Written by Po-Han Lee, Alvaro Martinez-Lacabe, and Yu-chin Tseng.
Image credit: Routledge.
We are grateful to Taiwan Insight for inviting us to curate this special issue on Feeling Taiwan: Emotions in Everyday Politics, Social Movements, and Research Practices, part of the Routledge Research on Taiwan Series. The invitation gives us an opportunity not simply to introduce the book, but to return to it differently: to re-feel the project, to ask what it means when a collective academic work begins to travel beyond the book itself, and to consider how its arguments may speak to wider publics interested in Taiwan.
We are also thankful to the contributors who have generously adapted their chapters into shorter, public-facing articles for this special issue. Writing for a blog article requires a different kind of labour, opening specialised debates to broader audiences. We appreciate the care with which the authors have undertaken this task.
The six articles collected here do not attempt to summarise the whole volume. Rather, they offer six routes into the book’s wider concerns. Anne Sokolsky returns to Huang Fengzi’s Taiwan no shōjo (A Young Girl of Taiwan) to examine how emotions were expressed, authorised, and mediated in a Japanese colonial text. Hsiao-Man Cavalli and Lily Y.H. Lin reflect on the transformative power of affects in researching Taiwan’s party politics, showing how defensiveness, discomfort, and embodied tensions can open alternative ways of perceiving and narrating the political. Yang-Hsun Hou turns to Han settler colonialism, reflecting on how pride, guilt, racial illegibility, and a sense of responsibility reshape what it means to feel Taiwan as a Han person.
Judy Lee reflects on Hongkongers in Taiwan after 2019, showing how grief, attachment, solidarity, and methodological improvisation contribute to diaspora community-making. Yu-Yueh Tsai examines the historical trauma of housing modernisation among the Tao of Lanyu, where state-led development has left behind not just damaged houses but also unfinished justice and enduring social suffering. Jung Chen turns to Taiwanese gay men’s journeys toward fatherhood, showing how queer reproduction is structured by legal, logistical, and financial conditions as well as by affective relatedness, imagined futures, and the emotional labour of research.
Feeling Taiwan began from a simple observation: emotions are everywhere in research, politics, and everyday life, yet they are often treated as secondary to supposedly more rational forms of analysis. What if feelings are not distractions from knowledge, but part of how knowledge is made? What if emotions are not merely private experiences, but socio-political and historical forces? What if studying Taiwan seriously requires us to ask not only what Taiwan is, but how Taiwan is felt? Echoing Eno Pei-Jean Chen’s recent works, Cultural Politics of Love [愛的文化政治] and Cold War Feelings [冷戰的感覺結構], published in 2023 and 2024, respectively, this book responds to these questions by recentring emotional registers and the structural conditions that shape them in analysis.
In academic writing, emotions are frequently framed as background, bias, or noise. Researchers may acknowledge them in passing, perhaps in a reflexive note, but rarely place them at the centre of inquiry. This volume asks what happens if we reverse that hierarchy. It approaches feeling as both an object of analysis and a way of knowing – something people experience, circulate, suppress, and inherit, but also something that shapes how researchers choose their questions, enter their fields, interpret their materials, and take up their own positions within the knowledge they produce.
These questions matter because Taiwanese society has never been made merely through institutions, policies, elections, or geopolitical arrangements; it is also made through attachments, griefs, fears, longings, resentments, solidarities, intimacies, and hopes. It has been shaped by colonial rule and authoritarian violence, as well as by social movements, democratic aspirations, feminist and queer struggles, Indigenous resurgence, migrant lives, disability activism, public health crises, ecological entanglements, and everyday negotiations of belonging. These processes are structural because they organise how we can or should feel. They work through what people remember, what they are asked to forget, what they are taught to be indifferent to, what they are allowed to desire, and what they come to imagine as possible.
