The use of celebrity scandals and sensational news for identity negotiations: analyzing gossip among the queers within Taiwanese families

Since the late 1990s, Taiwanese celebrity scandals and sensational news stories have addressed how the families of gay children understand the latters' idiosyncratic sexual identity. Conducting studies on audience reception and searching for divergent readings were once useful means of understanding resistance and resilience among marginalized groups. This study of the interactive interpretive practices among viewers in a family further contextualizes the dialectical formation of queer1^1. In this study, I use the term queer to refer to the larger lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and questioning (LGBTQ) community in Taiwan. However, since the usage of gay and lesbian is more common than that of queer in Taiwanese everyday conversations, I use gay and lesbian when referring to the context of family conversations. Since the early 1990s, Tóng-zhì (vernacular for queer) has become the most common name for the younger generation in the LGBT community in the Greater Chinese area. According to Chou Wah-Shan (2000 Chou, W. (2000). Tongzhi: Politics of same-sex eroticism in Chinese societies. New York: Haworth Press. Google Scholar], p. 2), Tóng-zhì was coined as a means of signifying “politics beyond the homo-hetero duality” and “integrating the sexual into the social”. Specifically, the social networks I am referring to here are the Taiwan Tong-Zhi Hotline Foundation and the Persons with HIV/AIDS Rights Advocacy Association. In the former Tong-Zhi Hotline, I worked as a volunteer and an advisor; in the latter, I am a member of the steering committee, and I serve on the advisory board. subjectivities in Taiwan, a society that emphasizes the performance of an appropriate self in social relations and maintaining family harmony. Over a three-year period of fieldwork in Taipei, this study employed ethnographic methods to interview 16 gay men and lesbians and their mothers in order to clarify how celebrity scandals and sensational news function as a site for identity negotiation within families with gay children. This study argues that vernacular interpretive practices within families produce resources of resistance, accommodation and even pleasure, which can be used to understand the nascent Taiwanese gay identity in relation to significant others.