Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approac ...

Unlike the tradition in Chinese Peking Opera, in which all the roles, including the female ones, are played by men (although the all-male Chinese Peking opera was almost non-existent in the early twentieth century¹⁶; in Dai’s Peony Pavilion, she intentionally assigned the male role to a woman. Therefore, in Dai’s production, the audience not only enjoys the art of the classical Peony Pavilion performed in both Chinese Kunqu and Western postmodern styles, but they also get the sense of a gender performance.

In this book, I deconstruct the classical Chinese drama Peony Pavilion using a postmodern theoretical perspective. The heterosexual and intellectual male character falls in love with a female ghost in the original story. In this deconstructive perspective (in terms of performativity), I argue that Dai presents a lesbian love story by representing a butch / femme or tomboy / girl gender masquerade.

Dolan comments that the “lesbian desire underlying lesbian representations of gender disrupts the system of gender signification” (116). In Dai’s production, therefore, this disruption stems from two women loving each other, with one woman hiding her biological body in a man’s suit, making love with a femme, who wears a traditional Chinese female costume. Since Dai stages her production on the occasion of the International Women’s Drama Festival in Taiwan in 2004, we can interpret Dai’s work as a contemporary study of performativity and gender identity. Dai transgresses gender performances carefully by using the great literary classic, Kunqu, to address the underlying butch / femme desire.

As Elin Diamond points out “gender becomes a social gestus, a gesture that represents ideology circulating in social relations” (116). Dai’s two actresses are hiding the butch-femme lesbian relationship by employing feminist gestus to perform femininity and pseudo-masculinity, which is then tolerated under the guise of “normal” social relations of apparent heterosexuality. However, there is distance between the two actresses’ gestus and the feminist gestus. Such gender-bending and cross-dressing strategies in feminist theater have long existed in China.