光幻之墟

God as a Transgender Butch; Devil as a Charismatic T:
Extrapolating a Micro-Multiverse of a Queer Tomboy Godhood

Lucifer Hung



This paper argues an allegorical verisimilitude between several
archetypes of transgender butch and their iconic representations
of anthropomorphic gods in chosen texts and present social-
cultural manifestations in Taiwan.

By elaborating issues of embodiment and a deviant godhood, I
will also articulate and extrapolate the identification politics
of transgender subjects, which has been manifestly formulated
within recent years in Taiwan local spheres. The transformation
of stigmatized subject into charismatic personification, and
the embeddedness of such a transformation in the mythic-
religious backgrounds of Christianity, Hinduism and Oriental
deities, has been relatively neglected by contemporary queer
theory. However, within current contexts of literature and
popular culture, there are an amazingly abundant melange of
non-normative, often non-human trans-tomboy characters
occupying a multitude sets of genre fiction, visual cultural
images including Japanese comic books, animation dramas and
movies; theirs are a spectrum of differently represented
charisma and stigma embedded in either realistic social
background or fantastic temporal-spatial dimension. In some
of them, there are also the seemingly transgender or inter-sex
portraits of gods originated from biblical mythology, Hindu
pantheon legends, Japanese occult tales, Chinese myths, and
some hybrid mythical universe created by the author and
less-familiar sources. The appropriation of these genre
writings and queer subjects' embodiment via these powerful
icons are rising rapidly in certain local grounds, especially
those sites occupied by younger generation of Taiwanese T.

My primary concern in this paper will conduct a detailed
theoretical articulation of how an anthropomorphic god-figure
in these textual elaborations, both hyper-masculine and
inhumanly unique, could be read as an embodiment of a
prototypical kind of transgender butch who personifies a
magnifying, flamboyant godly presence. Among these characters
will include the biblical Lucifer, and his legion of fallen
angels who has formed an assembly of transgender, altered-
bodied characters in science fiction, fantasy, gothic novels,
comic books, and queer fan-fiction. In the first part of this
paper, I will introduce this textual tradition of demonic,
charismatic characters who are vividly reminiscent of many
youthful tomboy figures of a local community waiting to be
recognized. The second part of this paper will form a
theoretical framework to contextualize the embodiment of
transgender butch characters in and through primordial
quasi-religious sagas; these representational politics are
"resurrected" simultaneously in conte-mporary, present-day
products of gender imagination forged by defiant queer authors
and practitioners. The third part of this thesis will deal
with nowadays contextualization and contests between queer
literary representation and the transgender politics, which
will be elaborated within a chosen set of textual materials.
These allegorical readings and textual analysis would also
be a cross-over between academic network and a local
(Taipei, for instance) transgender community whose queer
sub-culture already saturated with identification icons
but without enough visibility to be reckoned as a significant
force of identity politics.


（IACSS, Shanghai, 2007 June）