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Title |
The Disable, Underclass, Intergenerational: On the drifting lesbians and homoerotic practice in Zero Chou's Drifting Flowers |
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Author |
Tseng, Hsiu-Ping |
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Associate Professor, Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University |
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Abstract |
Revisiting the representation of the underclass lesbians' sexual desires and situations in Zero Chou's Drifting Flowers (2008), this article, on the one hand, highlights the analysis related to the politics of sexualities, on the other hand, underlines other aspects interweaved with sexualities, such as disabilities, classes, generations, regions, and the nation-state’s institutions, as well as power. This article first analyzes in-depth the visually impaired lesbian subject of the underclass, which has been neglected in the related literature to display the predicament of a queer with disabilities under the welfare system and ableism. By discussing the butch-femme representation in the film, this article intends to point out how Drifting Flowers topples the stereotypical butch-femme role-playing by depicting the relationship and homoerotic interaction among several lesbian subjects. Finally, this article explores the intergenerational/ cross-era inheritance in the film by discussing how (elderly) lesbians reverse/ perform the idea of (heterosexual) marriage with the formation of an alternative affective community and a gender-diverse family. This article uses the term "drifting" to name the cultural feature of these underclass lesbians and to underline that while representing the draftiness of lesbians, Drifting Flowers also hints at the characters' ability to build a utopian future after underdoing the traumatic experience. This article ends with discussing the imagery, such as the train and railroad running through the three parts of the film to create the intersection of the present and the past, as well as the virtuality and reality, connecting the particular queer time and heterogeneous space where the intergenerational / crossera practice of queer eros is possible. Drifting Flowers exemplifies various lesbian images in Sinophone cinema. By reading it closely, I hope to emphasize the lesbians who are not the mainstream, urban, middle-class, or intellectual elites but belong to the underclass to reflect on the phenomenon in tongzhi / queer cinema where gender and sexualities are differentiated and stratified. |
