Juicy Peaches Growing in the Desert: An Ongoing March of Queer Citizenship
Translated by Pin-hsien LIN
This year (2025) marks the 30th anniversary of “gender mainstreaming.” The agenda’s meaningful legacies and substantive outcomes have now been examined in every domain. Perhaps we can also reflect on this globally shared historical moment through the lens of this year’s queer program.
Of the six films in this year’s queer program lineup, five contemporary works weave the history and current trends together, creating a mainstream yet alternative queer space. From the shifts of identity politics to queer citizenship movements, queer Muslims in Malaysia are calling for the government to be held accountable for corruption; a Wayúu transgender woman in Colombia is striving to reclaim her civic identity; a lesbian couple in Germany is trying to bring love to life through assisted reproduction; and Canadian queer icon, Peaches, and transgender human rights lawyer, Chase STRANGIO, are respectively advocating for art and medical rights for youth. The classic film Desert Hearts, meanwhile, preserves a rare and invaluable portrait of women’s experiences before “gender” became mainstream.
Queer as Punk challenges the boundaries between genders, religions, and races, documenting the evolution of the queer punk band Shh..Diam! since 2018. The gender transitioning of the main vocalist reflects the resurgence of conservative traditions and religious extremism, while highlighting the counter-community forged across racial and religious divides. Surely, gender transitioning shall come with discomfort (for example, hormone therapy causes internal physical conflicts), but it also includes the crucial moment of regaining dignity and true selves. The special alliance of queer Muslim and white women fills a gap in Muslim queer history, for women and trans people have been underrepresented so far. As Rosawita, an Indonesian member of the Asian Lesbian Network (ALN), said in 1992, as Muslim women, lesbians in Indonesia were held to stricter standards than men. Lesbian Muslims could not even socialize or participate in social movements as gay men could. In Queer as Punk, each song by the band and every street protest scene envisions the possibilities of the future.
The future may need a long wait, or it may arrive in a blink of an eye. In Soul of the Desert, the Wayúu transgender woman, Georgina, who lives in the arid landscape of La Guajira, Colombia, is now stepping into the last stage of her life, yet she still yearns to rewrite her fate—to reclaim her identity after 45 years. Because she could not speak Spanish, Georgina could only make ends meet. With the unhealed wounds and painful family memories, she’s physically and emotionally distant from mainstream life. However, Georgina is always tender and serene in front of the camera. That kind of peace forms a sharp contrast to the harsh desert landscape while embodying an enduring beauty. To take back what’s taken from her, Georgina left a fingerprint on the paper, and that mark ingeniously mirrored the unique ridges and patterns of the desert. That sheer beauty can only be felt and experienced on the big screen.
Another desert scene—Nevada in 1959—shows the possibilities born of the unknown. Desert Hearts became a milestone of non-mainstream film upon its release in 1985. It is called a cult classic, but at its core, it’s simply a love story between two women. Paradoxically, “the love between two women” may have had a greater space in the 1950s than in 1985. For instance, the lesbian canon The Price of Salt, which was adapted into the film Carol in 2015, was published in 1952. At that time, World War Ⅱ had just ended, and everyone was searching for new opportunities. The openness of the postwar era soon vanished during the rebuilding process. Women were forced to step out of the public sphere and return to their households. In the 1980s, almost everything went back to the old ways. Therefore, the collaboration of a female director and a female producer was extremely rare and precious. The space that this duo created, as quoted from the young main character, “I didn’t do it to change the world; I did it so the world wouldn’t change me,” further defines the core of later queer movements.
Peach Goes Bananas was filmed over 17 years, painting an intimate portrait of Canadian gender-defying performer Peaches. Even though she seemed too wild, too outrageous on the surface, her creativity springs precisely from the fast-moving era. The point is, Peaches never lets the world change her core. The strong bond between Peaches and the queer community partially reveals the mainstreaming of the LGBTQ+ movement and the tensions that came with normalization, as the Heightened Scrutiny documents how a lawyer in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) faced multiple pressures. Chase, the first trans person to argue before the United States Supreme Court, stood up for the Skrmetti case in 2023. He protested the law by which the government of Tennessee prohibited providing medical services for trans youth. The heavy pressure weighing on Chase came from the transphobic bias of mainstream media and the divisions within the LGBTQ+ communities. These two documentaries not only show that prejudice and discrimination never vanish from the mainstream, but they also reconstruct queer histories and minority subjectivities through personal struggles and emotions, which are often neglected in the celebratory scenes of marriage equality.
The name of Love Alone Can't Make a Child points directly to the inadequacy of the “love wins” rhetoric within the marriage equality movement when confronted with the realities that follow. The film documents the decade-long journey of a lesbian couple in Germany to conceive a child. Along the way, they went through relentless pressures from the medical system, biological clocks, personal emotions, intimate relationships, and financial constraints. Love may not dissolve such realities, yet the film crystallizes the question of how love, even across long years, can remain unbroken in its essence. For while love alone may not make a child, the inability to have children does not diminish love.
All six films in the lineup move beyond proud statements. Aside from striving for dignity in everyday life, these films also stress the ever-pressing question of “To Sing or Not to Sing.” Under the premise of not taking mainstream agendas for granted, we should value personal struggles and emotional worlds more in the present historical moment. In this way, as we are singing our songs, we embrace the power, and we keep those who choose not to sing and those who are unable to sing in mind.
Eno Pei-Jean CHEN
CHEN is Associate Professor of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She received her PhD degree from the Dept. of Asian Studies, Cornell University in May 2016. She is the author of Cultural Politics of Love: Colonial Genealogy of Modern Intimate Relationships in Taiwan and Korea (2023) and Cold War Feelings: Politics of Gender and Affect in 1950-1980s’ Taiwan and South Korea (2024).
