Abstract
Cross-dressing performances, particularly female impersonation, have a long tradition rooted in Chinese and Taiwanese culture. Two of the best-known examples are the jingju (Beijing opera) in China and zidixi (junior theatre) in Taiwan.1 While these traditional examples of male cross-dressing performance are generally dying out, a new form of male cross-dressing entertainment, the fanchuanxiu (cross-dressing show), emerged and swept across Taiwan’s theatre culture in the late 1990s. Among many fanchuanxiu troupes, Hongding Yiren (“Redtop Arts”), established in 1994 in Taipei, was the most popular in Taiwan’s cross-dressing entertainment industry in the nineties. Although members of Redtop Arts claimed that their performance was the modern version of the traditional cross-dressing art, their shows represented a middlebrow, commercialized entertainment genre, which was distinct from the highbrow art form of the traditional theatre. Fanchuanxiu usually consisted of approximately 20 skits. Selected from around the world, the sources for their drama, dance, and music materials came from cultures local and global, Eastern and Western, and traditional and contemporary. The fanchuanxiu embodied the aesthetic characteristics of pastiche and hybridity. Male cross-dressing performance (especially the ones showcased by Redtop Arts) became so popular that it was generally perceived as a new cultural phenomenon in Taiwan.2
Cross-dressing is a true masquerading, an anatomy of oneself, an emersion of one’s heart, and double sides of a unity.
Lin Chilong, the stage designer of SWET (2006)
Bodies and minds are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance but somewhere in between these two alternatives.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (1994: xii)
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Notes
See Siu Leung Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003).
Chang Ai-Zhu, “Xingbie fanchuan, yizhi kongjian yu hozhimin bianzhuang huangho de wenhua xianji” (Gender cross-dressing, heterotopias and the cultural want-to-be-ness of postcolonial drag queens), Zhongwai wenxue [Chinese and foreign literature] 29, no. 7 (December 2000): 139–157;
Lin Yu-ling, “Jiedu Taiwan zongyi jiemu fanchuanxiu de xingbie wenhua” (Decode the gender culture in fanchuanxiu in television programs), in Kua xingbie [Transgender], ed. He Chunrui (Taipei: National Taiwan Central University, 2003), 173–220;
Tsai Shih-tsong, Hongding yiren [Redtop Artists] (Taipei: Redtop Culture, 2000);
Tseng Yung-I, “Nanban nüzhuang yu nüban nanzhuang” (Female and male impersonation), in Shuo xiqu [On Chinese music drama] (Taipei: Lianjing Chubanshe, 1983), 31–47;
Yen Yu-Feng, “Dianshi tanhuaxing zongyi jiemu yu xingbie fanchuan zaixian” (An analysis of transvestites on TV talk shows) (MA Thesis, Tamkang University, 2001).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 139.
A fourth line of inquiry is about the performers’ interaction with audiences is discussed in another chapter in my dissertation. See Chao-Jung Wu, “Performing Postmodern Taiwan: Gender, Cultural Hybridity, and the Male Cross-Dressing Show” (PhD Dissertation, Wesleyan University, 2007).
Information taken from Black Pearls’s autobiography, which was transcribed by Huang Huo from an oral account. See Huang Huo, Fanchuan yiren Hei Zhenzhu [The male cross-dressing performer Black Pearl] (Taipei: Haujiao, 1998), 154, 174. “Soul-guiding operas” refers to a ceremonial performance by a professional troupe that takes place at a funeral. It usually consists of a “red-helmeted” master/director and three female chanters. There is a troupe/ceremony called wunü-kumu (五女哭墓) [Five daughters crying in front of the tomb], performed by women or male cross-dressing performers.
Hong Bitang (洪碧堂), “Tongxinglian zhe, nanban nüzhuan fanchuan zhe, disanxing gongguan—xiangguan wenti de tantao” (同性戀者、男扮女裝反串者、第三性公關—相關問題的探討) [Homosexuals, male cross-dressing performers, and third-sex publicists—a discussion of relevant issues], Shehui fuli (社會福利) [Social welfare] 136, no. 6 (1998): 58–69, on 67.
Luo Ching-Yao, “Wenhua zhuanzhe zhong de kuer yuejie: jiuling niandai Taiwan tongzhi lunshu, shen/ti zhenzhi ji wenhua shijian (1990–2002)” (Queering across the border at the crossroads: The queer discourse, body/voice politics and cultural practices in Taiwan, 1900–2002) (MA thesis, National Chiao Tung University, 2005), 109.
Charlotte Suthrell, Unzipping Gender: Sex, Cross-Dressing and Culture (New York: Berg, 2004), 4.
Judith Shapiro, “Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of sex,” in Body Guards, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 248–279, on 248.
Kimberly J. Devlin’s article “Pretending in ‘Penelope’: Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom” has a major impact on the following section. My lists of signifiers are mostly inspired by her analysis on Molly Bloom’s femininities: appellative, verbal, sartorial, proprietorial, and gestural. Kimberly Devlin, “Pretending in ‘Penelop’: Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom,” A Forum on Fiction 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 71–89, on 72.
John Money, Gay, Straight, and In-Between: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 102.
On the gendered meanings of blood in Chinese history, see Charlotte Furth, “Blood, Body and Gender: Medical Images of the Female Condition in China,” Chinese Science 7 (1986): 43–65.
For a theoretically rich elaboration of the sex/gender norms, see the classic essays by Gayle Rubin: “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” and “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” both can be found in Gayle Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
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© 2012 Howard Chiang
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Wu, CJ. (2012). Performing Transgender Desire: Male Cross-Dressing Shows in Taiwan. In: Chiang, H. (eds) Transgender China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137082503_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137082503_9
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