Fortune-Telling as Healing: Queer Divination in Taiwan

Sang Chi Liu is a PhD Candidate in Computational Media, Arts, and Cultures in the class of 2028. Sangchi is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. 

Waking up before dawn during an overseas research trip, I sometimes stepped away from a room full of sleeping researchers to find a quiet outdoor place. Carrying my laptop, phone, coins, and a jacket, I paused to clear my mind and energy before beginning my work. There, I opened my laptop and, with six coins in hand, conducted divination and sent readings based on the coins through a messaging app. Drawing on my connection to both the materials and the practice, I responded to questions with the guidance of the coins. For the past year, I have been researching queer fortune-telling practices and how rapid developments in AI are transforming them, as part of my Ph.D. dissertation. Waking up to draw coins has become an unexpected part of the daily rhythm of my fieldwork: doing divination online while sometimes traveling as an artist-researcher, wherever the internet reaches me.

My fieldwork took place across multiple online divination settings, including an online fortune-telling practice based out of Taiwan. The coins are called Six-Emperor Coins (六帝錢), and they are said to carry blessings from the temple gods. I draw six coins at a time: heads and tails refer to yin (陰) and yang (陽), and their combinations produce one of sixty-four possible results corresponding to the sixty-four I Ching hexagrams. This practice is called I Ching divination, a method that is generally believed to date back to the Shang dynasty (商朝). After a consultation at an appointed time with people seeking divination advice, I use digital tools to record my own reflections on my reading, and how I felt about the interaction. The practice involves forms of interpretation, communication, feeling, and care that extend beyond the moment when the coins are drawn. Looking across these records allows me to trace a trajectory of my own practice and experiment with different principles: How do diviners try to make divination more helpful, for whom, and toward what goals? My reflection continue to change over time.

Traditional yin-yang cosmology can frame same-sex relationships as imbalanced or even harmful, and queer people may encounter divinatory interpretations that treat queer relationships as incompatible, dangerous, or outside the scope of a particular tradition. Before the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan in 2019, such forms of exclusion were often more explicit, with statements suggesting that same-sex relationships were abnormal or should not exist. After 2019, these forms of exclusion became less overt in some settings. Even when overt judgment was absent, diviners might say that they had not learned methods within their tradition to address same-sex relationships and therefore feel unable to provide spiritual guidance. Such encounters can leave queer believers feeling helpless and cut off from cultural or spiritual resources.

It was within these experiences of exclusion in some divination settings, as well as a broader social environment in which queer people have faced stigma, that online communities in Taiwan began to make space for sharing frustrations about divination and spiritual practices, as well as for developing more affirming forms of online guidance. In these virtual environments, users often employed nicknames to conceal their identities. What began as informal online exchange gradually developed into new ways of connecting divination with community, cultural belonging, and support. As the broader environment has become more accepting of queer people than it was fifteen years ago, and as online divination services have become more common, some practitioners have begun using rainbow flags or affirming language on the platforms where they advertise their services to signal that they welcome queer people.

I have long been interested in how our bodies and identities shape the ways we relate to the tools we use. As a performance-based artist, I often think about the tension between accidental encounters and deliberate control. I began experimenting with AI soon after ChatGPT was released, and I found that using it often felt strangely like having my fortune told. There is something mysterious about receiving a particular response in precisely the way that I do. AI is built to be believed. I have seen more and more people from marginalized communities describe AI as a source of comfort, guidance, and support. I have both hope and increasing concern about the potential harm that can happen when people engage in these practices without understanding their cultural context.

I was eager to explore a form of divination that I felt culturally connected to. At first, I assumed that my fieldwork would center on in-person encounters in Taiwan, with online spaces serving mainly as supplementary sites for communication, promotion, or preliminary observation. From a distance, it was difficult to know how much of the practice actually took place online.

As my fieldwork developed, I discovered that the role of online space was far more extensive than I had imagined. Online platforms were not simply places where divination services were advertised or where practitioners and people seeking readings first encountered one another. They were also central to the practice itself. Readings, communication, coordination, and ongoing forms of engagement could all take place remotely. In some of these cases, the practitioner and the person received their reading may never see each other in person.

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The degree of geographic dispersion also exceeded my initial expectations. Practitioners could coordinate their work through digital communication while living in, or traveling between, different parts of the world. What I had imagined as an in-person field site with an online supplement instead became a dispersed digital network. This shift changed not only where my fieldwork occurred, but also how I understood presence, participation, and embodied knowledge.

I had also not planned to deliver divination to anyone directly, but as part of my fieldwork, I was encouraged to experience the practice directly. I trusted this suggestion because I respected the expertise behind it, yet what still fascinates me is that embodied experience can occur mostly through text. As I became more immersed in this unexpected virtuality, I found myself paying closer attention to what time of day messages arrived, how long they were, and how small forms of written communication and emojis expressed tone and presence. I gradually came to see that digital ethnography was not simply another version of ethnography, nor a secondary method to be measured against in-person fieldwork. It was becoming a method of its own.

I am now reflecting on my engagement with the practice and continuing to develop questions. I am most interested in understanding the tools that connect people—to their bodies, objects, communities, histories, and cultures. I let these questions lead me: What kind of care is being delivered here? What kind of healing can text-based divination provide? As conversations with AI become increasingly common, what unexpected queer practices are emerging?

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