus to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) online communities in Taiwan. On the one hand, I argue that such online communities in Taiwan are worthwhile researching and deserve special academic attention because they touch upon Taiwan’s perpetual difference in the world as a de-facto, thereby questioning how a transnational perspective permanently influences or even changes the way national identity is or is not formulated. On the other, against the backdrop of globalisation, I highlight the fact of under-theorisation of issues and politics of sexuality dissidence in a non-western, non-dominant location and culture such as Taiwan. As I start to bridge the current gap of such insufficiencies in unevenly distributed research interests in some parts of the world rather than others, I also make a point of fighting against surveillance and control in cyberspace. Ultimately, such studies on Taiwanese LGBT online communities are not possible without continuous attempts and efforts in trying to keep freedom of expression and anonymity to certain extent.

Author Biography

Terri He is currently a third-year PhD student in Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, United Kingdom. Terri has an MA in Science, Technology and Society from Linköping Universitet, Sweden, and an MA in Foreign Languages and Literature from National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization, postcolonial studies and queer theory. Her publications are “Why (Not) Queer? Ambivalence about ‘Politics’ and Queer Identification in an Online Community in Taiwan” in Queer Popular Culture with Palgrave-Macmillan (2007), “The Cyborg, Mutant and Hybridity: Towards a Technological Mode of ‘Queer Race’” in Feminist Review (forthcoming) and ‘Hybridity Online: the Cybercommunity of Spiteful Tots’ Mark McLelland and Gerard Goggin, ed. Internationalising Internet Studies (provisional title). Routledge (forthcoming).

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