Asia as Counter-method

Abstract

Abstract By taking the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan as a point of departure, this paper attempts to differentiate a “bloc asia” as a virtual aggregate from an “Area Asia” as a concrete geo-historical region in order to theorize the possibility of taking Taiwan or Asia as a counter-method. The paper starts with an examination of Takeuchi Yoshimi's 1960 “Asia as Method” in light of the two possible Asias—Asia as entity and Asia as method—suggested in Koyasu Nobukuni's poststructuralist reinterpretation. It then moves on to the two possible methods as disclosed in Kuan-Hsing Chen's Asia as Method—one adopts an “Asian studies in Asia” approach with an inter-referencing system; the other foregrounds a dynamic process of turning and hybridizing that occurs between Western colonial powers and local structures—to warp up the similar differentiation of Area Asia and bloc asia, as well as that of Asia as entity and Asia as method. The second part of the paper focuses on Taiwan's recent “Pikaochiu” incident, which uncannily conflates questions of same-sex marriage rights and ancestral tablet terminology. Instead of regarding it as merely an Internet kuso, the paper takes it to demonstrate how out of the old clan patriarchy in East Asia there may emerge new “homophobic” forms that rely not on a proscription of specific sex practices but rather on defending the integrity of the family surname and patrilineage. Yet its potentiality as a rollback against a Euro-American model of marriage, kinship, and family, and simultaneously a reversal against East Asian Confucian values, makes it a bizarre yet challenging case to explicate how Asia could function as a counter-method, a virtual “not yet.”