Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape 9789048540075

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Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape

Asian Visual Cultures This series focuses on visual cultures that are produced, distributed and consumed in Asia and by Asian communities worldwide. Visual cultures have been implicated in creative policies of the state and in global cultural networks (such as the art world, film festivals and the Internet), particularly since the emergence of digital technologies. Asia is home to some of the major film, television and video industries in the world, while Asian contemporary artists are selling their works for record prices at the international art markets. Visual communication and innovation are also thriving in transnational networks and communities at the grass-roots level. Asian Visual Cultures seeks to explore how the texts and contexts of Asian visual cultures shape, express and negotiate new forms of creativity, subjectivity and cultural politics. It specifically aims to probe into the political, commercial and digital contexts in which visual cultures emerge and circulate, and to trace the potential of these cultures for political or social critique. It welcomes scholarly monographs and edited volumes in English by both established and early-career researchers. Series Editors Jeroen de Kloet, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Edwin Jurriëns, The University of Melbourne, Australia Editorial Board Gaik Cheng Khoo, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Simon Fraser University, Canada Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Amanda Rath, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany Anthony Fung, Chinese University of Hong Kong Lotte Hoek, Edinburgh University, United Kingdom Yoshitaka Mori, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Japan

Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape

Shi-Yan Chao

Amsterdam University Press

Cover image from Sentimental Journey, directed by Tony Wu and George Hsin, 2003 Courtesy of Tony Wu Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 803 3 e-isbn 978 90 4854 007 5 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462988033 nur 670 © Shi-Yan Chao / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Processing Tongzhi/Queer Imaginaries Mapping the Research Field Research Method Book Structure Note on Translation

9 13 18 26 32 35

Section I  Against Families, Against States 1 The Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary Filiality as a Discourse, and the Cultural Policy of Martial-LawPeriod Taiwan a) Filiality as a Discourse: A Historical Perspective b) The Cultural Policy of the Martial Law Period of Taiwan The Modernist Literary Movement, the Nativist Literary Movement, and Taiwan New Cinema a) From the Modernist Literary Movement to the Nativist Literary Movement b) Taiwan New Cinema The Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary in Outcasts a) The “Queer Family-Dark Kingdom” Imaginary b) The Local and the Postcolonial through the Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary Other Tropes for the Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary a) Tsai Ming-liang’s Taipei Trilogy b) The Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary: From Outcasts (1986) to Fleeing By Night (2000), and Beyond Concluding Remarks 2 Two Stage Sisters: Comrades, Almost a Love Story Two Stage Sisters and Its Historical Connections A Queer Feeling in a Socialist Political Melodrama a) Two Stage Sisters as a Socialist Political Melodrama b) A Queer Feeling in Two Stage Sisters Transformation of Qing through Two Stage Sisters and Yueju Concluding Remarks

39 48 48 51 54 54 58 60 60 68 76 76 90 94 99 102 107 107 117 131 138

Section II  Camp Aesthetics 3 Mass Camp in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema Mass Camp and Gay Camp, A Discursive Approach The Discursive Formation of Mass Camp in Hong Kong Mass Camp Impulse in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema a) Hui Brothers Comedy and Mass Camp Impulse b) Gender Parody in Mass Camp c) Mass Camp and Hong Kong New Wave d) Mass Camp in Kung Fu Comedy e) Mass Camp and Hong Kong Nostalgia Film Concluding Remarks

143 146 154 169 169 172 180 185 189 194

4 Toward an Aesthetic of Tongzhi Camp Queer Structures of Feeling: Gay Shame and Gay Melancholy, Chinese Style a) Gay Shame b) Gay Melancholy c) A Temporal Dimension of the Queer Structure of Feeling From the Queer Feeling to Tongzhi Camp: A Case Study of Zero Chou Camping in The Hole Concluding Remarks

199 207 209 213 216 219 230 242

Section III  Documentary Impulse 5 Coming Out of The Box, Lalas with DV Cameras Identity Politics and Production Methods Bringing out Lesbian Subjects in Contemporary China Lalas with DV Cameras Concluding Remarks

247 250 255 262 268

6 Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Postsocialist China 273 Performing Documentary: “Xianchang” Aesthetic and Reflexivity 275 Performing Gender/Subjectivity through Reflexive Documentary 282 Mapping Out Gender-Crossing Performance across the Geopolitical Landscape 288 Situating Gender-Crossing Performance in Postsocialist China 292 Concluding Remarks 300

Conclusion

301

Chinese Glossary

307

Bilingual Filmography

323

Bibliography Selected Bibliography in English Selected Bibliography in Chinese Newspaper Articles without Bylines

333 333 369 402

Index

403

List of Figures Figures 1-3

Posters for the Institute for Tongzhi Studies Events16 Figure 4 Poster for the INTERACT Event, Columbia University16 Figure 1.1 Outcasts: A-Qing and Dragon Prince 62 Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd. Figures 1.2.1-1.2.4 Stills from Outcasts 67 Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd. Figures 1.3.1-1.3.4 Stills from Outcasts 71 Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd. Figure 1.4 The Bell Tower of the Donghe Temple Chao Shi-Yan73 Figure 1.5 The Guanyin Edifice of the Donghe Temple Chao Shi-Yan 73 Still from Outcasts 74 Figure 1.6 Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd. Still from Two Stage Sisters 113 Figure 2.1 Shanghai Film Studio Figures 2.2.1-2.2.2 Stills from Two Stage Sisters 119 Shanghai Film Studio Figures 2.3.1-2.3.2 Stills from Two Stage Sisters 120 Shanghai Film Studio Figures 2.4-2.5 Stills from Two Stage Sisters 122 Shanghai Film Studio Figure 2.6 Still from Two Stage Sisters 126 Shanghai Film Studio

Conclusion

301

Chinese Glossary

307

Bilingual Filmography

323

Bibliography Selected Bibliography in English Selected Bibliography in Chinese Newspaper Articles without Bylines

333 333 369 402

Index

403

List of Figures Figures 1-3

Posters for the Institute for Tongzhi Studies Events16 Figure 4 Poster for the INTERACT Event, Columbia University16 Figure 1.1 Outcasts: A-Qing and Dragon Prince 62 Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd. Figures 1.2.1-1.2.4 Stills from Outcasts 67 Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd. Figures 1.3.1-1.3.4 Stills from Outcasts 71 Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd. Figure 1.4 The Bell Tower of the Donghe Temple Chao Shi-Yan73 Figure 1.5 The Guanyin Edifice of the Donghe Temple Chao Shi-Yan 73 Still from Outcasts 74 Figure 1.6 Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd. Still from Two Stage Sisters 113 Figure 2.1 Shanghai Film Studio Figures 2.2.1-2.2.2 Stills from Two Stage Sisters 119 Shanghai Film Studio Figures 2.3.1-2.3.2 Stills from Two Stage Sisters 120 Shanghai Film Studio Figures 2.4-2.5 Stills from Two Stage Sisters 122 Shanghai Film Studio Figure 2.6 Still from Two Stage Sisters 126 Shanghai Film Studio

Figure 2.7 Figure 2.8 Figures 2.9.1-2.9.2 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5

Still from Two Stage Sisters Shanghai Film Studio Still from Two Stage Sisters Shanghai Film Studio Stills from Two Stage Sisters Shanghai Film Studio Still from Corner’s Courtesy of Zero Chou Still from Splendid Float Courtesy of Zero Chou Still from Splendid Float Courtesy of Zero Chou Still from Death of Montmartre Courtesy of Evans Chan Still from Dyke March Courtesy of Shi Tou Still from The Box Courtesy of Ying Weiwei Still from Dyke March Courtesy of Shi Tou Still from Tang Tang Courtesy of Zhang Hanzi Still from Tang Tang Courtesy of Zhang Hanzi Still from Tang Tang Courtesy of Zhang Hanzi Still from Mei Mei Courtesy of Gao Tian Still from Mei Mei Courtesy of Gao Tian

128 129 130 225 229 229 244 253 260 265 276 278 279 289 292

Acknowledgements This book represents a journey of nearly two decades in my life and academic career, from my familial home in Taipei to New York City and Hong Kong. These stages of departure, transformation, and return resonate with Taiwanese filmmaker Tony Wu’s award-winning experimental film Sentimental Journey (2003, with George Hsin). On first viewing the film in 2004, I was deeply affected by the film’s delicately paced and layered images, its mesmerizing narration and sound designs, all masterfully integrated into a deeply moving testimony of the gay-identifying filmmaker’s self-discovery and transfiguration, and the haunting melancholy of his exilic journey from Taiwan to the US and back to Taiwan. My attachment to this film only grew stronger over the years, as I, too, embarked on an ongoing search for self-identity and meaning, while continuously processing my past and current life experience. The multilayered and sometimes fuzzy images in Sentimental Journey speak precisely to the ambiguous processes I often faced on this extensive journey. I am grateful that Tony Wu, one of my best friends and mentors, kindly shares the image from Sentimental Journey for the cover of this book. The main part of this extensive journey consists of my study and research in the Cinema Studies department at New York University. I researched Chinese queer cinema under the close guidance of Professors Zhang Zhen and Chris Straayer from NYU, as well as Professor Chris Berry from King’s College London. At NYU Cinema Studies, I am grateful to all the faculty members, especially Zhang Zhen, Chris Straayer, Robert Stam, Richard Allen, Anna McCarthy, Robert Sklar, Bill Simon, and George Stoney, and to Augusta Palmer, Charles Leary, Cindy Chen, Sherry Xiao, Sangjoon Lee, Li Jingying, Gao Dan, Cho Tingwu, Raymond Tsang, and Ruby Liang for their academic support and friendship along the way. Among the NYU community, my thanks also go to Angela Zito, Rebecca Karl, José Esteban Muñoz, Lisa Duggan, and Gayatri Gopinath. At Columbia University, I am tremendously grateful to Myron Cohen for offering me the opportunity to serve as an INTERACT postdoctoral fellow in the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, where I also enjoyed the academic support and friendship of my colleagues Robert Barnett, Murray Rubinstein, Jim Cheng, Tseng Hsun-hui, Saskia Schaefer, and Michael Griffiths. My gratitude at Columbia also goes to Jane Gaines and Richard Peña from the Film Studies department. Meanwhile, through the CUNY-based Institute for Tongzhi Studies, my dear sisters Kiang Mai, her partner Melissa Chang,

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Liu Wen, Sam Zhao, and I facilitated a tongzhi/queer social network via the various cultural events we organized and sponsored in the NYC area. I deeply cherish the friendship and forms of support I received through this network during my days in New York. In Taiwan, I am indebted to Teresa Huang, Hsueh Hui-ling, and Wang Chun-chi of the Taiwan Film Institute (previously Taipei Film Archive), for their assistance with my research. I am deeply grateful to Chang Hsiao-hung, Liou Liang-ya, Wen Tien-hsiang, Li You-xin, Tsai Ming-liang, Tony Wu, Zero Chou and Hoho Liu, Mickey Chen, Edwin Chen, Chi Ta-wei, Antonia Chao, Chen Fang-ming, Zeng Xiu-ping, Shiau Hong-chi, Sophie Lin, Li You-ning, Mingson Chou, Jennifer Jao, Tori Tan, Tsao Yu-ling, Justin Huang, Tony Chang, Agnes Lee, Amy Wen, Chen Jo-fei, Lu Zhong-ji, Ying Cheng-ru, Anthony Lian, Kassey Huang, Chen Ming-lang, Guo Shang-sing, June Wu, Michelle Yeh, and Huang Cui-hua, who have in various ways helped with this project. In Hong Kong, I am grateful to the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University for its generous support of my research, teaching and publication. My special thanks go to my dear friends in Hong Kong in general, especially Emilie Yeh, Darrell Davis, Yau Ching, Evans Chan, Tan Jia, Kit Hung, Lim Song Hwee, Lucetta Kam, Alvin Wong, Denise Tang and Yang Ching-yi, Travis Kong, Siu Cho Joseph, Luo Feng, Calvin Hui, June Tang, Enoch Tam, Vincent Chui, Simon Chung, Quentin Lee, Louisa Wei, and Huang Zhi-hui. For their help with my research on Mainland Chinese queer film and media, my profound gratitude goes to Cui Zi’en, Shi Tou and Ming Ming, Fan Popo, Wei Xiaogang, Ying Weiwei, Gao Tian, Zhang Hanzi, Bao Hongwei, Jamie Zhao, Shi Chuan, He Xiaopei and Yuan Yuan, Ana Huang, Xu Bin, Yao Yao, Dajing, Du Haibin, Zhang Yuan, Wu Wenguang, and Qiu Jiongjiong. At international conferences over the years, especially the annual SCMS and AAS conferences, I have enjoyed the friendship and “comradeship” of a cohort of scholars working on queer Asia, including Victor Fan, Tan Hoang Nguyen, Arnika Fuhrmann, Patricia White, Ungsan Kim, Tsai Hwa-Jen, Wang Chun-chi, Dredge Kang, Jih-fei Cheng, AW Lee, Lim Song Hwee, Hong Guo-juin, Luke Robinson, and Wu Weiting, as well as Richard Dyer, Howard Chiang, Ari Heinrich, Shih Shu-mei, Lisa Rofel, Helen Leung, Barbara Hammer, Earl Jackson, Jim Wren, Tam See Kam, E.K. Tan, Beth Tsai, Nick Trask, Scott Myers, Wang Yiman, Wang Qi, Ma Jingchao, Qin Yiping, Doris Ho, Kao Ying-chao, and Brandon Kemp, through various connections. All their support and encouragement has been tremendously important to me along this otherwise lonely journey. The expansive research for Chapter 3, “Mass Camp in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema,” could not have been completed without the research

Acknowledgements

11

funding from a General Research Fund award, “Hong Kong Camp: The Poetics of Camp through Hong Kong Mass Culture and Cinema,” Research Grants Council, Hong Kong, 2017-2018 (HKBU, No. 12661016). I appreciate this financial support and my research assistant Ho Hangyuan’s hard work. A different version of my Chapter 5 previously appeared in Chris Berry et al, The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record, under the title “Coming Out of The Box, Marching as Dykes”; a slightly different version of Chapter 6 previously appeared in Yau Ching (ed.), As Normal As Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong, under the same title. I thank Hong Kong University Press for permission to reproduce the material. At Amsterdam University Press, I am deeply grateful to my editor, Saskia Gieling, for her very thoughtful assistance with the whole publishing process, and to Victoria Blud for her meticulous, amazing copyediting work. Last but not least, I would like to thank and dedicate this book to my parents, Chao Ju-jen and Hsu Hsiu-feng (1930-2016), and my husband, Bennett Marcus, for their love and unwavering support all the way.



