This talk explores how humour and teasing shape the performance of femininity and Taiwanese local identity in Make a Diva, a YouTube drag competition featuring Taiwanese drag queens. Drawing on interactional data from two seasons, I show how contestants use humour to navigate the tension between the marginalisation and reification of “tai-ness” as a form of local femininity. In particular, the talk examines how the perceived lack of qizhi (氣質, “refined disposition”) becomes a key humorous resource. Contestants playfully construct themselves and their competitors as women without qizhi through linguistic practices such as using Taiwanese Hokkien, referencing lower-class femininities, and exaggerating associations with female sexuality. Some queens adopt a childish femininity, while others humorously disrupt “successful” gender performance through indexical disjuncture. The final part of the talk moves beyond interactional humour to consider how performance itself—through costume, music, and dance—mediates humour, using embodied semiotic resources to produce a distinctly “tai” aesthetic. I argue that these humorous practices are central to how Taiwanese drag queens construct sexual identity, revealing how language, classed femininity, and local identity are negotiated through performance and play.

About the Speaker

Li-Chi Chen is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Linguistics at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He is the author of Taiwanese and Polish Humor: A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) and Humour, Identity and (De)Localness in Digital Spaces: Gay Taiwanese Men’s Language and Gendered Expression (Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), as well as co-author of Pride in Asia: Negotiating Ideologies, Localness, and Alternative Futures (Elements in Language, Gender and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 2025). He is also the editor of Contemporary Studies in Chinese Languages, Literature, and Culture, Volumes 1 and 2 (Kazimierz Wielki University Press, 2022, forthcoming), 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. He is a recipient of Taiwan’s 2023 National Science and Technology Council Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers (TOP) Grants for New Scholars.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.

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