Abstract
In wars and military institutions, sexuality is often used for attacks, rewarding allies, and shaming the enemy, as seen in Japan colonizers’ use of “comfort women”. But Kao’s chapter exposes another less travelled path to explore the triangular complex—militarism, masculinity, and sexuality. Based on fieldwork and interviews, Kao reveals how Taiwanese male conscripts used gender and sexual scripts, classified as four “weapons of the weak soldiers”, to resist the military bureaucracy and accompanied hegemonic masculinity. His original data narrates colorful stories regarding how soldiers built queer families and profaned sacred military symbols by sex, and why. Those who are interested in gendered dissents and rebellions will be surprised to see that manhood fanatics exposed the fragility of the hegemonic, taking away a useful framework of resistance.
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Notes
- 1.
In response to the defeat in the Pacific War in 1944, the Japanese Cabinet resolved that the colonized Taiwanese had the obligation of military service. The Taiwan Governor implemented conscription inspections on the island the following year and created the Rules of Imperial Training Bureau for the training of new recruits. Moreover, the Governor used the National Volunteer Military Service Law to require both male (15–60 years old) and female (17–40 years old) citizens to serve (Lin 1996).
- 2.
All names of interviewees in this chapter are pseudonyms chosen by the interviewees themselves.
- 3.
It is not only queers that could form alliances: heterosexual males could also form small groups to break with the masculine hierarchy. For example, enrollees who do not smoke or pay for sex could form other circles, breaking up the circles formed by the enrollees who offer cigarettes to each other and boast of their sexual experiences with prostitutes.
- 4.
BDSMers are those who participate in the subculture of BDSM and who produce and receive pleasure by B/D (bondage and discipline), D/S (dominance and submission), S/M (sadism and masochism), or other types of erotic power play.
- 5.
Xiezhi is the symbol of the military police, based on a legendary righteous creature in Chinese and Korean mythology that rams the guilty and bites the wronged party.
- 6.
WARNING: This section includes graphic description of sexual behaviors. Before reading, please receive this warning and make sure that you have a mature enough mind to understand erotic materials. If you opt out, you are welcome to skip this section and move to the Conclusion.
- 7.
Notably, this symbolic resistance was derived from the interviewee’s own intention, not my interpretation. Tank Madman fully sensed how provocative his behaviors were; thus, he developed his rebellion map aggressively. After our interview, he eagerly asked me in an online chat: “How many people have you interviewed? Does anyone beat me?” I had not yet interviewed BWU, so I replied: “Nope, congratulations! You are still the fiercest one.” He was very proud that his masturbation allowed him to symbolically destroy what the military had done to his body and that he sexually stood out in the military crowd.
- 8.
This example may be rare, but is not a single case. Another interviewee Yu-Lun reported similar scenes and the BDSM author Tiejun Huang (2006.3.25) echoed my findings with his story in a forum.
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Kao, YC. (2017). Weapons of the Weak Soldiers: Military Masculinity and Embodied Resistance in Taiwanese Conscription. In: Lin, X., Haywood, C., Mac an Ghaill, M. (eds) East Asian Men. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55634-9_12
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