Introduction: Processing Tongzhi/Queer Imaginaries

Since the mid-1980s, the West has been “discovering” Chinese cinema. At the same time, more frequent multinational cooperation in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China has reconfigured the regional landscape of mass media. From pre-production and funding to distribution and exhibition, Chinese cinema crosses the geopolitical boundaries of traditional nationstates. As cinematic interaction between the “three Chinas” increases, the changing mediascape has prompted some to rethink what “China” is, and what the potential meaning of “Chinese cinema” is. Originally introduced by Taiwan- and Hong Kong-based scholars in the early 1990s, the phrase “Chinese-language film” (huayu dianying) has broadened to designate “any film produced in a Chinese-speaking society.”1 A linguistic description, so to speak, has been used “to unify and supersede older geographical divisions and political discriminations”2 amid the changing geopolitics and mediascapes in post-Cold War Chinese-speaking societies.3 Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and subsequently Mainland China have also seen the rise of tongzhi/queer movements and the emergence of tongzhi/queer cultures, studies, and communal consciousness. The term tongzhi first translated the Soviet concept of “comrade” (or cadre), and was initially adopted by the Communist and Nationalist Parties alike. 1 Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, “Introduction: Mapping the Field of ChineseLanguage Cinema,” p. 10. 2 Ibid. 3 A 1992 conference organized by Li Tian-duo saw Mainland film scholars invited to Taiwan for the first time. A similar conference was held at Hong Kong Baptist University in 1996; meanwhile, Taiwan’s Golden Horse Film Festival opened entries to “all Chinese language films, regardless of which of the three Chinas they were produced in,” and established a Chinese-language film exhibition to better reflect the changing geopolitical and media landscape of the Asia-Pacific Region. For early studies of “Chinese-language film,” see Zheng Shu-sen (ed.), Wenhua piping yu huayu dianying (Cultural criticism and Chinese-language film); Li Tian-duo (ed.), Dangdai huayu dianying lunshu (Discourses on contemporary Chinese-language film); Cara Cheng and Liu Xian-cheng (eds.), Huayu yingpian guanmozhan, zhuanti tekan (Chinese-language film exhibition, catalogue and anthology).

Chao, Shi-Yan, Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462988033_intro

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After 1949, tongzhi became the preferred non-hierarchical term to address everyone under the communist regime in People’s Republic of China. 4 While it is still used in present-day China for formal introductions, especially in public ceremonies,5 its popularity as an everyday appellation has waned in China’s postsocialist era (from the 1980s onward). In the meantime, tongzhi was appropriated by queer communities and officially introduced to the public by Hong Kong gay critics Michael Lam (a.k.a. Maike) and Edward Lam (a.k.a. Lin Yihua),6 at first casually, in some of Michael Lam’s writings in around 1985,7 and then formally by Edward Lam for the first Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in Hong Kong in December 1988.8 Within a few years, tongzhi became the most common term in Hong Kong, Taiwan,9 and (by the new millennium) metropolitan areas in Mainland China, to refer to those who are characterized by samesex attractions. By original definition, tongzhi is an umbrella term that includes all individuals who are critical of heteronormativity,10 involving 4 Bao Hongwei. “From Comrade to Queer: A Genealogy of Tongzhi,” in Queer Comrades. p. 71. 5 Engebretsen, and Schroeder, “Introduction: Queer/Tongzhi China,” in Engebretsen and Schroeder (eds.), Queer/Tongzhi China, p. 5. 6 As Michael Lam recalls, tongzhi’s queer appropriation started to circulate in private occasions among Hong Kong lesbians and gay men in San Francisco back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. See Michael Lam, “Tongzhi jianshi” (A brief history of tongzhi), in Huchui buru danda (Single-minded, double-entendre), pp. 244-245. 7 See for instance, Michael Lam’s reviews (under the pen name “Yuxian Youzi”), “Tongzhi reng xu nuli: Weiguo Junhuen” (Comrades must continue f ighting: Wreaths at the Foot of the Mountain) and “Renjian you Zoushuang” (An Early Frost in the human world). In the first, Lam uses tongzhi somewhat ambiguously, perhaps since this film was produced and set in Mainland China. Reviewing the latter film, an American drama, he remarks, “Coming out has been deemed pivotal for tongzhi individuals,” suggesting the term is interchangeable with “homosexual.” 8 Xiaomingxiong, “Yishu zhongxing shi’nian geming” (The Arts Center’s decade-long revolution). 9 The term “tongzhi” was formally introduced into Taiwan through the twenty-ninth Golden Horse Film Festival (Taipei, 1992), which included a special program in its International Film Exhibition. “Ai zai aizi manyan shi/Love in A Times of AIDS” showed 24 works from the US, Europe, and Australia that dealt with LGBTQ subjects, including “Xin tongzhi dianying/New Queer Cinema” (featuring Swoon [Tom Kalin, 1991]), “Tongzhi fangong/Queers Bash Back” (I & II) (e.g. Edward II [Derek Jarman, 1991]), “Tongzhi yuwang/Gay Desire” (e.g. Un Chant D’Amour [Jean Genet, 1950] and Caught Looking [Constantine Giannaris, 1991]), “Tongzhi! shiyan!!/Queer and Experimental” (featuring Massillon [William Jones, 1991]), “Tongzhi shang lu/Queers on the Road” (e.g. The Hours and Times [Christopher Munch, 1991]), and a retrospective on “nu tongzhi” filmmaker Su Friedrich. In November 2009, when I interviewed Huang Cui-hua, chief programmer for the 1992 Golden Horse Film Festival, Huang modestly gave Edward Lam (a.k.a. Lin Yihua) full credit for introducing the term “tongzhi.” 10 Chou Wah-shan, Tongzhi lun (On tongzhi); Chou Wah-shan. Houzhimin tongzhi (Postcolonial tongzhi), pp. 360-365. Even in its initial introduction to Taiwan through the 1992 Golden Horse

INTRODUC TION: PROCESSING TONGZHI/QUEER IMAGINARIES

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“sexual or gender non-normativity or an affinity with the political and social movements surrounding these ideas.”11 However, this word in current everyday usage, as Tze-lan Sang notes, designates predominantly gays and lesbians, especially when it is used unmodified.12 Hongwei Bao’s recent study further highlights an alarming tendency in contemporary China that aligns tongzhi with a “[male-centered], essentialist and homonormative identity,” in contradistinction to the more liberating principles of “gender equality, sexual diversity and radical politics that challenge sexual and social norms.”13 In other words, tongzhi, in everyday use and identity politics, has been gradually losing its radical edge to the concept of queer (ku’er), which was introduced to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the early 1990s,14 and subsequently China in around 2000.15 Although tongzhi and queer overlap in some ways, they are not totally interchangeable. While tongzhi emphasizes identity and serves as the rallying call for social movements, queer defies fixed identity categories and stresses the heterogeneity of both identities and human subjects. Tongzhi and queer, in other words, should supplement and remain in dialogic relation to each other.16 By stressing the term tongzhi in this project, I include a more affirmative connotation in terms of identity politics than the word “queer” tends to do. By using “tongzhi/queer,” jointly or in parallel, I aim to capture the nuanced dynamics between tongzhi and queer politics, and those of social movements and media representations. Although many tongzhi/queer activities and events are locally oriented, they generate translocal effects, especially through the internet and media circulation. Various events and organizations, such as the HK-based “Chinese Tongzhi Conferences” (1996-2004)17 and the CUNY-based “Institute for Tongzhi Studies” (ITS), have facilitated significant translocal conversations among Chinese tongzhi/queer communities (see Figures 1-4). The opportunity Film Festival, the term of “tongzhi” was used in a way that was virtually interchangeable with “gay” and “queer” and, to a large extent, “lesbian.” It was evident in the bilingual naming of the thirteen sub-categories within the special program mentioned in the previous footnote. 11 Engebretsen and Schroeder, “Introduction: Queer/Tongzhi China,” in Engebretsen and Schroeder (eds.), Queer/Tongzhi China, p. 5. 12 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, p. 236. 13 Hongwei Bao, “Queer Comrades, p. 88. 14 Chi Ta-wei, Tongzhi wenxue shi (A history of tongzhi literature), pp. 392-394. 15 Hongwei Bao, Queer Comrades, p. 80. Hee Wai Siam, Cong Yanshi dao xingshi (From amorous histories to sexual histories), p. 74. 16 Chi Ta-wei. Wan’an babilun (Sexually dissident notes from Babylon), pp. 12-13, 15-16, 64. 17 For a documentation of the first meeting with participants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and beyond, see Lu Jian-xiong (ed.), Huaren tongzhi xin duben (A new reader on Chinese tongzhi).

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Figures 1-3 Posters for the Institute for Tongzhi Studies Events Figure 4 Poster for the INTERACT Event, Columbia University

Figures 1-3: Three 2014 events hosted by the Institute for Tongzhi Studies (organized by Kiang Mai, Liu Wen and I), with guest speakers from China and/or Taiwan Figure 4: An event featuring Cui Zi’en (China) and Barbara Hammer (US) that I curated at Columbia University (and co-sponsored by ITS) in 2014

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for lesbians in Mainland China (or lalas) to connect with those in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US, alongside the establishment of the Chinese Lala Alliance (CLA) at the core of this transregional network, has played a key part in the conspicuous expansion of China’s lala movement.18 Since the f irst annual “lala leadership training camp” was launched in 2007, the Chinese lala movement has grown from fewer than five isolated groups nationally to nearly fifty well-connected, energetic, and informed grassroots organizations. What is the relationship between Chinese tongzhi/queer culture and global gay/queer culture? Is the evolving Chinese tongzhi/queer culture merely derived from a neo-colonialist process dominated by EuroAmerican culture? What roles do Chinese tongzhi/queer subjects play in this process? How much collective and individual agency can Chinese tongzhi/queers exert in our everyday lives in different regions around the Taiwan Strait? Accelerating globalization exerts its puissance in terms of scale, density, and intensity: it influences and interacts with subject formation. What dynamics play out between various global flows (of imagery, f inance, ideas/ideologies, technology and people) and tongzhi/queer subjectivity? Conversely, how do local or localized queer representations negotiate with the local/regional conditions? And what does identifying as Chinese tongzhi or being Chinese queer mean to a filmmaker? With these questions in mind, in this book I examine queer representations in Chinese-language film and media from a local tongzhi/queer perspective and in a rigorously contextualized manner. By media, I mean “communication media” in various formats: print, sound recording, film, broadcast, photography, and video, and additionally “satellite, cable, computer [and digital media] – both the physical objects and the organizations that activate them.”19 While I focus largely on film as a particular medium,20 I also hope to underline the role of other media in generating the flow of information about tongzhi/queer subjects in the larger, multilayered mediascape. This project thus locates the transmedial representation of tongzhi/queer subjects within the interactive and interdependent relations between the socio-economic and the cultural, the global and the regional, the regional and the local, and the local and the individual. 18 Email from Kiang Mai at the NYC-based Astraea Foundation, June 2012. 19 Croteau and Hoynes, Media/Society, pp. 8-15. Downing, Mohammadi, and SrebernyMohammadi (eds.), Questioning the Media, p. 487. Creeber and Martin (eds.), Digital Cultures. 20 Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, pp. 107-23.

