Despite the hard-won legalization of same-sex marriage in many countries, the experience of feeling “unlivable,” a term coined by Rob Cover in his 2012 study of queer youth suicide, remains all too common, including in the Sinosphere. Thoughts of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicide itself are not rare occurrences. Many queer individuals, especially children and young adults, still live in the shadows, grappling with isolation and misunderstanding. Refusing to overlook the trauma and stigma obscured by celebratory narratives following the legalization of same-sex marriage, my research has concentrated on queer melancholia and suicide attempts. Through a process of deep reflection, I reached an unexpected conclusion: while suicide must undoubtedly be prevented through networks of support, melancholia need not be understood solely in pessimistic terms; it can also be read optimistically and embraced as a survival strategy, a means of resisting heteronormative society.
Building on this insight, I seek to develop the concept of queer melancholia further and extend the discussion beyond Taiwan to include works from Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia. The project examines queer melancholia as both an affective burden and a potential form of endurance. It asks how survivor’s guilt, shaped by the legacy of HIV/AIDS and the history of queer suicide, has contributed to the formation of queer melancholia; how melancholia circulates as a shared but often unspoken emotional terrain within LGBTQ+ communities resisting social normalization; how it can be mobilized through obscenity, blasphemy, and camp aesthetics to provoke and unsettle heterosexual audiences; and how it might be understood not only as a negative affect but also as a resource that enables endurance in heteronormative societies.
