This book offers a timely and original exploration of how queer humour shapes cultural identity within Taiwans digital media landscape. Focusing on language, sexuality and performance, it examines humour as a form of resistance, connection and creativity across online queer spaces. Drawing on data from YouTube, Grindr and X/Twitter, it investigates how gay Taiwanese men use humour to negotiate visibility, articulate desire and respond to exclusion. Through drag queens mediatised interactions, YouTubers everyday expertise in sex and sexuality, dating app profiles and X/Twitter posts by erotic content creators, humour emerges not merely as entertainment but as a vital sociolinguistic strategy. These playful performances are deeply rooted in local language varieties and actively challenge dominant gender norms and heteronormative expectations. While humour serves as the books central analytical lens, it also engages a wide range of sociolinguistic phenomena, including narrative construction, indexicality, register variation, metaphor, indirectness, punning, code-mixing, self-deprecation, ironic politeness and stylised registers such as wúlítóu nonsense. These strategies are analysed to show how gay Taiwanese men craft voice, negotiate authenticity and build digital intimacy across genres and platforms. In doing so, the book draws on insights from fields including queer linguistics, humour studies, digital discourse analysis and East Asian cultural studies.
1. Introduction: Humour and Queer Asian Identities.-
2. Language,
Gender, and the Shaping of Tai-ness.-
3. Performing Femininity,
(De)Localness, and Humour: Drag Queens on Make a Diva.-
4. Constructing
Ordinary Expertise: Gay YouTubers Humorous Narratives of Sex and Sexuality.-
5. Grindr with a Wink: Humour as a Communicative Strategy among Gay Taiwanese
Men.-
6. Going Viral with Desire: Selling Same-Sex Fantasies through Humour
on X/Twitter.-
7. Performing Gay Taiwan: Reflections on Queer Humour,
Identity, and Digital Belonging.
Li-Chi Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Linguistics at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and a Visiting Fellow (FebruaryMarch 2026) at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Taiwanese and Polish Humor: A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis (2017) and co-author of Pride in Asia: Negotiating Ideologies, Localness, and Alternative Futures (Elements in Language, Gender and Sexuality) (2025). He is also the editor of Contemporary Studies in Chinese Languages, Literature, and Culture, Volumes 1 and 2 (2022, 2026), and the guest editor of the special issue Narrating Asia Multimodally of Image [ &] Narrative 25(3) (2024). His research interests include discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, with particular emphasis on the linguistics of humour, language, gender and sexuality, language and culture, nonverbal communication and comic book studies.