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Mapping the Research Field The ongoing process of institutionalization since the 1980s has also changed English-language scholarship on Chinese cinema. In general, this process reveals a paradigmatic shift from a national cinema approach to a transnational approach (as illustrated by Sheldon Lu, Esther Yau, and Tan See-Kam)21 or to a transcultural media approach (as exemplified by Jenny Lau, Kwai-cheung Lo, and Shu-mei Shih).22 Although by the early 2000s English-language scholarship on Chinese cinema/media had analyzed ethnicity, transnationality, postmodernity, and postcoloniality, explorations of queer representation remained on the margins, and consisted mainly of individual articles. Crucial to this early queer intervention were the writings of Chris Berry, who has been immensely influential in shaping the contours of English-language scholarship on contemporary Chinese queer representation. He is possibly the first to discuss contemporary Asian/Chinese queer representation in relation to international circulation;23 moreover, he usefully discerns two major “patterns” in Asian Queer representation: its tension with kinship system and its reliance on traditional operas.24 Berry also draws special attention to the familial-kinship system, and proffers insights into the postcolonial interplay between Asian and Anglo-American social economies through such cultural formats as melodrama.25 My focus on the familial system and Chinese opera (Chapters 1 and 2, respectively) is significantly informed by Berry’s work. In retrospect, 2003 was a crucial year for queer interventions into Chinese film/media/cultural studies. Alongside Berry’s edited volume Chinese Films in Focus: 25 Takes, Debra Tze-lan Sang’s The Emerging Lesbian, and Berry, Martin and Yue’s anthology Mobile Cultures26 – the latter bringing into focus the emerging field of queer Asian cultural studies, followed quickly by AsiaPacifiQueer (2008), As Normal As Possible (2010), and Queer Sinophone Cultures (2014)27 – Fran Martin also published the first book-length study on the subject, 21 See Lu (ed.), Transnational Chinese Cinemas; Yau (ed.), At Full Speed; Tan et al, Chinese Connections. 22 See Lau (ed.), Multiple Modernities; Lo, Chinese Face/Off; Shih, Visuality and Identity. 23 Berry, A Bit on the Side; Berry, “Sexual DisOrientations.” 24 Berry, “Globalisation and Localisation: Queer Films from Asia.” 25 Berry, “Sexual DisOrientations”; Berry, “Happy Alone? Sad Young Men in East Asian Gay Cinema”; Berry, “Asian Values, Family Values”; Berry, “Wedding Banquet: A Family (Melodrama) Affair.” 26 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian; Berry, Martin, and Yue (eds.), Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia. 27 Martin, McLelland and Yue (eds.), AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities; Yau Ching (ed.), As Normal As Possible; Chiang and Heinrich (eds.), Queer Sinophone Cultures.

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Situating Sexualities.28 This brilliant monograph argues that queer culture in modern Taiwan is configured by a dynamic process combining local knowledge with globalizing LGBTQ discourses, producing sexualities that are multiple, shifting, and inherently hybrid. In particular, her article on Vive L’amour incisively illuminates the film’s “obsessive focus on graphic, architectural, aural and metaphysical emptiness” as an index of “the familiar cultural logic” that renders homosexuality “the cipher of heterosexual plentitude.”29 Implicitly, it challenges Berry’s contention that Vive L’amour – alongside East Palace, West Palace (Zhang Yuan, 1996, China) and Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997, HK) – typifies a historical moment of queer representation in Greater China that “breaks” the pattern of family narrative.30 While distance from conventional family narrative may not be equivalent to breaking the family narrative, I would emphasize the need to pay attention to visuals in queer narratives, and especially audio-visual elements. I argue in this book that heterosexual familialism – through its influence on both narrative and style – discursively disciplines our audio-visuality while reproducing different narratives. In particular, drawing on Martin’s insights into the tension between heteronormative narratives and queer-inflected stylistics, as well as the activist strategy of mask-donning as a way to negotiate queer subjectivity, I posit a tongzhi-oriented camp aesthetic (see Chapter 4) as a particular audio-visual expression that is born out of and makes plain the tension between queer subjects and their heteronormative family environments. My investigation of the discursive nexus between family and state coincides with the expanding scholarship on Pai Hsien-yung’s Niezi/Crystal Boys, arguably the most influential novel in contemporary Chinese tongzhi/queer literature. First serialized, then published as a complete volume in 1983, Niezi/ Crystal Boys was also adapted as Outcasts (Yu Kan-ping, 1986),31 the first Taiwanese film to feature gay protagonists. Compared with the abundant scholarship on Niezi/Crystal Boys,32 that on Outcasts has been sparse. Aside 28 Martin, Situating Sexualities; Martin, (ed. and trans.), Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan. 29 Martin, “Vive L’Amour: Eloquent Emptiness,” p. 178. 30 Berry, “Happy Alone? Sad Young Men in East Asian Gay Cinema,” p. 189. 31 The film adaptation of Pai Hsien-yung’s novel Niezi shares the same Chinese title. The novel was officially translated into English and published by Gay Sunshine Press under the title Crystal Boys, while the film was officially released on video by Award Films in the US under the title Outcasts. 32 For instance, Chang Hsiao-hung. Guaitai jiating luomanshi (Queer family romance), pp. 27-73; Yeh De-hsuan, “Yinhuen bosan de jiating zhuyi chimei” (The haunting spectre of familialism); Chi Ta-wei, “Taiwan xiaoshuo zhong nan tongxinglian de xing yu liufang” (Sex and diaspora of the male homosexuals in Taiwan fiction); Chu Wei-cheng, “(Pai Hsien-yung tongzhi de) nuren, guaitai, jiazu” ([“Comrade” Pai Hsien-yung’s] women, queers and nation); Zeng Xiu-ping, Guchen,

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from some generally favorable reviews upon the film’s theatrical release,33 only a handful of critical articles address the film.34 In a seminal article mapping Taipei’s landscape of desire, Chang Hsiao-hung and Wang Chih-hung compare Outcasts with two other films – Good Morning, Taipei (Lee Hsing, 1979) and Tsai’s Vive L’amour – tracing the ways in which they negotiate “other spaces”35 for non-normative desires (in contrast to the “mainstream spaces” of the heterosexual institution). While Vive L’amour hints subversively at “the heterogeneity of the family and […] the existence of heterotopias,”36 Good Morning, Taipei depicts spaces outside the patriarchal family in an “assimilating” process,37 and Outcasts works to rehabilitate its heterosexual family in crisis by “marginalizing” the other spaces of homosexuality.38 Huang Yi-guan likewise notes that Outcasts downplays the novel’s homoeroticism by reconfiguring it through the ethics of heterosexual family life, shifting the focus toward “the warmth of the family.”39 Like Chang and Wang, Huang essentially sees Outcasts as a conservative rendition of the novel, but Huang’s analysis places more emphasis on Taiwan’s larger “cultural field” in the 1980s.40 In similar fashion, my analysis of Outcasts and Tsai Ming-liang’s oeuvre rests on a detailed mapping of Taiwan’s cultural field from the 1950s onward. I look particularly at Taiwan’s state-sponsored cultural policy on literature and arts, 41 the nativist movement, 42 national enterprise during the Cold niezi, Taipei ren (Lonely subjects, evil sons, Taipei characters); Mei Chia-ling, Cong shaonian Zhongguo dao shaonian Taiwan (From adolescent China to adolescent Taiwan), pp. 237-282; Martin, Situating Sexualities, pp. 47-71; Liou Liang-ya, “At the Intersection of the Global and the Local”; Huang Tao-ming, Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan, pp. 113-142. 33 Liang Liang et al., “Niezi zou weimei luxian” (Outcasts is characterized by a romantic style); Huang Ren, “Niezi yingde yongqi jiang” (Outcasts deserves an award for its courage); Wang Chang-an et al, “Yibu dianying dajia kan: Niezi” (Combined criticism: Outcasts). In Hong Kong, see Xiaomingxiong, “Ai niezi: Niezi” (Melancholic niezi: Outcasts). 34 See, for instance, Wen Tien-hsiang, Fu yi ke dianying dan (To hatch a film egg), pp. 130-131; Wen Tien-hsiang, Yingmi cangbaotu (Treasure map for movie buffs), pp. 243-244; Wen Tien-hsiang, Sheyingji yu jiaorouji (Film camera and meat grinder), pp. 221-223; Timothy Liu, “The Outcasts: A Family Romance”; Huang Yi-guan, “Xingbie fuma, yizhi fasheng” (Gender codes, heterogeneous enunciation); Chen Ru-shou, Chuanyue yao’an jingjie (Through a screen, darkly), pp. 184-191. 35 Chang and Wang, “Taipei qingyu dijing: jia/gong yuan de yingxiang yizhi,” p. 117. 36 Ibid., p. 125. 37 Ibid., pp. 118-119. 38 Ibid., pp. 119-122. 39 Huang, “Xingbie fuma, yizhi fasheng,” pp. 309, 316. 40 Ibid., p. 292. 41 See Zheng Ming-li’s detailed account, “Dangdai Taiwan wenyi zhengce de fazhan, yingxiang yu jiantao” (The development, impact and reevaluation of modern Taiwan’s cultural policy). 42 Hsiau A-chin, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism; Hsiau A-chin, Huigue xianshi (Return to reality).

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War era, 43 Taiwan’s literary history, 44 New Cinema and its legacy, 45 and Taiwan’s propaganda films, 46 alongside important scholarship on Taiwan cinema at large. 47 Tsai’s films, mostly made in and about Taiwan, have been much studied, but most authors do not highlight queer appreciation of the films but rather their distinctive cinematic styles,48 modernist genealogies,49 and avant-garde resonances.50 Tsai’s work explores postmodern alienation,51 paradoxical human relationships,52 changing urban spaces,53 and dystopic globalization 43 Allen Chun, “From Nationalism to Nationalizing”; Allen Chun, “The Culture Industry as National Enterprise”; Allen Chun, “Fuck Chineseness.” 44 Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance; Chang (Yvonne) Song-sheng, Wenxue changyu de binaqian (The change in the literary landscape); Yvonne Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan; Chang Sung-sheng, Xiandai zhuyi, dangdai Taiwan (Modernism in contemporary Taiwan); Chen Fang-ming, Dianfan de zhuiqiu (In search for literary paradigm); Chen Fang-ming, Weilou yedu; Chen Fang-ming, Hou zhimin Taiwan (Postcolonial Taiwan); Chen Fang-ming; Taiwan xin wenxue shi (History of Taiwanese new literature); Chen Fang-ming, Wo de jiaguo yuedu (My homeland reading); Peng Rui-jin, Taiwan xing wenxue yungdong sishi nian (Forty years of the Taiwan new literature movement); Liou Liang-ya, Yuwang gengyi shi (Engendering dissident desires); Liou Liang-ya, Qingse shijimo (Gender, sexuality, and the fin de siecle); Liou Liang-ya, Hou xiandai yu hou zhimin (Postmodernism and postcolonialism); Liou Liang-ya, “Taiwan’s Post-colonial and Queer Discourses in the 1990s.” 45 On literary connections, see Yip, Envisioning Taiwan. The definitive volume on New Cinema is Chiao Hsiung-ping (ed.), Taiwan xin diaying (Taiwan New Cinema). See also Chen Ru-shou, Taiwan xin dianying de lishi wenhua jingyan (The historical cultural experience in Taiwan new cinema); Wen Tien-hsiang (ed.), Shuxie Taiwan dianying (Writing Taiwan cinema); Berry and Lu (eds.), Island on the Edge; Wen Tien-hsiang, Guo ying: 1992-2011 Taiwan dianying zonglun (Past films: An overview of Taiwan cinema 1992-2011); 46 Huang Ren. Zhengce dianying yanjiu (Film and political propaganda). 47 Lu Feii, Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949-1994 (Taiwan cinema: politics, economics, aesthetics, 1949-1994); Li Tian-duo, Taiwan dianying, shehui yu lishi (Taiwan cinema, society and history); Liu Xian-cheng, Taiwan dianying, shehui yu guojia (Taiwan cinema, society and state); Li, Yong-quan. Taiwan dianying yuedu (Reading Taiwan cinema); Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors; Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen; Davis and Chen (eds.), Cinema Taiwan; Guo-juin Hong, Taiwan Cinema; Wicks, Transnational Representations. 48 For instance, Jones, “Here and There: The Films of Tsai Ming-liang”; Rehm, Joyard, and Riviere, Tsai Ming-liang. 49 For instance, Lim Kien Ket, “Gai yizuo fangzi” (To build a house); Betz, “The Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang: A Modernist Geneology.” 50 Weihong Bao, “Biomechanics of Love”; Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness; Sing Song-yong, Rujing/chujing: Tsai Ming-liang de yingxiang yishu yu kuajie shijian (Projecting Tsai Ming-liang: Towards Trans Art Cinema). 51 For example, Read, “Alienation, Aesthetic Distance and Absorption in Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour.” 52 Guo-juin Hong, Taiwan Cinema, pp. 159-181. 53 Braester, “If We Could Remember Everything, We Would Be Able to Fly.”

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process,54 rendered through the dislocation of cinematic time that strains to bind past and present into a meaningful narrative.55 The relatively few academic considerations of the queer themes in Tsai’s work tend to focus chiefly on Vive L’amour (1994) and The River (1997),56 not least because of their explicit portrayal of male homosexuality; meanwhile Rebels of the Neon God (1992) and The Hole (1998), from the same stage of Tsai’s career, have been largely neglected.57 Partly to remedy this, Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 include in-depth queer readings of Rebels of the Neon God and The Hole, respectively. In Hong Kong, the mid-1990s also saw the emergence of tongzhi/queer representations characterized by a largely self-affirmative attitude toward tongzhi/queer identity politics. These works differ from past queer representation in Hong Kong, such as we see in the fantasy-inflected warrior-errant picture and opera film (where cross-dressing, particularly female to male, is a notable convention),58 and occasionally in contemporary dramas like Sex for Sale (Chang Tseng-chai, 1974) or “sexploitation” flicks like The Bamboo House of Dolls (Kuei Chih-hung, 1973). The affirmative portrayal of lesbians and gay men in 1990s Hong Kong had much to do with the increased visibility of queer activism following the decriminalization of consensual male homosexuality in 1991;59 alongside the rise of the New Queer Cinema,60 Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet and Kaige Chen’s Farewell My Concubine (both 1993) had particular local impact,61 and representations of homosexuality 54 For instance, Ban Wang, “Black Holes of Globalization.” 55 Jean Ma, Melancholy Drift, pp. 95-122. 56 On Tsai’s career, see Wen Tien-hsiang, Guangying dingge (Framing through lights and shadows); Yeh and Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, pp. 217-248; Song Hwee Lim: Celluloid Comrades, pp. 126-152, and Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness; Sing Song-yon, Rujing/chujing (Projecting Tsai Ming-liang). On Rebels of the Neon God, see Chi Da-wei, Wan’an babilun (Sexually dissident notes from Babylon), pp. 309-313. On Vive L’Amour, see Chang Hsiao-hung and Wang Chih-hung, “Taipei qingyu dijing”; Martin, “Vive L’Amour: Eloquent Emptiness”; Berry, “Asian Values, Family Values”; Berry, “Where Is the Love.” On The River, see Chang Hsiao-hung, “Guaitai jiating luomanshi” (Queer family romance); Martin, Situating Sexualities, pp. 163-184; Marchetti, “On Tsai Ming-liang’s The River”; Chow, Rey. Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films, pp. 181-196; Kai-man Chang, “Drifting Bodies and Flooded Spaces.” On The Wayward Cloud (2005), see Vivian Lee, “Pornography, Musical, Drag, and the Art Film.” On Goodbye Dragon Inn (2004) and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), see Guo-juin Hong, “Theatrics of Cruising” and Kenneth Chan, “Queerly Connecting.” 57 However, see Martin’s concise reading in Situating Sexualities, pp. 170-171. 58 See Chao Shi-yan, “Xungtu jia poshou, citu yan mili: chutan dongdai huayu dianying zhong de fanchuan wenhua” (A preliminary study on the cross-dressing culture in contemporary Chinese-language cinema). Taiwan dianying biji. 59 Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema,” pp. 426-427. 60 Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema. 61 Cheung, Marchetti, and Tan (eds.), Hong Kong Screenscapes, p. 9.