The six articles in this special issue show why emotion matters for Taiwan Studies across scales and sites. Colonial emotion appears in the literary framing of a young Taiwanese girl’s voice under Japanese colonial rule. Methodological emotion surfaces when researchers sit with frustration and hope for rethinking how Taiwan’s party politics might be narrated otherwise. Han settler emotion emerges when pride in Taiwan becomes unsettled by the dominant class’s privilege and the responsibility to listen otherwise. Diasporic emotion travels with Hongkongers as they rebuild community in Taiwan after political rupture. Indigenous suffering becomes sedimented in houses, kinship systems, and the modernisation project’s afterlives. Queer reproductive aspiration moves gay men to parenthood and draws researchers into forms of fragile but meaningful relatedness. These pieces offer a compact but powerful entry point to the larger volume, showing that feelings are not supplements to, but part of, the material through which politics, memory, and knowledge production are done.
Following Sara Ahmed’s insight that emotions are relational and political, these articles trace feelings as they move across texts, bodies, communities, institutions, and histories. Some feelings are explicit and nameable; others are atmospheric, implicit, or difficult to describe. They all show that emotion is not simply a private interior state, but a force through which social relations, political claims, and forms of belonging are made sensible. This approach offers a way to reorient Taiwan Studies. Taiwan is often read through questions of statehood, democratisation, sovereignty, identity, and cross-Strait relations. Feeling Taiwan does not reject those frames; rather, it asks how they are experienced, embodied, and contested in emotional terms.
What does colonial belonging feel like when voiced through the language of empire? This question also resonates within Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s award-winning Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄, 2020). How might researchers work through discomfort, confusion, anger, and hope when studying Taiwan’s party politics? How does Han settler colonialism become felt, ambivalently, through guilt, absence, privilege, and responsibility? How does migration transform anger and mourning into community service, cultural production, or student outreach? How do incomplete houses become evidence of unfinished transitional justice? How do queer futures become thinkable when law, kinship, and reproductive technology remain unevenly available? These are not separate from politics; they are among the ways politics is lived.
This is especially important at a time when Taiwan is increasingly visible internationally, but often through compressed or simplistic narratives – as a geopolitical flashpoint, a beacon of democracy, a semiconductor hub, or a progressive outlier in Asia. These narratives are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They risk turning Taiwan into an object of strategic interest rather than a lived society. By foregrounding emotion, Feeling Taiwan invites readers to slow down and attend to the textures of life that exceed headline categories.
We hope this special issue offers readers an accessible entry point into the book’s wider aims and the desires that animate it. The articles gathered here do not provide a single theory of emotion, nor do they claim that there is one correct way to experience and feel Taiwan. Instead, they show that Taiwan can be approached through many affective registers: pride and discomfort, anger and hope, guilt and responsibility, grief and intimacy, suffering and repair, apathy and uncertainty. Bringing these perspectives together, we ask readers to consider emotion not as the opposite of analysis, but as one of its conditions.
To study Taiwan is never just about observing from a safe distance. It is to encounter a messy field shaped by attachments, vulnerabilities, responsibilities, and ambivalent pasts and futures. To feel Taiwan is to recognise that knowledge is produced not despite these feelings, but through and with them.
Co-editors of Feeling Taiwan:
Po-Han Lee is an Associate Professor in the Global Health Program and the Institute of Health Policy and Management at National Taiwan University. He is trained in International Law in Taiwan and holds a PhD in Sociology from the United Kingdom. His research and activism engage critically with issues of gender, sexuality, disability, and health justice, and his recent scholarship explores feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches to global health law and the politics of knowledge in human rights, aiming to connect theory with social transformation.
Alvaro Martinez-Lacabe is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Society and Environment at Queen Mary University of London. His research explores the intersections of critical public health, queer studies, and activist networks, with a particular focus on HIV/AIDS prevention and the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV. He has published in journals including Culture, Health & Sexuality, and Critical Public Health.
Yu-chin Tseng is an Associate Fellow at the European Research Centre on Contemporary Taiwan, University of Tübingen. She previously served as a Junior Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at Tübingen from 2018 to 2025. Her research critically examines migration, intimacy, and state power in politically sensitive regions, particularly China and Taiwan. Tseng has published in leading journals such as the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies and the Journal of Contemporary China. Her interdisciplinary scholarship bridges sociology, migration studies, and Asian politics, offering incisive analyses of emotion, aspiration, and mobility within the context of global migration.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Feeling Taiwan’.