Between Apparition and Disappearance: Queer Penumbrae in Wu He's Ghosts and Fairies

Abstract: This essay examines Taiwanese author Wu He's 2000 novel Ghosts and Fairies ( Gui'er yu ayao ) through its portrayal of sexual minorities as ghostly beings. The gui'er (literally "ghosts") of the title serve as an alternative to the common translation of queer as ku'er in Chinese. Bringing together Anglophone theorizations of queer spectrality and Taiwanese scholars Jen-peng Liu and Naifei Ding's formulation of the queer penumbra ( wangliang ) as a figure of ghostly liminality, I explore how Wu He's figuration of gui'er straddles the boundary between visible and invisible, present and absent, corporeal and incorporeal, and thereby probes the limits of visibility without recourse to a diametrically opposed politics of invisibility.