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were frequently seen as a metaphor for individual freedom as Hong Kong faced the impending 1997 Handover.62 Not least because of their often intricate but largely positivist engagement with tongzhi/queer identity politics, Hong Kong films of the 1990s have been widely studied. Happy Together (Wong Kar-wei, 1997) is taken up by Rey Chow, Marc Siegel, Jeremy Tambling, Song Hwee Lim, and David Eng,63 while the work of gay filmmaker Stanley Kwan is the subject of Lim’s analysis of the intertwined personal/political crises around the Handover; Kwan’s films Lan Yu (2001), Hold You Tight (1998), and Center Stage (1991) in particular have inspired seminal readings.64 Other notable subjects in recent scholarship include Yan Yan Mak’s Butterfly (2004),65 and Yau Ching’s Ho Yuk (2002).66 Interestingly enough, in her own writings on queer representations in Hong Kong cinema, critic-filmmaker Yau Ching often addresses the conflicting ideologies, spectatorial pleasures and even subversive potential of mainstream films unbounded by affirmative identity politics. She sees “forms of self-renewal through unconventional genderization” in f ilm classics like You Were Meant for Me (Wong Tin-lam, 1961)67 and calls for a “transgender reading” of contemporary box-office hits like Swordsman II (Ching Siu-tung, 1992) and He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (Peter Chan, 1994).68 In her innovative research on Hong Kong queer media, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (2008), Helen Leung further argues that “contemporary queer culture in Hong Kong is paradigmatic of the city’s postcolonial experience” overdetermined by the lack of any “political possibility of an alternative nationalist claim.”69 Despite the fact that gay and lesbian identities (like their nationalist counterparts) 62 Grossman, “The Rise of Homosexuality and the Dawn of Communism in Hong Kong Cinema,” p. 151. 63 Rey Chow, “Nostalgia of the New Wave”; Siegel, “The Intimate Space of Wong Kar-wai”; Tambling, Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, esp. pp. 67-75; Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades, pp. 99-125; Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, pp. 58-92. 64 Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades, pp. 153-179; Eng, “The Queer Space of China”; Marchetti, “Between Comrade and Queer.” Reynaud, “Center Stage: A Shadow in Reverse.” 65 Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Undercurrents, pp. 58-63; Martin, Backward Glances, pp. 157-164; Bachner, “Queer Affiliations.” 66 Yau Ching, Ho Yuk: Let’s Love Hong Kong (Ho Yuk: script and reviews); Dang, Conditional Spaces, pp. 127-140; Marchetti, “Handover Bodies in a Feminist Frame.” 67 Yau Ching, “Cong Youxi renjian kan dianmao dianying de nanxing qingjie” (A study of genderization and the representation of masculinity in You Were Meant for Me), p. 160. 68 Yau Ching, Xing/bie guangying (Sexing shadows), p. 92. 69 Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Undercurrents, p. 5.

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remain characteristically nebulous in Hong Kong culture, “undercurrents” of diverse and complex expressions of gender and sexual variance, as Leung eloquently shows, are widely evident. By analyzing filmic texts that may appear too “understated” or to pre-date affirmative identity politics – such as Swordsman II and Portland Street Blues (Raymond Yip, 1998), both of which have been interpreted by other critics as “failed” representations of homosexuality – Leung actively engages the critical rhetoric of “queer” while contesting the restrictive nature of “gay and lesbian” as an analytical category for Hong Kong popular culture. Swordsman II and He’s a Woman, She’s a Man also illustrate the theme of gender-bending popular in Hong Kong cinema, which exists in significant tension with the aff irmative politics of gay and lesbian identities. This phenomenon, I suggest, can also be understood from the perspective of camp impulse in Hong Kong mass media. In his seminal essay on the Western treatment of Hong Kong cinema as camp, Julian Stringer presents a two-fold argument.70 On the one hand, he proposes that camp response to Hong Kong cinema is “not only textually encouraged, it is aesthetically correct,”71 in that Hong Kong’s is “a postmodern, hybrid film culture that truly does […] provide a playful, knowing, self-reflexive theatricality.”72 On the other hand, Stringer also draws attention to cross-cultural camp appreciation’s unequal power relations, wherein “racial, ethnic and cultural distance,” alongside a “seeming lack of emotional investment,” become “conducive to the distance that allows for camp laughter.”73 For Stringer, the Western treatment of Hong Kong cinema as camp is aesthetically appropriate but politically problematic, since the “cultural capital” privileges the West.74 While I respect Stringer’s view, I am not entirely satisfied with his elucidation of Hong Kong cinema as textually and aesthetically camp. For one thing, his conception of Hong Kong cinema focuses mostly on its post-1979 period, just as the New Wave was reshaping the local film industry. His overgeneralizations not only include labeling Stanley Kwan’s post-New Wave dramas “playful” and thus campy,75 but also presenting martial arts films (particularly those of Bruce Lee and King Hu) as the only examples of Hong Kong cinema before 1979. He fails to account for the significant genre 70 71 72 73 74 75

Stringer, “Problems with the Treatment of Hong Kong Cinema as Camp.” Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 53.

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of comedy, particularly the widely influential Hui Brothers comedies of the 1970s and 1980s; nor does he consider the influence of different media (especially television, from the 1970s onward) on camp expressions in film. In Chapter 3, I thus conduct a genealogical analysis of camp expression in Hong Kong popular culture from the 1960s onward. This incorporates a more comprehensive, transmedia perspective on the one hand (cf. Stringer) and, on the other, a consideration of camp – in a locally embedded form – as a legitimate discourse gradually adopted and adapted by the Hong Kong populace since the late 1970s. I argue that this camp impulse in local mass media, alongside its discursive formation among the local residents, has played a crucial part in the proliferation of gender-bending images in contemporary Hong Kong cinema. Only a handful of fiction features from the independent filmmaking scene in contemporary Mainland China feature self-conscious portrayals of non-normative sexualities or gender embodiments. Arguably, Zhang Yuan’s East Palace, West Palace (1996) and Li Yu’s Fish and Elephant (2001) are the first to deal with China’s gay men and lesbians, while Liu Bingjian’s Men and Women (1999) intentionally leaves its male protagonist’s sexual orientation open and undecided.76 Here Cui Zi’en, an acclaimed novelist and critic, merits special attention since he not only taught at Beijing Film Academy but was also the chief organizer of various queer cultural events in Beijing. He is the writer/director of a series of independent digital-video films. His early fiction films include avant-garde fictions like Enter the Clown (2002), The Old Testament (2002) and Star Appeal (2004), whose queerness, Chris Berry suggests, informs “an unholy trinity of themes: the sacred, the profane, and the domestic.”77 Audrey Yue and Wang Qi, meanwhile, explore the “mobile intimacies” and “queer embodiments” in Cui’s experimental works.78 Cui’s documentary f ilm Queer China, “Comrade” China (2008) – addressing tongzhi community building – is analyzed by Luke Robinson and Hongwei Bao;79 and finally, docudramas Feeding Boys, Ayaya (2003) and Night Scene (2004) are the basis for Lisa 76 Cui Zi’en, Diyi guanzhong (First audience), pp. 44-45. For signif icant English-language scholarship on these works, see Berry, “East Palace, West Palace: Staging Gay Life in China”; Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades, pp. 89-98; Martin, Backward Glances, pp. 164-169; Williams, “Troubled Masculinities.” 77 Berry, “The Sacred, the Profane, and the Domestic,” p. 196. 78 Yue, “Mobile Intimacies in the Queer Sinophone Films of Cui Zi’en”; Qi Wang, Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese, pp. 168-176. 79 Robinson, “‘To Whom Do Our Bodies Belong’,” pp. 294-297; Hongwei Bao, “Digital Video Activism,” pp. 37-44.

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Rofel’s anthropological study of the pressing issue of “money boys” among China’s urban gay men, which for Rofel must be articulated through a reconsideration of neoliberal ideologies shaped by China’s socio-economic transformations since the 1980s.80 Alongside Cui’s docudramas and documentary films, a growing number of independent DV documentaries have augmented China’s unofficial archive of queer images. This group of queer documentary films emerged from what Lu Xinyu famously terms the “new documentary film movement” in the People’s Republic,81 which pointedly addresses topics or subjects ignored in official discourse. Such films contribute to what Berry and Rofel call the “alternative archive” that does not supplant the state-corporate hegemonic culture of contemporary China but “grows alongside [it] as something additional.”82 I identify two major categories emerging from this movement: one engaging with lesbian subjects – beginning with The Box (Echo Y. Windy, 2001) and Dyke March (Shi Tou, 2004) – and the second with male-to-female transsexual subjects (e.g. Miss Jin Xing [Zhang Yuan, 2000] and Our Love [Jiang Zhi, 2005]) and male cross-dressing performers, particularly Tang Tang (Zhang Hanzi, 2004), Mei Mei (Gao Tian, 2005), Beautiful Men (Du Haibin, 2006), Madame (Qiu Jiongjiong, 2010), and Be A Woman (Fan Popo, 2011).83 These two thematic categories are explored in detail in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, respectively.

Research Method My approach in this book is inflected by queer theory and cultural studies. Although both these critical schools can lack for definitive, coherent methodologies and clearly demarcated fields of investigation, I understand queer theory as a form of analysis that systematically challenges any theoretical or discursive practice which naturalizes sexuality, and cultural studies as “a radically contextual and conjuncturalist practice”84 through which to comprehend contemporary culture. My theoretical framework emphasizes 80 Rofel, “The Traffic in Money Boys.” 81 Lu Xinyu, Jilu zhongguo (Documenting China). 82 Berry and Rofel, “Alternative Archive,” in Berry, Lu, and Rofel (eds.), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement, p. 137. 83 Chao Shi-yan, “Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Post-socialist China,” p. 151; Chao Shi-yan, “Documenting Transgenderism and Queer Chronotope in Postsocialist China,” pp. 15-16. 84 Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, p. 20.

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the dynamics and negotiations of multiple layers – the individual, the local, the intraregional, and the global85 – wherein certain discourses are queerly rendered through various media in particular social and historical contexts, and as such this study responds to Arif Dirlik’s concern for “bringing history back in” through places.86 Alexander Doty offers valuable models for the multilayered formation of contemporary queer mass cultures, particularly the diachronic and synchronic dynamics between film texts, filmmakers, stars, and queer audiences.87 However, his conceptualization is predicated on American queer culture and tends to overlook globalizing influences and postcolonial conditions. Meanwhile, although Arjun Appadurai does not focus on queerness, he theorizes the flows and disruptions of finance, technology, information, images, and ideas/ideologies via the complex relations between the local and the global.88 Rather than taking a defeatist view of globalization as the “Empire,”89 demonizing capitalism (which is at once oppressive and liberating), and potentially erasing cultural differences, Appadurai emphasizes process, disjunctures, and heterogenization. At the same time, Appadurai’s concept of imaging/imagination as a “social practice” calls attention to the individual in the process of globalization,90 whose subject realm is increasingly articulated “in and through” technology and consumption.91 Here, Mayfair Yang’s writing sheds light on the interaction between the consumption of mass cultural products and the proliferation of imagined “transnational subjectivities” in post-Mao China.92 Lisa Rofel brings a specifically queer perspective to this phenomenon, placing queer subjects among other “desiring subjects” who avidly negotiate their “cosmopolitan” citizenship in a postsocialist world through their engagement with public culture venues such as window displays, print media, TV dramas,

85 For current critical attention to the intraregional linkages in cultural studies, see Yue, “Queer Asian Cinema and Media Studies”; Yue, “Trans-Singapore: Some Notes towards Queer Asia as Method.” See also Kuan-hsing Chen’s influential monograph, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. 86 Dirlik, “Bringing History Back In: Of Diasporas, Hybridities, Places and Histories.” 87 Doty, Flaming Classics; Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer. 88 Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” 89 Hardt and Negri, Empire. 90 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 31. 91 Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Hay, “Piecing Together What Remains of the Cinematic City”; Jameson and Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization. 92 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai.”

