| 摘要: | Transgender studies, a relatively new area of critical inquiry, offers useful insights to scholars who specialize in ecocriticism. I make the case for that claim here by way of an ecofeminist reading of several poems in 之間:陳育虹詩選
(In-between: New and Selected Poems) (2011), by Taiwanese poet Yu-hong
Chen (陳育虹). In addition, I comment on the figure of the goddess Guanyin in the Chinese literary classic 西 遊 記 (Journey to the West) (1592) by Cheng-en Wu (吳承恩). The given figures speak to and for a range of “in-between” con ditions, identities, histories, and perspectives that are missing from or erased in
mainstream, dominant, and official narratives of Taiwanese and Chinese culture and society. In identifying those conditions, identities, histories, and viewpoints, I draw upon studies by transgender studies’ scholars and ecofeminist scholars, since they, more than other critical studies, highlight concerns being voiced in the East about the need for more committed appreciation of moral and affective ties that challenge mainstream reductive dualisms—namely, culture/nature, male/female, and human/animal.
In 現代臺灣文學史,下册 (A History of Modern Taiwanese Literature) (2011), Fang-ming Chen (陳芳明), one of Taiwan’s most well-known and highly respected literary critics, summarizes the generation of “pioneer” writers
to which Yu-hong Chen belongs. They forged modern Taiwanese poetry in the 1980s, when martial law ended and the government opened its doors to so-called free market liberal economic policies and practices. One of the more felicitous outcomes of those seismic political and economic shifts was the “re revolutionizing” of Taiwanese society and culture by women (ibid., 722). By the latter half of the 1990s, by which time women had more political and economic power under new or revised inheritance and labor laws, women were producing and consuming not only the staple genre of popular romance fiction but also literature that dealt with taboo topics, reflected the influence of postmodern theories of subjectivity, and challenged older and limited chauvinist prescrip tions and formations of Taiwanese identity (ibid.). Questioning and rejecting masculinist and putative objective and factual accounts of Taiwanese culture and society, writers and readers called for narratives that explored female sexuality, the role of women in culture and society, domestic life, and affective experience (ibid., 753). |
