Abstract
With a focus on the figure of prostitutes, this paper attempts to articulate the gender configuration and class politics of the Taiwanese writer Shi Shuqing''s Hong Kong Trilogy. In terms of gender configuration, the trilogy involves an ideology of heterosexual monogyny that excludes the possibilities of homosexual relationship and autoerotic pleasure and therefore constantly stigmatizes the heroine Huang Deyun, a daughter of a peasant family in Mainland China forced into prostitution in Hong Kong, as the sewer beneath the pantheon. With regard to class politics, Huang Deyun''s upward movement on the ladder of class coincides with the desertion of prostitute identity, a life trajectory allegorizing Hong Kong''s rapid economic development but implicitly and unwisely embracing a capitalist view of history as linear, progressive and developmental. Under such circumstances, prostitutes surviving at the bottom of society as well as housewives, concubines and female servants imprisoned in the households are under-represented as the subaltern and deprived of their voices. In Taiwan''s postcolonial studies, literary critics have frequently drawn upon theories of Homi Bhabha and Edward Said whereas this paper intends to emphasize the usefulness of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak''s interruptive employment of Marxism, feminism and deconstruction in postcolonial studies. Through her insights, this paper wishes to shed new light on the complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction of Shi Shuqing''s ambitious literary work-Hong Kong Trilogy.