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and gay bars.93 The concepts of transsubjectivity,94 intersubjectivity,95 and “flexible citizenship”96 also represent helpful interventions in the intricate dynamics between queer representations and queer subject formation in a transnational framework. They conceptually reflect the particular ways in which queers negotiate their own Third Space97 and queer chronotope,98 their own imaginaries and disidentifications.99 To better understand the mechanism of queer subject formation and authorship in relation to queer imaging/imagination, I connect this macro picture with a micro one developed in the fields of queer/women’s studies. I draw on first Teresa de Lauretis’s and Joan Scott’s reconceptualization of “experience” as a process of subjectivity, which subverts the traditional insistence on a hygienic interior/exterior boundary and offers a Bakhtinian understanding of an evolving subjectivity.100 Secondly, I consider imaging/ imagination as one of the social technologies of self 101 and gender 102 (including what Butler calls “heterosexualized genders”)103 with a biological special effect.104 Thirdly, I consider “reality” to be ingrained in fantasy, where fantasy is “the mise-en-scène of desire.”105 Fantasy simultaneously conditions and produces subjects but also allows “a varying of subject positions.”106 Thus queer subjects at once experience and negotiate a reality/fantasy constituted

93 Rofel, Desiring China. 94 For instance, Kwai-cheung Lo, Chinese Face/Off. 95 For instance, Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen. 96 Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. 97 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 50-56; Chow, Ethics after Idealism, pp. 149-167; Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, pp. 173-184. Chu Yiu-wai (ed.), Xianggang yanjiu zuowei fangfa (Hong Kong studies as method). 98 Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place; Helen Leung, Undercurrents; Freeman, Time Binds; Dang, Conditional Spaces; Kam, Shanghai Lalas; Chao, “Performing Authorship in a Queer Time and Place.” 99 Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 100 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema; Scott, Gender and the Politics of History; Scott, “‘Experience’”; Scott, “The Evidence of Experience.” 101 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2. 102 De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t; de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender; Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”; Barlow, “Theorizing Woman: Funü, Guojia, Jiating.” 103 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” p. 21; Butler, Bodies That Matter; de Lauretis, “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation.” 104 Halberstam, Female Masculinity. Zito and Barlow (eds.), Body, Subject & Power in China; Zito, “Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries”; Zito, Of Body and Brush. 105 Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” p. 26. See also Žižek, Looking Awry. 106 Cowie, “Fantasia,” p 160.

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by social technologies that are supposed to interpellate historical beings into heterosexualized gendered positions. As image-making practices for filmmakers negotiate with the available discourses performed by decentered authors as “performers”107 or “orchestrators,”108 they encounter the discursive constraints of performativity. While Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity locates those who “fail” to repeat heterosexualized gendered norms within the “unlivable” zones of social life,109 Chris Straayer identifies the crucial distinction between “failure to repeat” and “refusal to repeat,” wherein the latter precisely embodies the sense of queer agency unwittingly marginalized by Butler’s totalizing formulation.110 This is echoed in Halberstam’s more recent appraisal of “the queer art of failure.”111 As Judith Mayne eloquently shows in her study of lesbian filmmaker Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979)112, Arzner exerts her agency through characterization and particularly mise-en-scène, and it is herself she is fashioning. In Golden Gate Girls (2014), Louisa Wei likewise shows how pioneering director Esther Eng (1914-70) fashioned herself in her daily life, characterized by her patent lesbian tomboyism.113 Like Fran Martin, I also draw attention to the stylistics and technologies of visuality/invisibility, for instance the transformation of female homoeroticism into asexual comradeship for the “greater” purpose of socialist nation-building (Chapter 2). More importantly, I consider audio-visuality: for example, the use of dubbing to solicit camp responses (Chapter 3), the role of soundscape in mediating queer affects in Zero Chou’s Corner’s (2001), the function of voice in the queer presence ironically premised upon queer invisibility in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole (Chapter 4), and the importance audio-visual embodiment for female impersonators in today’s China (see Chapter 6). Throughout, I argue that aspects of sound and voice, often overlooked, comprise a fundamental resource with which tongzhi/queer subjects perform and negotiate their non-normative subjectivities. While conventional discussions about queer representations mainly take the perspective of texts and their authors, I am convinced that (queer) audiences and the tongzhi/queer communities that consume queer texts – and 107 Dyer, “Believing in Fairies,” p. 188. 108 Stam, Subversive Pleasures, p. 191. 109 Butler, Bodies That Matter. 110 Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies, pp. 160-183. 111 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure. 112 Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole; Mayne, “Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship”; Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner. 113 See also Louisa Wei and Law Kar, Xiage chuanqi (Legend of Brother Xia).

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even actively assert their agency through queer readings – also engage in “queer performativity,”114 Alexandra Juhasz’s moving project AIDS TV, for instance, illuminates how a new community may form around AIDS as an identity and develop through AIDS videography and video-viewing, as a way of self-empowerment.115 Since I believe communal agency arises through cultural participation in both production and consumption, I have engaged in conversations with queer-identifying filmmakers including Tsai Ming-liang, Zero Chou, Mickey Chen (1967-2018), Tony Wu, Ying Cheng-ru, Evans Chan, Yau Ching, Kit Hung, Shi Tou and Mingming, Cui Zi’en, Fan Popo, He Xiaopei, and Wei Xiaogang. I also frequently refer to and consciously incorporate the queer readings “performed” by local critical agents, including those by pioneering gay film critics Li You-xin and Wen Tien-hsiang from Taiwan, Xiaomingxiong (or Samshasha),116 Michael Lam and Yau Ching from Hong Kong, and Cui Zi’en, Fan Popo and Wei Xiaogang from Mainland China. I thereby put my project in dialogue with the collective agency historically emerging from local tongzhi communities. The main body of my project is composed of textual analyses of Chinese queer representations, organized thematically (see below). Moreover, my approach is both diachronic and synchronic: I follow the trajectory of an idea or trace a discursive practice, as in the discipline of discourse analysis. Informed by Michel Foucault’s genealogical inquiry 117 and taking language as “an irreducible part of social life, dialectically interconnected with other elements of social life,”118 discourse analysis sees “language as social practice,” and considers “context of language use” crucial.119 Focusing on “patterns of language across texts as well as the social and cultural contexts in which the texts occur,”120 discourse analysis can be characterized by three aspects. (1) It involves not only spoken or written language but other types of semiotic activity that produces meanings, such as visual images, sound, and nonverbal communication (from gestures to dances).121 (2) Between texts and 114 Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity.” 115 Juhasz, AIDS TV. 116 Cultural critic and author Xiaomingxiong (1954-2006) was Hong Kong-born Han Chinese. To signal his rejection of the patriarchal social institution, he repudiated his original family name and adopted the self-invented “Xiaoming” as his surname (with the first name “Xiong”). He is referred to as Xiaomingxiong or Samshasha (see the brief biography in his Zhongguo tongxingai shilu). 117 Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. 118 Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, p. 2. 119 Wodak and Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, p. 5. Fairclough, Media Discourse. 120 Paltridge, Discourse Analysis, p. 1. 121 Fairclough, Media Discourse, pp. 17, 54; Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism.

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social practices are “intermediate organizational entities,” or what Norman Fairclough terms “orders of discourse,”122 wherein genres, modes, and styles constitute their key elements. (3) Discourse analysis, as Siegfried Jager maintains, addresses knowledge that must be located in “respective concrete context” that is inseparable from “a certain place at a certain time.”123 Drawing on discourse analysis’s emphasis on transmedia, genre/mode/ style and sociohistorical context, my discursive approach underlines Stuart Hall’s idea of “articulation” that stresses the “contingent […] connections between […] different social practices and social groups.”124 Also important here are Lydia Liu and Arif Dirlik’s notions of “translingual practice” and “translated modernity,” illuminating the localizing process of imported ideas in an indigenous context,125 and Zhang Zhen and Miriam Hansen’s notion of “vernacular modernity,”126 which casts early Shanghai cinema as a “translation machine”127 that synthesizes different cultural ingredients to create “a domestic product with cosmopolitan appeal […] in the realm of embodiment.”128 Crucially, my textual analyses incorporate two levels of contextualization. On the one hand, I consider the local within the global context, emphasizing the negotiation between the individual, the local, the intraregional and the global. In so doing, I stress the unevenness and multilayered-ness of globalization, while arguing against the simplistic notion of a “global gay” identity that either equates Western gay identity with modernity and Asian homosexualities with tradition,129 or conversely sees the global AngloAmerican-dominated gay movement as merely a form of neo-colonialism.130 On the other hand, I underscore the socio-historical specifics of local and local 122 Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, p. 24. 123 Jager, Siegfried. “Discourse and Knowledge,” p. 33. 124 Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, p. 122. 125 Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Dirlik, Zhimin zhi hou? (After colonialism?), esp. Chapters 2 and 3. 126 Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen; Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons.” 127 Zhang Zhen., An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, p. xxx. 128 Ibid., pp. 30-31. For film experience as a sensual and affective embodiment, see also Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts; Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media; Hansen, Cinema and Experience; Elsaesser and Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses; Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema. 129 Altman, Global Sex. 130 Other seminal studies on cultural translation, postcolonial hybridity, and cultural alterity that inform my study include Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity; Said, “Traveling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 226-247; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism; Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in

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discourses. Not only do queer representations negotiate with the available discourses, but those discourses evolve with time. In particular, tongzhi/queer movements have to varying degrees reconfigured the mindset of be(com)ing tongzhi/queer and thus in various ways influenced queer representations. Scholarship in Chinese and other local discourses voiced in Chinese are hence crucial to my research and analysis in each chapter, and I thoroughly integrate local histories and evolving discourses, avoiding ahistorical interpretations or over-generalizing theories. My overarching cultural studies methodology is thus characterized by a productive interdisciplinary approach and contextualization that highlights “historical contingencies and local specificities.”131

Book Structure Though I set out to provide the “bigger picture” of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, including as many individual film/ media works as possible, the wealth of material and the speed at which new works appear puts this beyond the scope of a single monograph. My selection therefore supplements the current scholarship either by foregrounding some lesser-studied titles, or by addressing certain more familiar titles from new perspectives. The works in question are linked through the themes and discourses described above; I also refer to numerous other film/media titles where they are relevant to these themes, expanding their scope further. Each of the six chapters tackles one principal theme or discourse – Chinese familialism/filiality (Chapter 1), Chinese opera/melodrama (Chapter 2), mass camp and tongzhi camp (Chapters 3 and 4), lesbian and transgender documentary (Chapters 5 and 6) – largely in chronological order in accordance with the historical context. The chapters also form thematic pairs: Chapters 5 and 6 (Section III) trace the “documentary impulse,” Chapters 3 and 4 analyze “camp aesthetics” (Section II). Chapters 1 and 2 both deal with issues under direct influence by state politics, intersected by Chinese familialism; the first section: “Against Families, Against States,” thus provides the cultural and historical foundation for much that follows. In Chinese societies in general, just as individual identities are ingrained in the familial-kinship system, so are Chinese tongzhi/queer subjects largely developed and imagined with regard to the familial. My opening chapter, Late Twentieth Century; Chow, Primitive Passions; Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity; Young, “Cultural Translation as Hybridisation”; Yiman Wang, Remaking of Chinese Cinema. 131 Chen Kuan-hsing (ed.), Trajectories, p. 4.

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“The Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary,” examines the representation of queer subjects in relation to intersecting familial discourses, particularly filiality (xiao), familial-home ( jia) and family-state in a Chinese cultural context. It offers a historical perspective on the discourse of filiality, along with a sketch of state-sanctioned cultural policy in martial-law-period Taiwan during the Cold War era. This survey is intended to counter the pitfall of cultural essentialism underpinning much discussion of the role of “filiality” in Chinese cultural settings. Against the hegemonic, official setup in Taiwan’s cultural field, a civil force was gradually taking shape on the margins, which eventually informed the modernist and nativist literary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and eventually the New Cinema movement in the 1980s. This historical evaluation of Taiwan’s larger cultural field is the foundation for my analysis of The Outcasts (Yu Kan-ping, 1986). Based on Pai Hsien-yung’s novel Niezi (or Crystal Boys), the film contests “family-state” discourse both in its determination to make queer communities more visible and by integrating local and postcolonial perspectives into the narrative and setting. While the term “niezi” (literally “bad” son, unloved by his father) has been used of gay men since the mid-1980s, this chapter also examines an array of other tropes that have likewise contributed to a Taiwan-based Chinese queer diasporic imaginary. In particular, an intertextual approach to the folkloric character of Nezha informs my reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s “Taipei trilogy” of the 1990s, which – alongside a rethinking of the queer diaspora in recent years – concludes this chapter. While the familial-kinship system comprises the foundation for Chapter 1 (and Chapter 4), Chapter 2 (and later Chapter 6), emphasize the influence of Chinese opera in queer representation. Moving from Taiwan to Mainland China, Chapter 2, “Two Stage Sisters: Comrades, Almost a Love Story,” investigates acclaimed director Xie Jin’s film classic (1965). Analyzing the film as political melodrama, on the one hand, on the other, the chapter pays special attention to the history of Shaoxing opera (or Yueju, Yue opera), which provides the backdrop for Two Stage Sisters. As a reflection on the history of the opera from the 1910s to around 1949, the film itself embodies the social history of the “Seventeen Years” (from the founding of PRC in 1949 to the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966), characterized by the promotion of socialist nation-building. Shaoxing opera was previously known for its all-women performances, but during the 1950s and 1960s a state-engineered effort saw actors integrated with the actresses on stage; the underlying theme of Two Stage Sisters translates this state intervention (against cross-dressing) into a narrative in which the overly (read “queerly”) invested life-force (qing) between the eponymous two stage sisters is redirected toward socialist

