By Joyce Lau
“Queer studies in the West and kuer or lanbi studies in Taiwan can be said to share family resemblances, but are quite different from one another.”
Last year, Taiwan became the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. This made 2019 a milestone year for gay rights in Asia – but it was also the culmination of decades of education and debate about LGBT rights in Taiwan, whose universities have led the continent on gender studies research at university level.
“In the sense of promoting gay awareness, academic queer studies did work to promote a more tolerant attitude towards LGBT,” Josephine Ho, an emeritus professor at National Central University, told Times Higher Education – although she also noted that some queer scholars opposed the institution of marriage entirely, whether gay or straight.
When Professor Ho founded the Center for the Study of Sexualities at NCU in the mid-1990s, it set off a proliferation of queer studies activity. For her work, the prominent feminist scholar has been nicknamed the “godmother of the Taiwanese queer movement”.
The NCU centre was the first of its kind in Asia as a research collective. It hosted overseas experts and events with names such as the “4Sex Conference” and “Super Slim conference”. It even published a handbook for schoolteachers called The Gender/Sexuality Campus: Radical Education for the New Generation.
Today, NCU is part of a gender and sexuality studies research cluster that includes National Tsing Hua University, National Yang Ming University and National Chiao Tung University.