This paper uses Elaine Showalter’s ideas of gender crossing and decadence in her book Sexual Anarchy and applies them to 1990s Taiwan and Taiwanese fiction. I trace the change in notions of gender in the past few decades in Taiwan in terms of globalization and localization and discuss how meanings of gender crossing and decadence in 1990s Taiwan are different from those in England in the 1880s and 1890s. 1990s Taiwanese fiction is both agent and product of the phenomena of gender crossing and decadence in 1990s Taiwan. For my examples, I choose fictions by four female writers, whom I call “daughters of decadence.” While earlier Taiwanese fiction tends to condemn homosexuality and female desire and take such condemnations for granted, 1990s Taiwanese fiction, even when they continue to denigrate such desires, are more ambiguous and ambivalent in tone. Thus, Li Ang’s The Labyrinthine Garden and Cheng Ying-shu’s What Good Girls Don’t Do portray on the one hand how loose women become men’s playthings, and on the other how these women’s feminist consciousness emerges. Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man simultaneouly vilifies male homosexuality and implicitly criticizes mainstream heterosexual society by relishing homosexual practice. Chiu Miao-Jin’s Notes of a Crocodile apparently denigrates lesbianism and male homosexuality, but virtually uses it to express anger at and protest against mainstream heterosexual society. In addition, new, unconventional visions are presented, such as the feminine, narcissistic women, the Material Girls, and the Queen Bees in Chu Tien-wen’s Fin-de-Siècle Splendor, the sexually autonomous fat girls ugly women in What Good Girls Don’t Do, and the beautiful male-tofemale transsexual in Cheng Ying-shu’s Humankind Should Not Fly. Queer gender notions are posited in Notes of a Desolate Man, where the male homosexual narrator directly overturns traditional disparagement of femininity and women, and in Notes of a Crocodile, where the lesbian narrator asserts violent masculinity. From a larger perspective, the fictional emphasis on female desire signifies that the meanings of female autonomy have extended to the sexual terrain, where women redefine their sexuality by themselves, thereby posing a great threat to men. Meanwhile, the various genders in 1990s Taiwan go well beyond the traditional gender divide: the sexiest woman may turn out to be a male transvestite, and the most masculine person may be a woman.