What is left of queer anti-militarism? Queer fatalism, Sinocentrism, and Taiwanese sovereignty

Since the early 2000s, the United States’ (US) War on Terror has facilitated a transnational turn in queer theory. By thinking through the ramifications of gender, sexuality, and nationalism in times of war, queer theorists have pushed the field from a domestic critique of US liberalism and assimilationism to a broader analysis of transnational geopolitics. This move, in turn, has allowed for the discipline’s expansion outside of the US, where non-Western concepts of gender and sexuality are incorporated into queer theoretical production. However, the focus on the US as the primary object of critique and epistemological center of how war is understood neglects the agency of contested states such as Taiwan. This article problematizes how US-centric queer theory combined with the discipline’s implicit Sinocentrism has dismissed queer politics in Taiwan as an assimilationist movement toward the US empire and conceptualized the movement as a Cold War confrontation against “socialist China.” By tracing the changing knowledge production of queer scholarship in Taiwan vis-à-vis the concept of war, this article aims to highlight the critical position of queer Taiwan studies in the context of war and imperial rivalries in an attempt to think alternatively about war, militarism, and security.