UC Merced

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.