光幻之墟

時移事不魍，物換星不移：
從跨性男的愉虐敘事分析酷兒時空模式
A Time out of Joint; a Place for Enigmatic Quest:
Reading Three Trans-men in Their BDSM Ways of Being

Hung Ling, Lucifer



This paper showcases three approaches of transsexual men's modes of
desire, emphasizing on their articulation of temporality in regard
to an excruciating, intoxicating enactment of queer gay relationship
embedded within the locus of sadomasochistic power play.

The first part is a re-writing (or reverse writing) based on the
Hegelian model of "bondage and lordship", in which a trans-man
slave undertakes his trajectory on a process of bodily transfiguration,
branding his identification by way of a Nietzschean discipline that
trains a (masculine) animal into a promising being across the boundary
of time and space. I will read this remarkable and strenuous
bildungsroman via a close textual and inter-textual analysis of a
serial queer BDSM literature, Marketplace Series by celebrated author
Laura Antoniou. This cycle of stories vividly invokes a politically
sensitive and phantasmatically constructed reality in which a
centralized anti-hero figure, a closeted trans-man Chris Parker posits
as an emblem for this pansexual backdrop of an unruly leather community,
his is a story told in unyieldingly tricky tone, both densely agonizing
and perversely compelling, finally reclaiming a status by recourse to
a complicated (re)inscription of bodily modification, liminal
subjectivity, and a dialectical struggle between memory and amnesia,
stigma of the past perfect tense and stigmata in this present
"after-life" which allows for his relocated embodiment as a slave man
per se.


The second example is a landmark opus by a prestigious queer author,
who is also a renowned transsexual man, Patrick Califia, formally
known as Pat Califia. In this intricately interwoven tale, Incense
for the Queen of Heaven, it foregrounds a painstakingly "beatific"
violence conducted by a queer menage a trois among a dominatrix high
femme, her transgender bottom-boy, and a top trans-man formally serving
this dominatrix as her slave-man. My central proposal here is to
demonstrate that their relationship, especially the archetypal homoerotic
tension initiated by trans-man Tam to his prey and competing younger
brother, Adonis, generates a temporal frame which could be epitomized
as an eschatological, apocalyptic queer time. By this focus, I will
form a correspondence and dialogue with several non-normative non-
familial temporalities, especially the one formulated by Judith
Halberstam, a queer masculine brotherhood out of archaic, anachronistic
identification. This temporality both constructs their agonized release
and channels a trans-masculine cathexis out of these two characters,
forming a resplendent intergenerational queer-trans-gay affiliation.


In the last part of my analysis, I choose one of my own literary texts
as a recent illustration of Taiwan queer/trans literature, to ground a
connection between an anti-globalized, local, and idiosyncratic poetics,
and an eccentric queer masculinity. This story, Finally the Marshal of
Inferno Beholds His Dream Object as Thanatos Personified, an artistic
edifice on brutality and redemption, centralizes on the exchange between
a far-future trans-man militant officer and his beloved young prince.
Their time together, as an acid dream and a Burrough-esque junk
temporality, is both synchronically sadistic and compellingly kaleidoscopic,
bespeaking a science-fictional simultaneous flow which intensifies and
liberates a primordial bodily thirst. It depicts a trespassing on the
progressive, linear time on the expense of one's radical transfiguration,
such as the devastation of the form of flesh. This temporal model is
realized on the expense of a queer trans-man's journey on subversion of
history, seamless continuity, and the domination of reproductive sex. By
this deliberate trans-queer reading, I will argue for a mode of
epistemological experience and ontology on this very queer-masculine
psychotic time, which illustrates a landscape where only certain
trans-sexual and trans-gender masculine characters could live out and
die fulfilled, in an excessive drop of immortality.



（Bodies-in-Urbanity, HK, 2007 Mar.）