This project examines the ways Taiwan’s contested sovereignty pokes holes in dominant understandings of what it means to be a sovereign nation based on the discourses of Taiwan that appear in transnational popular culture and media. As a result of Taiwan’s role as a global economic center, the traces Taiwan leaves behind in transnational media, and the scandals they garner, reflect the larger dynamic of Taiwan as a constant problem and yet a valuable commodity for powerful nation-states. Taiwan is simultaneously a site of transnational profit for states like China, as well as a rhetorical threat to a One China Policy. This liminality represents a kind of impossible sovereignty—one that is politically illegible, but functional nonetheless. This form of sovereign absurdity for Taiwan is perhaps best encapsulated by the Hokkien term ku-mo. Ku-mo is a transliteration of a 台語 colloquialism 龜毛, which describes someone who is slow or high maintenance to the point of inconveniencing others. There is a second definition to龜毛, one grounded in a Buddhist idiom that represents an absurdity—something that does not and ought not to exist. I argue that Taiwan’s impossible sovereignty can be described as ku-mo in the sense that it is conceptualized both as an impossibility and an inconvenience that disrupts otherwise uniform and smooth processes of international trade and media production.

Taiwan’s contemporary liminal sovereignty presents a profound problem for the very nation-states that attempt to erase it, and as a result of Taiwan’s role as a center of transnational capital, the debate over Taiwanese sovereignty is contested and mediated transnationally through culture and the culture industry of multiple nation-states. The relevant question of Taiwan’s sovereignty for us is not, “Is Taiwan sovereign?” but rather “What does the discourse surrounding the question of Taiwanese sovereignty accomplish and how does it function?” Examining sovereignty as a discourse and a practice allows us to explore the ways conceptions of sovereignty are defined by documentation, institutions, and bureaucracy that are perpetually attempting to contain that which cannot be contained.

This project centers Kurdish women in modern-day Syria, as native to the land, to demonstrate how Syria’s deployment of state biopower produces stateless-ness and refugee-ness among indigenous communities. Borrowing Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower and Yen Len Espiritu’s reconceptualization of the refugee, I frame the minoritization process of Kurds during the French Mandate period, their subsequent denationalization from the nation-state, and their violent displacement and dispossession that is forcing them to become refugees of war during the 2012 Syrian war, as technologies of exclusion, in the context of colonialism, empire, and war for the past 100 years, that are not over. I seek to answer what are the ways in which Kurdish women’s movements across Mediterranean waters are represented in public discourse? Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) I analyzed a sample of 28 newspaper articles that I obtained from ethnic media in the first five years of the war. I examined semantic strategies of marginalization to theorize about hierarchies of power, to help us remember the violences of a colonial past that are in danger of being forgotten, and to unpack ideological underpinnings of discourse that have become naturalized and may be out of vision through the ‘feminization of the Orient’ and the ‘Orientalization of the feminine’ (Dobie). My analysis shows three emerging themes: refugees as burdens to the nation, [white] savior narratives that deploy humanitarian discourses, and the prominent (in)visibility of Kurdish women in public discourse. As Kurdish women’s bodies wash ashore, they enact their agency, even in death.