Humour, Identity and (De)Localness in Digital Spaces (Hardcover)

This book offers a timely and original exploration of how queer humour shapes cultural identity within Taiwan’s 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 book’s 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.

Li-Chi Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Linguistics at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and a Visiting Fellow (February–March 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.