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Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture, by Fran Martin. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. xii + 358 pp. HK$295.00/US$39.50 (hardcover). Fran Martin's Situating Sexualities traces the history of homosexuality in the emergence of Taiwanese modernity and provides an excellent account of the impact of shifts in political and economic power on cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Martin achieves a rare balance in studying both male and female homosexuality as elements of broader patterns of same-sex representation and cultural formation, and reveals the rich potential of historically and politically informed cultural studies analysis of Asian literatures, cinemas and popular cultures. Situating Sexualities is much more than a history of homosexuality. Through detailed analyses of recent novels and cinema, Martin also describes how the recent history of Taiwan-its anxious relationship to the PRC, recent democratization and rapid economic globalization-has been lived and imagined by the island's inhabitants. Chapter 1 considers Pai Hsien-yung's novel Crystal Boys, which Martin describes as the first modem Chinese novel to make homosexuality its subject. The novel became an iconic representation of homosexuality in 1980s Taiwan. Martin focuses on the "dehomosexualisation" of this important novel by critics who interpret its narrative of a banished homosexual son as a political allegory of Taiwan's historical exile from the homeland of Chineseness on the mainland. Chapter 2 summarizes the efflorescence of critical social movements, including the tongzhi movement, after the lifting of martial law in 1987, and considers the policies of Chen Shui-bian, then Democratic Progressive Party mayor of Taipei City Government and subsequently first non-KMT president of the Republic of China on Taiwan. Focusing on Taipei's New Park, the site of national memorials as well as a homosexual cruising ground, Martin describes the intersection of political and sexual cultures in the closing years of the 20th century. These opening chapters reveal how Taiwanese politics-caught between rival efforts to assert an autonomous national identity and the claims of Taiwan as a site of authentic Chineseness-provides a powerful metaphor for the relation of the island's homosexual minorities to the dominant heterosexual culture. There are queer resonances between tongzhi sexual identity and Taiwanese nationalist imaginings, with the tongzhi's dissident relation to heteronormativity coming to symbolize the uncertain place of the Taiwanese national subject in the geo-polity of greater China. Chen Shui-bian's taking up of tongzhi as a sign of Taipei's global modernity in the 1990s can be understood in this context, where some heterosexual Taiwanese detected echoes of their own stories in the tongzhi homosexual culture that emerged in that decade. In Chapter 3, Martin uses Ang Lee's 1993 film The Wedding Banquet as a lens to focus on 1990s queer Taiwan, interpreting this film as marking "the triumphant entry of the 'Chineseness' of Taiwan into a global present, where 'tolerance of homosexuality' works as a marker of a newly liberal, democratic state" (p. 143). She also interprets Lee's internationally acclaimed film as staging "a kind of postcolonial cultural clash between two regimes of sexuality: broadly, a 'Chinese familial' regime, and a regime of'American gay identity'", (p. 143). The first wave of Asian cultural studies in the early 1990s was often marked by well-intentioned but naive attempts to "apply" Western critical theory which reproduced Eurocentric conceptions in the name of critiquing empiricist area studies. Situating Sexualities is part of an important corrective move that responds to these excesses by localizing and refashioning poststructuralism in historical, discursive/linguistic and cultural contexts. Martin asks the crucial question of whether the ideas of the Western queer theorists she engages-Foucault, Butler, Kosofksy-Sedgwick and others-map adequately the cultural and discursive terrains of sexuality and gender in Taiwan. …

(1999). A Panoply of Roles. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services: Vol. 9, No. 2-3, pp. 1-27.

When Muslim forces under the Ghurid sultan, Mu'izz al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Sām, made their first major breakthrough into Hindūstān in the 1190s, they brought with them two institutions that had long since taken root in the Islamic world. One was the iqṭā ' or assignment of land or its revenue, in some cases in return for military service (sometimes misrepresented as “fief” on the Western European model). The other was the mamlūk , or military slave. Mamlūk status, it should be stressed, bore none of the degrading connotations associated with other types of slavery: mamlūks – generally Turks from the Eurasian steppelands – were highly prized by their masters, receiving both instruction in the Islamic faith and a rigorous training in the martial arts, and were not employed in any menial capacity. The mamlūk institution, whose origins go back to the first century of Islam, came into vogue from the first half of the third/ninth century, as the ‘Abbasid Caliphs built up a corps of Turkish mamlūk guards and their example was followed, with the disintegration of their empire, by the various autonomous dynasties that sprang up in the provinces. Turkish slave officers themselves went on to found dynasties, as in the case of the Tulunids and the Ikhshidids in Egypt and the Ghaznawids in the eastern Iranian world. The institution surely entered upon its heyday in the seventh/thirteenth century, with the military coup of 648/1250 in Cairo: a group of mamlūk officers overthrew the last Ayyubid sultan of Egypt and inaugurated a regime in which slave status was the essential qualification for high military and administrative office.

Various properties associated with plant water economy, including osmotic potential at incipient plasmolysis (π0), elastic modulus (e), and maximum potential stomatal conductances were measured in Pinus ponderosa, Pseudotsuga menziesii, Abies grandis, and Thuja plicata growing in northern Idaho to determine the role of such features in adaptation. Pinus and Pseudotsuga exhibited the lowest π0's while Thuja had the highest. Similarly, Pinus and Pseudotsuga exhibited the greatest amount of acclimation relative to this feature and Thuja the least. The proportion of apoplastic water between full turgidity and incipient plasmolysis was highest in Thuja, intermediate and about equal in Pinus and Pseudotsuga, and lowest in Abies. Maximum potential stomatal conductance was eightfold greater for Pinus than for Abies, which had somewhat greater conductance than Pseudotsuga; Thuja had the lowest potential conductance. Overall, there was a strong correspondence between the properties investigated and the habitat preference of the respective species, suggesting that these properties have adaptive significance in such plants.

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