台灣文學中的身體轉向︰從酷兒到身心障礙

Abstract

「台灣文學中的身體轉向：從酷兒到身心障礙」這個計畫，延續了本人過往留美十一年的讀寫經驗。「身體轉向」一詞，至少有二義。一，在英美的主流學界，以及台灣學界（尤其在外文學門），「身體」早成研究焦點。文學研究中，身體從背景暗處移到鎂光燈下。將目光轉向身體的課題，即被我視作「身體轉向」，此詞乃在效法拉康（J. Lacan）研究者所稱之「語言的轉向」以及詹明信（F. Jameson）所稱的「文化的轉向」，旨在標識一種學術的趨勢。「身體轉向」的另一義，是從美好驕傲的身體轉向令人迴避的另類身體。本人長年從事文學創作與文學研究，特別強調：同志、陰性的身體兼具驕傲及美好。當年保持類似態度的國內外師友頗多，因為大家大抵要反對「不看好同志身體，不看好女性身體的主流態度」。時過境遷，我卻發現一直歌頌身體的「生」，終究是有局限的；坦然面對身體的「老，病，死」，才能另闢身體研究的生路。本人決定以台灣文學為研究場域，處理上述兩種身體的轉向。本人目前已開始進行非正式的深度訪談；待研究倫理規範達成共識之後，本人才能將訪談正式化。訪談對象含研究本土身心障礙的資深學者、身障表演團隊，身障同志聚會等等。這些訪談將跟本人的文學研究整合。本人擬研究的本土文學文本，含杏林子作品，《汪洋中的一條船》，各種不被視為嚴肅文學的身障勵志書，各名家（含黃春明，鄭清文等人）代表作中的身障呈現等等。

My proposed research, “The Corporeal Turn in Taiwan Literature: from the Queer to the Disabled,” is an extension of my research on queerness and the body over the past 11 years. In discussing the “corporeal turn,” I intend to make two points. First, among the English-speaking scholars in humanities and the scholars trained in the English-speaking countries but teaching in Taiwan, the body has become a focus for academic research. For scholars in literature, the body has shifted from the background to the foreground. Inspired by the Lacanian “linguistic turn” and the “cultural turn” emphasized by Fredric Jameson, I call this recent focus on the body the “corporeal turn.” My proposal is to generate research that centers on the corporeal turn in Taiwan/Taiwanese literature in the 20th century. With the “corporeal turn,” I also mean to indicate the turn of academic scrutiny from the beautiful, confident body to the disturbing, alternative body. Since I started publishing creative writing and academic papers in the early 1990s, I have been trying to alleviate the stigma related to queer, feminine bodies by insisting on the beauty of such marginalized bodies. There were many mentors and scholars sympathetic with my strategies to empower the non-mainstream body in the 1990s, as we shared the critical stance of challenging the heteronormative ideology that denies the queer and the feminine. However, after more than a decade of advocating for the beauty of the alternative, marginalized body, I realize that it is insufficient to pay attention to this. I find it urgent to extend my attention to the potential illnesses and contingent disabilities, not to avoid the ugliness of the corporeal alternatives. I propose to study not only the turn to the body in the humanities in Taiwan, but also the turn from the (gym-trained) body that is commonly admired to the (disabled, ill) body commonly avoided and ignored. I have conducted informal interviews with senior scholars in disability studies, performers in the Very Special Arts (VSA), or the arts of the disabled, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people with disabilities, all of whom are based in Taiwan. So far, my interviews have been informal, as I need to locate one set of research ethics in order to engage my interviewees ethically before I formalize my interviews. My interviews will be integrated with my research on the body in Taiwan/Taiwanese literature; my literary studies will be thus enriched by the oral histories of local people accessible to the researcher. The literary texts to be analyzed include established writers’ works whose representations of disabilities are seldom discussed by scholars, as well as the seemingly clichéd, popularized books by the disabled, which are ignored for their seeming lack of literary value. Such questions as why representations of other-ed bodies are ignored and why disabled writers’ books are not seriously scrutinized are central to my research.