Taiwan’s 2019 legalization of same-sex marriage has branded the nation as one of Asia’s most progressive. However, the Han-centric, settler-nationalist rhetoric of the Republic of China government often disregards the intersection of Indigeneity and gender expression, particularly among Indigenous queers, who navigate multiple marginalizations. This paper examines how adju—historically a term of endearment among Paiwan women (one of Taiwan’s 16 officially recognized Indigenous groups)—has been reclaimed as a pan-Indigenous gender/sexuality category, encompassing effeminate males, transgender individuals, and gay men. The growing audibility of adju in Taiwan’s popular music scene, particularly through performers such as Utjung, Pacak, and Ponay, reflects Indigenous queer agency in shaping spaces of belonging and recognition amid Taiwan’s contested international status.

As Taiwan democratized and repositioned itself geopolitically, the ROC government foregrounded Indigeneity through its Austronesian-speaking population, translated as Nandao-minzu (South-Island People), using linguistic and archaeological research (Bellwood 1985, 1995; Blust 1999) to frame the island as the homeland of all Austronesian-speaking peoples. This state-driven cultural policy, intended to strengthen diplomatic ties with Pacific Island nations, has reshaped domestic cultural narratives. In response, adju performers articulate the Nandao discourse, weaving Indigenous traditions with musical, political, and performative elements drawn from powerful female personas, including Mandopop diva Irene Yeh, American pop icon Beyoncé, and Hawaiian sovereignty activist Haunani-Kay Trask. In this paper, I argue that while adju performativity asserts Indigenous gender expression in Han-centric, heteronormative Taiwan, it also subverts state-driven Nandao narratives, transforming them into a lived Indigenous reality and forging both trans-Indigenous and queer alliances.

In the twenty-first century, global awareness of Mongolian music has been intimately accompanied with the global circulation of Inner Asian throat-singing (khöömii). By the early 2000s, young Mongolians in China recognized that khöömii could be their ticket to international success and began creating new music modeled after globally successful bands such as Tuva’s Huun Huur Tu (see Levin 2006 and Beahrs 2017). With increased opportunities for travel, study abroad, and invited teaching residencies, China’s Mongols have made concerted efforts to build alliances with throat-singing institutions and communities across Inner Asia, particularly in the Russian Republic of Tuva and the country of Mongolia, even as they have also incorporated a variety of local musical styles from lands within their own borders (in Inner Mongolia, China). In this paper, I use the case of khöömii bands in Inner Mongolia to trace how musicians stylistically mediate the transnational, global, and translocal through their musical work (see Beaster-Jones 2014) as a way to redraw cultural boundaries and to gain global recognition and audibility (see Colwell 2018). I demonstrate how musicians in Inner Mongolia engage in pan-Mongolic and pan-Inner Mongolian spheres that de-accentuate allegiance to Beijing and their identity as “ethnic minorities” and that, instead, emphasize alliance within and across the historical lands of the Mongols. Through their musical work – simultaneously northern- and inward-facing – Inner Mongolian khöömii bands performatively redraw musical boundaries for the knowing ears of cultural insiders, while still appealing to cultural outsiders using the unambiguously Mongolian sound of throat-singing.

In the evolving cosmopolitan context of southern China, transnationally circulating musics, cultural knowledge, and social identities are rearticulated through emplaced and historically constituted practices of listening and creation. Several bands have come to increasing prominence in recent years who draw on folk traditions of China’s ethnically diverse southwestern provinces as well as on transnationally circulating popular music styles deeply linked to African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black Atlantic histories and experiences. This paper is grounded in long-term ethnographic work in rehearsals, performance contexts, and recording sessions with the band San Duojiao (Three Step). Named after a popular folk dance from Yunnan Province, San Duojiao blends musical traditions of the Bulang, Wa, Hani, Dai, and Lahu minorities with reggae, ska, dub, and Afrobeat. I explore how these and other musicians in southern China self-reflexively reformulate and reinterpret musics from diverse sources within locally grounded contexts and experiences, reflecting their own subjective experiences of culture, power, difference, and globality. My analysis is inspired by what Shih and Lionnet describe as “minor transnationalism,” attending to “creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national boundaries” (2005, 7). More broadly, this paper aims to contribute to discussions of the ways configurations of human difference understood through historically and culturally constituted concepts and ideologies—such as race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, minzu (nationality/ethnicity), and shaoshuminzu (minority)—intersect and are reformulated through transnational circulations of local cultural practices and popular music.