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revolution. I contend that the parallel mechanism that both intervened in Shaoxing opera and also mediates the dynamic between the female characters is characteristically heteronormative. By foregrounding the historical context of the opera, in my queer reading of the film I aim to bring out the female homoeroticism barely muffled by the socialist agenda of the Seventeen Years. Importantly, my integration of the social history into the textual analysis serves as an alternative historiography, responding to and countering the ahistorical tendency of existing queer readings. The following two chapters engage with the cultural translation of camp – a discourse admittedly originating in the West – in a Chinese cultural setting. Chapter 3, “Mass Camp in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema,” delineates the socio-historical context particular to Hong Kong from the 1960s onward, laying the groundwork for understanding the diffusion of mass camp impulse among a populace characterized by a “self-conscious, often parodic attitude”132 toward the artifice of conventions, particularly those associated with art, dress, gendered behavior, and media representation. This chapter investigates the particular ways in which mass camp has informed and been informed by Hong Kong mainstream cinema since the 1970s. A crucial issue here is the intimate relationship between mass camp and the proliferating gender parodies of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, as epitomized by the sensational blockbuster Swordsman II. Chapter 3 also traces camp discourse in Hong Kong in general since the late 1970s. While I argue that this is chiefly “mass camp,” affiliated with mass culture, the 1990s witnessed the rise of another branch of camp discourse in Hong Kong and particularly Taiwan, discussed in Chapter 4. This latter camp discourse can be labeled “tongzhi camp,” since it reflects upon the experience of being gay in Chinese societies. In Chapter 4, “Toward an Aesthetic of Tongzhi Camp,” I investigate the significance and articulation of tongzhi camp. After first unpacking the nebulous concept of “gay sensibility” in a Chinese cultural setting, alongside gay shame and gay melancholy, the chapter examines how a queer “structure of feeling” is transformed into camp expression in Corner’s (2001) and Splendid Float (2004), both directed by Zero Chou. Finally, this chapter analyzes the way camp is adopted and adapted by Tsai Ming-liang in The Hole (1998), where camp becomes a powerful implement for negotiating heteronormativity by playing on the mechanism of homosexual closet: there are no more homosexuals in sight, and yet homosexuality is still out there, imbricated in the film’s characteristically tongzhi camp audio-visual style. 132 Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning, p. 138.

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Shifting the focus from Taiwan and Hong Kong to contemporary China, the final two chapters tackle queer issues in the new documentary film movement, particularly exploring how digital media help shape emerging local queer identities on a global scale. Chapter 5, “Coming out of The Box, Lalas with DV Cameras,” focuses on China’s first two documentaries on lesbian subjects: The Box (Ying Weiwei, 2001) and Dyke March (Shi Tou and Ming Ming, 2004). It examines the relationship of technique (particularly the use of digital video), and “objectivity” in documentary filmmaking, particularly the question of how we produce knowledge about social others. I argue that the knowledge/power scheme we see in The Box sits uneasily with some aspects of LGBTQ politics; in contrast, the more politically activist Dyke March shows the filmmakers’ great sensitivity and responsibility towards its subjects. More broadly, this chapter illustrates the developing trend for independent production in Chinese lesbian documentary filmmaking, emphasizing both collaboration and the specifics of communal identities. My last chapter “Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Postsocialist China,” likewise focuses on two DV documentaries: Tang Tang (Zhang Hanzi, 2004) and Mei Mei (Gao Tian, 2005). Each centers on a female impersonator and is marked by a concern with spatial parameters and geopolitics: Mei Mei elicits particular emotional investment in its subject, while Tang Tang is an experiment in form. I view Tang Tang through the realist aesthetic of xianchang (literally, on the scene) and the artistic effects of reflexivity, examining the ways in which the film blends fiction and documentary to draw attention to the openness of its queer subjects. The film itself I dub “performing documentary,” while the subject, Tangtang, “performs gender.” Meanwhile, taking into consideration the matrix of social, political, and economic conditions that inform individual subjectivities, Mei Mei can be read in terms of geopolitics. Here I explore the multilayered significance of female impersonation and the contexts of its expression. Finally, I consider how the cross-dressing subjects of both films negotiate their subjectivity in postsocialist China. The epilogue readdresses the key ideas of the book and its thematic strands and interconnections, and concludes with the hope that future research will emerge from this monograph.

Note on Translation Unless otherwise noted, all the translations in this book are mine. The pinyin system of romanization serves as the general rule. However, commonly

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accepted spellings such as “Sun Yat-sen” and “Taipei” have been retained. In addition, for names I have adopted the spellings used by the authors and filmmakers themselves, such as novelist Pai Hsien-yung, critics Wen Tien-hsiang and Chou Wat-shan, as well as film directors Tsai Ming-liang, Tsui Hark and Wong Kar-wai.

1

The Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary Abstract Focusing on the theme of Chinese familialism, this chapter recasts the notion of “f iliality,” foundational to the familial-kinship system, as a discursive formation, calling attention to the way filiality has been differently maneuvered by different regimes at different historical moments. Foregrounding the strengthened links between filiality and loyalty in the reinforced “family-state” discourse of martial law-era Taiwan, this chapter argues that the family-state discourse is pivotal to what I term the “Chinese queer diasporic imaginary,” symptomatic of the insoluble tension between Chinese tongzhi/queer subjects and their family-based social settings. This Chinese queer diasporic imaginary is expressed through an array of tropes – including niezi, Nezha, AIDS, ghosts, and Chinese/Taiwanese opera – in various queer-themed films, beginning with Outcasts (Yu Kan-ping, 1986). Keywords: filiality, Chinese queer diasporic imaginary, Outcasts, Nezha, AIDS, ghost

This chapter investigates the representation of queer subjects in relation to discourses of f iliality, familial-home, and family-state in a Chinese cultural setting. To better capture the nuanced and multilayered meaning of such representation, I propose the idea of a “Chinese queer diasporic imaginary.” It is critical to introduce this concept at the start of this wideranging project: projected on the emerging queer mediascape, this diasporic imaginary juxtaposes queer politics and Chinacentric nationalism, thereby foregrounding the relative significance of the peripheral polities of Taiwan and Hong Kong vis-à-vis Mainland China. To articulate this Chinese queer diasporic imaginary, the notions of filiality and familial-home must also be interrogated, for they embody the patriarchal discourse so fundamental to

Chao, Shi-Yan, Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462988033_ch01

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Chinese cultural and intellectual history. The articulation of the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary, then, lays the foundation for my investigation of the queer-inflected camp aesthetic in Chapter 4; it also embodies a strand of Chinese queer representation equal in importance to that of Chinese opera (this will be more fully addressed in Chapters 2 and 6). But first: what is diaspora? On what grounds is the notion of diaspora relevant to queerness? And in what sense does the suturing of queerness to diaspora help account for the representation of queer subjects in a Chinese cultural context? Diaspora – etymologically derived from the Greek term diesperien, from dia, “across” and sperien, “to sow or scatter seed” – names an ‘other’ in that it historically refers to displaced communities of people, dislocated from their homelands through the movements of migration, immigration, or exile.1 As Robin Cohen notes, the prototypical image of diaspora is the forced dispersion of Jews, Africans, and Armenians, along with the Irish and Palestinians. 2 Commonly marked by “scarring historical calamities” in their homelands,3 these dispersed populations designate the more classical use of the term in diaspora studies; however, as Cohen and Stephane Dufoix note, this has been followed by an expansion of the idea in the 1980s and onward. 4 Gabriel Sheffer’s edited anthology Modern Diasporas in International Politics (1986), and William Safran’s article in the inaugural issue of the journal Diaspora (1991-), exemplify this disciplinary shift.5 Whereas Sheffer’s volume features a “comparative” approach to an array of diasporas, ranging from the Jews to the Chinese to the Indians,6 Safran’s article notably argues for the term’s “metaphoric designations” for “several categories” of people, including “expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities tout court.”7 While recognizing the expanded use of the concept, however, Safran does not sidestep the influence of the paradigmatic Jewish experience, as epitomized by the role of the “original homeland” that underpins his conceptualization of diaspora.8 1 Braziel and Mannur, “Nation, Migration, Globalization,” p. 1. 2 Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, pp. 1, 2-4, 18. 3 Ibid. p. 4. 4 Ibid. pp. 1, 4-8. Dufoix, Diasporas, p. 20. 5 Sheffer (ed.), Modern Diasporas in International Politics; Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” 6 Dufoix, Diasporas. p. 20. 7 Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” p. 83. 8 Ibid., pp. 83-84.

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The 1990s also saw the impact of a “social constructionist critique”9 of diaspora studies or, as Dufoix puts it, a “postmodern” turn in the field that gravitates to “paradoxical identity, the noncenter, and hybridity.”10 Writings by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and James Clifford best exemplify this postmodern shift. Gilroy, for example, remains critical of earlier formulations of the African diaspora that see all African diasporic individuals – scattered across several continents – as linked by a common heritage or origin. For Gilroy, such African diasporic conceptions conform to a kind of cultural nationalism grounded within “ethnocentrism and ethnic absolutism”;11 to counter this contracted view, Gilroy posits the “black Atlantic” as a cultural contact zone that engages in continuous negotiation between Africa, the Americas, and Western Europe. The consciousness of the African diaspora is thus characterized less by uniformity as by “a changing same” mediated by an intricate intercontinental cultural and social intermixture.12 Echoing Gilroy’s multi-centered view, Clifford’s writing further reverberates with the postmodern impulse by drawing attention to such differences as gender and class within racially or ethnically defined diasporas.13 In his seminal “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Hall remarks that, “diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all cost return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing, form of ‘ethnicity’.”14 Invoking the term diaspora with a “metaphoric” bearing, Hall contends that diasporic experience must be defined “not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ that lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.”15 Postmodern or social constructionist critiques of conventional diaspora studies, particularly their (sometimes metaphoric) invocation of an idea that gravitates to multi-centeredness, diversity, and hybridity, also inspired conceptualizations of queer diaspora. For instance, Simon Watney finds the “metaphor” of diaspora “seductively convenient to contemporary queer politics”: Against overly monolithic lesbian and gay politics, the concept of 9 Cohen, Global Diasporas, pp. 8-11. 10 Dufoix, Diasporas, p. 24. 11 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 30. 12 Ibid., p. xi. 13 Clifford, “Diasporas,” in Routes, pp. 244-277. For Clifford’s discussion of gender and class vis-à-vis ethnically defined diasporic experience, see especially pp. 245, 257-260, 271-274. 14 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” p. 235. 15 Ibid.

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diaspora enables a consideration “of diversification, of scattering, fracturing, separate developments” around the shared basis of homosexual desire.16 In particular, Watney points to a diasporic subsistence resulting from one’s homosexuality that is “not so much external exile […] [as] a form of internal exile, more strictly akin to legal and cultural quarantine.”17 Alan Sinfield, on the other hand, compares homosexuality to race and ethnicity on their shared basis of social constructedness, highlighting the characteristic hybridity of diasporic culture. For Sinfield, “gay subculture, certainly, is hybrid,” and its hybridity derives from “the difficulty we experience in envisioning ourselves beyond the framework of normative heterosexism.”18 According to Sinfield, “lesbians and gay men are stuck at the moment of emergence. For coming out is not once-and-for-all; like [diasporic Africans who are poised between alternative homelands], we never quite arrive.”19 Inevitably marked by hybridity, gay subculture, for Sinfield, nonetheless represents a space that is “not entirely incorporated, in which we may pursue our own conversations […] [while] retaining a strong sense of diversity, of provisionality, of constructedness.”20 It is worth noting that in celebrating the role of gay subculture, even urging lesbians and gay men who come out to enter into gay subcultures, Alan Sinfield seems to downplay the fact that queers of color and queer women generally do not have access to the communal resources that white gay men do. This problem becomes manifest when he celebrates the “advantage” of gay subculture’s entanglement in heterosexism, which “makes us the perfect subversive implants, the quintessential enemy within […] We emanate from within the dominant[,] troubling the straightgeist with a separation that cannot be completed.”21 However, for queers of color, “they” are barely “within the dominant” to begin with; Sinfield’s claim to be the “quintessential enemy within [the straightgeist]” is predicated on racial whiteness. Elsewhere, Sinfield states that gay subcultures are where “we may address, in terms that make sense to us, the problems that confront us,” including matters of class, racial exploitations, misogyny, and so on.22 I would counter that a race (or class or gender) issue is something that must (not “may”) be addressed in the community. If some race- (or class- or gender-) related issues are viewed as not significant enough to “make [much] sense” to the dominant 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Watney, “AIDS and the Politics of Queer Diaspora,” p. 59. Ibid., p. 60. Sinfield, “Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Hybridity,” pp. 29, 30. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 40.

