Document Type
Article
Abstract
This paper proposes a queer reading against normalized imagination of "residence (as) rights" based absolutely on property ownership and hetero‐reproductive familial narrative. My argument will build upon the event of "Clan Wang's ancestors' house being demolished by [a] heartless government" from March, 2012, to trace the condition in which Taiwan's land mass (especially those in urban areas) has increasingly become a post‐capitalism' pawn, handled ruthlessly together by cooperation, the state apparatus and legal/governing system. What I am most concerned with is less the non‐normative, even recalcitrant possibility of intervention into the rights discourse and rhetoric of the norm, which argues for "living in a certain place" as non‐given and non‐naturalized modes of being. Instead, I provide a critical re‐reading of citizenship, be it the middle class, imagined or otherwise. On the one hand, these battles give rise to innovative lifestyles and the possible coalition among different gender/sexual positions; on the other hand, however, we need confront the re‐imagined "traditional" heteronormative way of life celebrated by and inscribed in, sarcastically, at least partially as the agenda of LGBTQ defenders of family and home to treat "having a home" as the final frontier and last signifier of a livable subject‐position.
Repository Citation
Hung, Lucifer. "Habitats for Whom or What: Barney Cheng's Baby Steps (2015), Affect Politics and Transgender Bodily 'Housing'." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1–11. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss2/19