Abstract
Chiu Kuei-fen''s essay ”Gender/Power/Postcolonial Discourse” highlights the significance of impotent male characters in postwar Taiwanese literature, opening the possibility of male studies in the field of postcolonial feminism. Following her argument, this essay combines the study of masculinity and postcolonial theory to explore the economy of desire in some postcolonial novels from Taiwan. The first section of the essay articulates the conspiracy of colonial discourse and gender hierarchy: the colonizer often effeminates the colonized, thereby justifying the subjection of the other sex and the other people to colonial domination. By reading Huang Chunming''s ”Sayonara, Goodbye!”, this essay then focuses on the homosocial relationship of the colonizer and the colonized, that is, a sense of brotherhood in the face of women as desirable objects. The final section develops this concept and discusses how the colonized men suffer symbolic castration in Wang Zhenhe''s Portraits of Beauties, how postcolonial struggles may unwisely duplicate the violent nature of colonial masculinity in Li Yongping''s ”A Pot of Spring Fire” and how colonial men are tormented by their guilty consciousness for doing violence to the colonized and innocent in Huang Chunming''s ”Little Willows” The conclusion argues that the process of decolonization would run the risk of duplicating the violence of colonialism if the culture of masculinity inherent in nationalist struggles is not taken into serious consideration.