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(white/middle-class/male) “we” within the gay community – are these still “problems” that deserve attention? Simply put, Sinfield’s formulation can downplay the intricate, sometimes conflicting, power relations operating within the community. In a similar vein, Watney’s formulation, with its call for the diasporization of queer culture, is unwittingly marked by a sense of Euro-American centricity. Listing “our queer cultural divinities” (including Divine, Pasolini, and k.d. lang), Watney proclaims that “We have our queer canon, and it is nothing if not diasporic,” and immediately confines and defines the diasporic queer canon within Euro-American culture.23 Equally problematic is Watney’s association of queer diaspora with “our direct experience of overseas travel,”24 which, as Anne-Marie Fortier points out, is “most often than not founded on privilege and, for white Euro-American males, freedom of movement.”25 Watney’s queer diasporic subject, as epitomized by this liberated traveler, is disembodied and racially/ethnically unmarked. My proposal for a Chinese queer diasporic imaginary is largely intended to counter the racial/ethnic insensitivity and unthinking Euro-American centricity of such conceptualizations of queer diaspora. In particular, I mean to foreground Chinese experience: per Watney’s insights on “internal exile” vis-à-vis homosexuality, the Chinese queer diaspora further emphasizes the haunting influence of such notions as filiality (xiao), familial-home ( jia) and family-state ( jia-guo) that are particular to Chinese cultural settings, and which historically have been politically mobilized in defining and disciplining human subjects. As shown in the case of martial law-period Taiwan during the Cold War, these discourses were politically maneuvered to great effect, making them the principal markers of normative subjectivity on the island and affecting the modern tongzhi/queer experience of both internal exile (i.e. individuals’ sense of displacement within their home country due to their nonnormative subjectivity) and to a lesser extent, external diasporic exile. Echoing Sinfield’s interpretation of cultural hybridity with respect to homosexuality, I will also draw attention to an array of culturally specific tropes that – though not specifically queer in their original meanings – have been adopted and adapted to help configurate a Chinese-oriented queer diasporic imaginary. 23 Watney, “AIDS and the Politics of Queer Diaspora,” p. 65. Watney’s list includes John Waters, Derek Jarman, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Townshend Warner, Morrissey, and Frank O’Hare. 24 Ibid., p. 61. 25 Fortier, “Queer Diaspora,” p. 187.

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The queerness of my proposed Chinese diasporic imaginary, moreover, contests the homogenizing and nationalist tendencies underpinning much Chinese diaspora discourse since the 1990s. As Ien Ang points out, the danger of the current valorization of “diaspora” among overseas Chinese communities, is that the prescribed ramification of the idea is “fundamentally nationalistic: it feeds into a transnational nationalism based on the presumption of internal ethnic sameness and external ethnic distinctiveness.”26 For Wang Gungwu and Shih Shu-mei, the expression of Chinese diaspora may also entail the false image of a single Chinese community that is ultimately loyal to China, to the detriment of the autonomy and specificity of local Chinese communities in different parts of the world.27 As Shih cautions, the Chinese diaspora has often become the alibi for assigning Chineseness as an ontological condition, readily subjected “to nationalist hailings by China, to variously motivated cultural essentialisms, even though generations may have lived and died and centuries may have elapsed since the dispersal.”28 Against such drawbacks, Shih urges crucial attention to the openness and recent changes,29 while Wang advocates that the Chinese overseas “be studied in the context of their respective national environments, and taken out of a dominant China reference point.”30 Wang’s advice gives particular priority to difference and diversity within the diaspora: for him, there are “many kinds of Chinese,” even “many different Chinese diasporas.”31 In line with Wang’s diasporic pluralism, queerness should be seen as another effective intervention in dominant Chinese diaspora discourse. Here work by David Eng, Gayatri Gopinath, Nguyen Tan Hoang, and Martin F. Manalansan  IV merits special attention.32 While Watney’s and Sinf ield’s writings focus on internal exile and diasporizing the queer, Eng, Gopinath, Manalansan and Nguyen instead queer the diaspora.33 As a critical tool for political and scholarly intervention, queer diaspora highlights the “tension between the homoscape and 26 Ang, “Undoing Diaspora,” pp. 82-83. 27 Wang, Gungwu. “A Single Chinese Diaspora?” Shih, Visuality and Identity. 28 Shih, Visuality and Identity, p. 185. 29 Shih, Fan lisan (Against diaspora), p. 48; Shih, “Against Diaspora,” p. 45. 30 Wang Gungwu, “A Single Chinese Diaspora?” p. 1. 31 Ibid., p. 17. 32 Eng, “Out Here and Over There”; Eng, Racial Castration; Eng, The Feeling of Kinship; Gopinath, “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora”; Gopinath, Impossible Desires; Gopinath, Unruly Visions; Nguyen, A View from the Bottom; Manalansan, “In the Shadows of Stonewall”; Manalansan IV, Global Divas. 33 I borrow the terms “diaspori(ci)zing the queer” and “queering the diaspora” from Jasbir K. Puar’s article, “Transnational Sexualities.”

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the ethnoscape,”34 challenging the double syllogism that simultaneously “situates the terms ‘queer’ and ‘diaspora’ as dependent on the originality of ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘nation’.”35 As Gopinath maintains, “suturing ‘queer’ to ‘diaspora’” helps recuperate “those desires, practices, and subjectivities that are rendered impossible and unimaginable within conventional diasporic and nationalist imaginaries. A consideration of queerness, in other words, becomes a way to challenge nationalist ideologies.”36 Such ideologies underpin the homogenizing forces policing the imagined communities of both territorialized nation-states and deterritorialized racial/ethnic diasporas. Accordingly, considering queerness contests conventional nationalist and diasporic imaginaries by diasporizing the queer (with internal exile at its core) and queering the diaspora (focusing on queer subjects in racial/ethnic diasporas). Equally, stressing queerness in my exploration helps distance the diasporic imaginary from the totalizing discourse that sees Taiwan and Hong Kong as merely diasporic communities of Mainland China. An understanding of the particular social economies of Taiwan and Hong Kong is imperative to the examination of queer imaginaries from both societies; in terms of the tongzhi movement and queer politics, Taiwan and Hong Kong are also far ahead of Mainland China. A reversal of center and periphery thus plays out in the terrain of the queer imaginary. My methodology echoes the “queer Sinophone” framework proposed by Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich, which opposes both the China-centric and heteronormative tendencies in the tradition of Chinese studies and Chinese diaspora studies. By foregrounding cultural production and participation beyond Mainland China (under the Sinophone rubric) and highlighting “[Sinophonicity’s] interplay with queer subcultural formations,”37 the queer Sinophone rearticulates “centers and margins” while seeking “a volatile alliance”38 between “multiple relationalities”39 by, for example, reinventing historiographies40 and queering kinship. 41 I very much sympathize with the queer Sinophone agenda; nonetheless, the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary insists on a “diaspora” that has been 34 Nguyen, A View from the Bottom. p. 168. 35 Gopinath, Impossible Desires. p. 13. 36 Ibid., p. 11. 37 Heinrich, “‘A Volatile Alliance’,” p. 4 38 Ibid., pp. 13-14. Bachner, “Queer Affiliations,” p. 206. 39 Shih, “On the Conjunctive Method,” p. 225. 40 Howard Chiang, “(De)Provincializing China.” 41 See for instance, Alvin Ka Hin Wong, “Queer Sinophone Studies as Anti-Capitalist Critique”; E. K. Tan, “A Queer Journey Home in Solos.”

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rendered through a certain historical existence (though this historical existence is never fixed) and, crucially, a discursive practice that directly depicts lisan (“diaspora”) and metaphorically liufang (“exile”). My queer formulation highlights the phenomenon of liufan, as part of lisan, in internal and external manifestations of the tension between queer individuals and the family-based Chinese societies. Replacing diaspora with the neologism Sinophone (or huayu yuxi in Chinese) works to de-emphasize precisely this character. I conceive of the term “imaginary” as a collection or archive of media representation, both audiovisual and literary. Located between imagination and reality, this archive is endowed with a Lacanian phantasmatic quality that is key to subject formation (for Jacques Lacan, the imaginary is phantasmatic since the subject forms their identity in the “mirror” of the gaze and desires of others, which at once conditions the subject’s perceived reality and refracts it). 42 Mediated by a web of social, political and economic influences, the imaginary also comprises a significant terrain for negotiation between sites of individuals and social agents, where the foundation for a social group’s imagination of its collective self is provided through the conceptions of “imagined community”43 and “imagination as a social practice.”44 However, this chapter does not attempt to cover the whole region of Greater China and other Chinese communities beyond the region. Echoing Wang Gungwu’s stress on social specificity, I believe any discussion of a society must emerge from that society’s particular cultural environment. To avoid cultural insensitivity or overgeneralization, I take Taiwan as my main example, examining Taiwanese media representation of queer subjects, particularly queer “diasporic elements”45 or exilic subsistence imbricated in the tension between queer subjects and discourses of filiality, familialhome, and family-state. My study is thus closer to ideas of diasporizing the queer than to queering the diaspora. While emphasizing “Chinese” in my study can be taken as a corrective to the racial/ethnic insensitivity and the unthinking Euro-American centricity of Sinfield’s and Watney’s formulations, my research is equally indebted to Eng’s and Gopinath’s scholarship (particularly their rethinking of “home” in the Asian American context), and some examples discussed below will likewise include a perspective 42 Mitchell and Rose (eds.), Feminine Sexuality. 43 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 44 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 31. 45 Clifford, “Diasporas,” p. 253.

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on overseas diasporic experience that overlaps with Eng’s research (as seen in his brilliant analysis of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet and Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together in a transnational queer framework). 46 While a corpus of more recent films bridging the diasporic experience (e.g. Ghosted, Monika Treut, 2009) deserves a study in its own right, my emphasis here on the dislocation of the internal, domestic, and psychological coincides with the idea of the imaginary as an arena of negotiation. This also provides queer-identifying filmmakers such as Tsai Ming-liang and Zero Mei-ling Chou with the creative inner force that, I argue, is vital to queer-inflected tongzhi camp expression (see Chapter 4). In this chapter, I first offer a historical perspective on the discourse of filiality, along with a sketch of state-sanctioned cultural policy in martiallaw-period Taiwan during the Cold War era. This historical perspective, coupled with analysis of the maneuvers of “family-state” discourse that dominated Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1980s, is intended as a counterpoint to the cultural essentialism that underpins much discussion of “filiality” in Chinese culture. Against these hegemonic attitudes, the civil force was gradually taking shape on the margins from the late 1950s onward; as I will explain, this initially found expression in the modernist literary movement of the 1960s, followed by the nativist literary movement of the 1970s, and eventually by the New Cinema movement of the 1980s. Taiwan New Cinema, I argue, reverberated with not only the nativist movement but the modernist impulse. This preliminary understanding of Taiwan’s larger cultural field lays the groundwork for my analysis of Outcasts (Yu Kan-ping, 1986), the first gay-themed Taiwanese film, 47 which appeared toward the end of the New Cinema movement, a year before the abrogation of martial law. (Outcasts is the film’s official English title; in various places, the international version is notably different from that released in Taiwan, due to Taiwan’s strict censorship at the time. I note around twenty different cuts, though the main plotlines remain similar. My subsequent discussion is based primarily 46 For Eng’s analysis of The Wedding Banquet, see “Out Here and Over There.” For his analysis of Happy Together, see The Feeling of Kinship, pp. 58-92. 47 The first feature from Taiwan that implicitly touched on and actually used the term “homosexuality” (tongxinglian) was Mou Tun-fei’s At the Runway’s Edge (1970), which depicts two teenagers whose relationship becomes so close that at one point they (jokingly or otherwise) denounce it as “homosexual” only moments before one of them dies of heart failure, while the other tries to cope with his sense of guilt by helping out with his friend’s parents. For unspecified reasons (possibly nudity or mentions of homosexuality), the film was not permitted to be shown, and its first public screenings took place only during the 2018 Taiwan International Documentary Festival. Mou Tun-fei was nicknamed “beast director” (qinshou daoyan) in Hong Kong for his “extreme” approach to “immoral” subjects.

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on the international version with some reference to the Taiwan version). Based on Niezi (English: Crystal Boys) by Pai Hsien-yung, the film contests the dominant “family-state” discourse with “queer family” imagery on the one hand and, on the other, responding to the nativist call by incorporating local and postcolonial elements into its diasporic imaginary. As well as the term “niezi,” which has been applied to gay men since the mid-1980s, the chapter examines a number of other thematic tropes, including Nezha, AIDS, ghosts, and Chinese/Taiwanese opera, all of which likewise facilitate the formation of a Chinese queer diasporic imaginary.

Filiality as a Discourse, and the Cultural Policy of Martial-LawPeriod Taiwan a) Filiality as a Discourse: A Historical Perspective According to Donald Holzman, the earliest appearance of the word for filial piety (i.e. xiao) is on a bronze vessel that was dated to around 1000 BCE. Etymologically, it indicates “an old [person] being supported by a child”48; xiao’s general meaning as “selfless devotion to the welfare of one’s elders” has remained constant over time. 49 However, “the particulars of xiao – the concrete actions recognized as embodying it and to whom it was addressed – were often subject to change.”50 As Keith Knapp notes, Confucius (551-479 BCE) and his followers, while adopting xiao as the basis of their philosophical system, fundamentally reinterpreted xiao: they “deemphasized the earliest meaning of xiao, feeding one’s elders, and instead accentuated a derivative meaning of obeying one’s parents, and by further extension, obeying one’s lord.”51 As Confucianism was established as the state orthodoxy (beginning in the Han dynasty, 206 BCE-220 CE), Confucian filial piety was systematically promoted, taken as fundamental to a social schema through which “the family’s internal hierarchical relationships” (the father-son dyad and husband-wife dyad) would purportedly be “transformed into [ministers’] loyalty to the ruler.”52 Though filial piety’s position as the keystone of Chinese 48 Holzman, “The Place of Filial Piety in Ancient China,” p. 186. 49 Knapp, “The Ru Reinterpretation of Xiao,” p. 197. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Kutcher, Mourning in Late Imperial China, pp. 12, 2.

