'Taiwan, This is for You!' Nymphia Wind, Rethinking Homonationalism, and Mediated Liminal Diplomacy

This is an invited chapter that was accepted in 2025. The editors delivered the full manuscript of the collection to Routledge this fall. This chapter focuses on the work of Nymphia Wind, a Taiwanese and Taiwanese American drag queen, who won the sixteenth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I use Nymphia Wind’s acts of what I theorize as liminal mediated diplomacy to query the utility of homonationalism as a tool for understanding national and transnational LGBTQ rights struggles, social movements, and political action. I define liminal mediated diplomacy as a set of acts and practices in contemporary mediascapes designed to make visible the existence of political actors who are rendered invisible in the current international geopolitical order; these acts are designed to affectively appeal to members of the group as well as non-group members. I further use Nymphia Wind’s acts of liminal mediated diplomacy as a way to move beyond how uses of homonationalism often reduce and essentialize media and communication as “the media.” I move beyond “the media” to think about the importance of media formations, specificities, and convergences, paying particular attention to reality television and digital media.