光幻之墟

Dark Kings in Exile:
Reading Transgender Heroes via Edward Said’s Post-Colonial Discourse


In this paper, I am proposing a critical mode of exchange between
a besieged national identity, especially the one suffering diaspora,
resentment, and bigotry, and an edgy, tragically heroic type of
transgender masculinity. This national identity is pervasively written
by Edward Said’s theoretical elaboration of Palestine people, and
representations of a queer masculinity is vigorously portrayed by
variant texts, including autobiographical writings, science fiction,
and literature on sadomasochism.

These two issues will be interrupting each other and formulating a
mutually interpreting correspondence, with the former regarding a
marginal nativism struggling to earn recognition, and the later
manifesting a queer identity whose force is starting to gain attention
and support within certain locations. It is my intention to form an
analogous framework by intervention and negotiation through Said’s
post-colonial vision, and hopefully this paper could achieve a satisfying
conclusion, which allows contrapuntal interpretations of these two sets
of textual materials.

In terms of the Palestine identity argued over and for by Edward Said,
it might help constituting an interpretive model, or an allegorical
foreground to account for a transgender masculinity which, like the
Islam subjectivity, is often deemed terroristic and brutally inhuman,
shadowed by its own guilt and charisma. By way of this ground for
textual analysis, I am going to explore a ruthless and obstinate
relationship among a wronged subject, the identity as an outlaw and
its own stigma, which, in the end, is turned upside down as an
ambivalent glory. This effect of such a transformation is both
revealing and historically dialectic. By digging into these chosen
texts, I am performing the process of re-reading a wandering national
identity in lights of transgender politics, and, at the same moment,
uncloseting some queer metaphors out of a literary dungeon saturated
with post-colonial power exchanges.


發表於【politizing the text】會議，以及【國際文化研究】期刊