Queer Remains: Mourning and Inheritance in Lo Yi-chin’s Banishing Sorrow

Abstract

This article examines Lo Yi-chin’s 2001 novel Banishing Sorrow, a controversial tribute to the late Taiwanese queer author Qiu Miaojin. Renowned for her writings on nonnormative desires, Qiu attracted a cult following in the wake of her suicide in 1995, but her posthumous fame has paradoxically eclipsed her nuanced vision of gender and sexuality since her skepticism toward fixed categories is potentially at odds with the quest for identity and recognition in the local LGBT rights movement. Published six years after Qiu’s death, Lo’s Banishing Sorrow represents a bold effort to challenge the identity-based approach to Qiu’s work. Echoing the metaphor of the disorderly body in Qiu’s writings, Banishing Sorrow deploys the trope of corporeal fragmentation to problematize how sexual identities have become essentialized and fixed in her postmortem reception. Reading Lo’s tribute alongside Qiu’s oeuvre, this article draws on theories of mourning, spectrality, and animacy to explore how Banishing Sorrow opens up new possibilities for Qiu’s afterlife beyond the confines of identity politics.