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morality appeared permanent in The Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing), the interpretation of filial piety was, nonetheless, never entirely fixed. For instance, Daoist and Buddhist perspectives were not aligned with Confucian patrilineal structure, as they gravitated toward the “feminine” and the “mother-son relationship,” according to Alan Cole.53 As Chan and Tan note, even within Confucianism the meaning of filial piety could be interpreted differently in relation to other key Confucian virtues, such as humanity or benevolence (ren), righteousness (yi), and loyalty (zhong).54 While the Han dynasty politicization of filial piety culminated in the idea of “transferring filial piety into loyalty” (yixiao weizhong) exalted in the early Ming dynasty (1368-1644),55 the Manchu rulers who conquered the Ming and founded the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) also upheld filial piety, but they did so by utilizing traditional Confucian mourning rites to win the support of China’s native elites while lending a measure of legitimacy to their conquest.56 In other words, filial piety could be taken first and foremost as a discourse that, aided by a multitude of ancestral rites and family rituals,57 was integral to Confucianism and had been politically maneuvered “to support diverse and at times competing interests.”58 It is worth noting that the early twentieth century saw a reevaluation of the Confucian-based institutions and beliefs that had defined Chinese cultural tradition for two millennia. Many Chinese intellectuals of the time insisted that the attachment to Confucian values was responsible for holding the country back and preventing it from achieving modernization. This anti-Confucian upsurge gave rise to the influential “New Culture” movement (1915-1923), which rejected “all aspects of what was named Chinese ‘tradition’,”59 and whose leading advocates, such as Lu Xun (1881-1936), Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), and Li Dazhao (1888-1927), wrote scathingly about how Confucian ethics had shaped a China in which “age was venerated at the expense of youth, women were repressed, individualism and creativity were stifled, and a cult of tradition prevented innovation.”60 Some intellectuals 53 Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism, pp. 33, 31. 54 Alan K. L. Chan and Sor-hoon Tan (eds.), “Introduction,” Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History, p. 3. On the relative priority of filial piety and ren, see Chan’s article, “Does Xiao Come Before Ren?” In Chan and Tan (eds.), Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History. pp. 154-175. 55 Lee Cheuk Yin, “Emperor Chengzu and Imperial Filial Piety of the Ming Dynasty.” 56 Kutcher, Mourning in Late Imperial China. 57 For a detailed discussion, see Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China. 58 Chan and Tan, “Introduction,” p. 3. 59 Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World, p. 11. 60 Wasserstrom, China in the 21st Century, pp. 8-9.

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of the day even condemned filial piety as “the source of evil” – having the effect of turning “China into a big factory for the production of obedient subjects.”61 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), established by Chen and Li in 1921, also criticized Confucianism as backward and feudalistic. In 1949, when the CCP defeated the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomingtang or KMT) and founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with Mao Zedong (1893-1976) as chairman, Communist and Maoist ideology replaced Confucian ideology as state orthodoxy in Mainland China. Against this anti-Confucian upsurge, the Chinese Nationalists of the 1930s, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), were, in fact, responsible for a major Confucian revival. Confucius’s birthday was made a national holiday, and Confucianism became an imperative component of the New Life Movement launched by Chiang in 1934. This movement encouraged the practice of four Confucian virtues – propriety, justice, integrity, and self-respect (li yi lian chi) – as the basis of social order and what Chiang called “the social regeneration of China.”62 Chiang insisted that China’s best route forward lay in a synthesis of Confucian values with the best technologies and ideas from Japan and the West.63 Importantly, its Confucian values further were a political platform for the Nationalist Party even after it retreated to Taiwan in the late 1940s. By defining itself as pro-Confucian, in contrast with the CCP in Mainland China, the KMT in Taiwan also asserted its political legitimacy by appealing to its perceived continuity with China’s cultural orthodoxy. Overall, Nationalist rule in Taiwan in the post-1949 era was characterized by a “Sinocization” of the island. Politically, the ruling party insisted that it was the legitimate guardian of the Republic of China (ROC) founded in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), and was the loyal envoy of Sun’s “Three Principles of the People” (sanmin zhuyi) – a set of political tenets on China’s nation-building (minzu), democracy (minquan), and economic development (minsheng).64 Maintaining the governmental structure organized according to the Mainland Chinese constitution adopted in 1936, the KMT asserted that the ROC was the sole legitimate government of all China, and it repeated its resolution to recapture the lost mainland. Culturally, the KMT government stressed that it resolutely defended “orthodox” traditional Chinese culture founded on Confucianism. Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles of the People” 61 Chan and Tan, “Introduction,” p. 2. 62 Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 356. Roberts, A Concise History of China, p. 230. 63 Wasserstrom, China in the 21st Century. p. 9. 64 Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, p. 48

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was also interpreted as a creative, eclectic syncretism of traditional Chinese and Western political thought, while Chinese communism was attacked as a “heresy” of Western origin that undermined traditional Chinese culture.65 b) The Cultural Policy of the Martial Law Period of Taiwan It merits special attention that although Taiwan in the Cold War period was commonly referred to in the West as “Free China” (as opposed to “Communist China”), Taiwanese society was nonetheless subject to martial law between 1949 and 1987,66 where local civilians’ freedom of speech, public assembly, and critical media were compromised. Alongside the state’s stringent political control over Taiwanese society, a multitude of state-sanctioned cultural policies on literature and art (wenyi zhengce) were enforced. In light of the CCP’s political maneuvering of literature and art during the 1940s, in March 1950, the KMT strengthened its emphasis on the political function of the arts,67 and later established a grant system, alongside numerous writers’ and artists’ associations (most notably the Chinese Literature and Art Association, organized by Zhang Dao-fan), founded various literary magazines (e.g. Youshi wenyi, initiated by the Chinese Youth Writing Association), and cultivated writers among military personnel (under the slogan “Literature and Art Into the Army”).68 In September 1953, Chiang published “Two Chapters on Education and Entertainment in Supplement to the Principle of the People’s Livelihood” (Minsheng zhuyi yule lian pian bushu), which reaffirmed Chiang himself as the successor of Sun Yat-sen’s political orthodoxy and comprised the official basis for the KMT cultural policy in Taiwan.69 The KMT further launched a mass movement in 1954 to “cleanse culture” by purging society of the “three vices,” namely communism (“the red poison”), pornography (“the yellow menace”), and crimes and morbid ideas (“the black guilt”).70 The cultural policy of “combat literature and art” (zhandou wenyi) was part and parcel of the officially sanctioned anti-Communist 65 Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism, p. 152. 66 Roy, Taiwan: A Political History, pp. 88-93, 163-164, 174-175. 67 Li Tian-duo, Taiwan dianying, shehui yu lishi (Taiwan cinema, society, and history), p. 82. 68 Ibid. See also Michelle Yeh, “‘On Our Destitute Dinner Table’,” pp. 119-120. For a detailed study of the role of Youshi wenyi vis-à-vis Taiwan’s cultural policy, see Zheng Ming-li, “Dangdai Taiwan wenyi zhengce de fazhan, yingxiang yu jiantau,” pp. 45-54. For an account of the specific historical conditions of the “military literary campaign” and its ensuing influence, see Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law, pp. 49-54. 69 Li Tian-duo, Taiwan dianying, shehui yu lishi, p. 83. Zheng, “Dangdai Taiwan wenyi zhengce,” p. 24. 70 Zheng Ming-li, “Dangdai Taiwan wenyi zhengce de fazhan, yingxiang yu jiantau,” pp. 30-33.

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literature ( fangong wenxue), known for its patent anti-Communist agenda and often imbued with a nostalgic, sinocentric sentiment.71 The “cultural cleansing movement” (wenhua qinjie yundong) and the “combat literature and art” slogan reflected two sides of the KMT’s cultural policy during the 1950s and 1960s. While “cultural cleansing” demonstrated the power of censorship, “combat literature” presented forceful guidance for cultural production.72 These two strategies came together in the service of a state ideology that, alongside the systematic suppression of indigenous expressions (ranging from Taiwanese language to Taiwan’s colonial history) in pursuit of a unified nationhood, was primarily characterized by an anti-communist agenda predicated on “accepting the myth of a shared cultural origin,”73 materialized in and through the (invented) notion of Chineseness (huaxia).74 The campaign most representative of the KMT’s cultural policy during the Cold War years came with the “Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement” (zhonghua wenhua fuxing yundong). Initiated by Chiang Kai-shek in 1966, this decade-long movement was directed against the rising Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in the People’s Republic. Its manifesto declared that venerable Chinese historical and cultural traditions (daotong) had been discarded on the Mainland, and a campaign for a “cultural renaissance” was needed for preserving the nation’s cultural heritage. Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles” would serve as the guiding principle of the struggle against the Communists.75 Crucially, the school system, the mass media, military training, and all nominally civic organizations were mobilized to inculcate this ideology.76 The Movement officially promoted particular cultural values, symbols, arts, music, and craft, as well as Mandarin Chinese, although, as Hsiau A-chin notes, this was not done without incurring “the expense of local counterparts.”77 Equally problematic in this construction 71 Lucy H. Chen, “Literary Formosa,” p. 78. For a historical review of anti-communist combat literature in 1950s Taiwan, see Peng Rui-jin, Taiwan xin wenxue yundong sishi nian, pp. 65-79, 96-100. For a thorough discussion of its rise and re-evaluation, see David Der-wei Wang, “Yizhong shiqu de wenxue? Dangong xiaoxuo xinlun.” Ruhe xiandai, zenyang wenxue, pp. 141-159. 72 Chao Yengning (Antonia Chao), “Guozu xiangxiang de quanli luoji,” Dai zhe caomao dauchu luxing, p. 166. See also Lu Feii, Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, 1949-1994, pp. 69-71. Li Tian-duo. Taiwan dianying, shehui yu lishi, pp. 85, 105. 73 Allen Chun, “Cultural Industry as National Enterprise,” p. 74. 74 Ibid., p. 73. For a critical elaboration on the notion of hua-xia, see Allen Chun, “Fuck Chineseness.” 75 Tozer, “Taiwan’s ‘Cultural Renaissance’: A Preliminary View,” pp. 82-83. 76 On the institutional operation of the Movement, see Allen Chun, “Cultural Industry as National Enterprise.” pp. 74-77. 77 Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism. p. 152.

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of a national culture, according to Allen Chun, was the KMT’s invocation of tradition, particularly “Confucianism as the rational foundation of Chinese tradition.”78 As a generalized moral philosophy that could be easily translated into secular action, the Confucianism invoked here was “not […] a system in itself but as a set of stripped-down ethical values which […] meant for the most part a devotion to filial piety, respect for social authority, and etiquette in everyday behavior.”79 This form of Confucianism also assumed a particular role in the state. In particular, with the notion of filial piety given greater significance through the emphatic, selective invocation of Confucian tradition, the nexus between filial piety and loyalty to the KMT nation-state was simultaneously reinforced.80 Whereas individual subjects were interpellated through the strengthened discursive nexus between filiality and loyalty, corresponding with the reinforced union between family and state, expressions of individualism were, nonetheless, substantially discouraged. Meanwhile, this wide-reaching mechanism was supported by a sinocentric mindset coinciding with the idealized projection of the nation that – as demonstrated by the KMT’s “sacred mission” of “defeating Communism and recovering the mainland” ( fangong fuguo) – was ultimately located on the Mainland, not the island of Taiwan on which the KMT government presently resided. In fact, by the 1970s, numerous films – state-sponsored or otherwise – illustrated the values and operations of this state-sanctioned cultural hegemony. For instance, Wu Feng (Bu Wancang, 1962) propagated the Han Chinese cultural indoctrination of aboriginal people, attempting to justify the presence of Han Chinese on the island;81 Descendants of the Yellow Emperor (Bai Ke, 1956) appealed to the myth of a shared ethnic origin in China to promote ethnic harmony.82 Whereas Emperor Qin/Shin Shikotei (Shigeo Tanaka, 1962, Taiwan/Japan) compared the Chinese Communist regime to the short-lived Qin dynasty (221-207 BCE) – as both were allegedly tyrannical – Beauty of Beauties (Li Han-hsiang, 1965) and Fire Bulls (Li Xing, 78 Allen Chun, “Cultural Industry as National Enterprise.” p. 78. 79 Ibid. 80 Allen Chun, “From Nationalism to Nationalizing,” p. 60. 81 Wu Feng was a Han Chinese historical figure. His story, however, is a distorted version of history that fabricates a “Han Chinese-aborigine reconciliation” (han-fan hejie) for the benefit of Han Chinese accessing natural resources in the hands of the aborigine peoples. It was debunked in the 1980s with the rise of the indigenous movement and the process of internal decolonization on the island. See Chen Fang-ming, Wo de jiaguo yuedu (My homeland reading), pp. 92-93, 194-195. 82 On the f ilm’s relationship with Nationalist cultural policy, see Hong, Taiwan Cinema, pp. 39-48.

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Bai Jingrui, and Li Jia, 1966) attempted to boost public morale with historical stories of protagonists “recovering the homeland” (the direct translation of Fire Bulls’ Chinese title, Huan wo heshan) in David-and-Goliath narratives. As Ding Shan-xi, director of Prosperity of Family (1970) claimed, his film’s interpretation of “loyalty-filiality-fidelity-sincerity” (zhong-xiao-jie-yi) was a direct response to the call for a Cultural Renaissance.83 While The Autumn Execution (Li Xing, 1971) demonstrated a strong appeal to filial piety, particularly “continuing the family line” (chuan zong jie dai), The Decisive Battle (Yi Wen, 1970) reiterated the well-known story of heroic literati-general Yue Fei (1103-1142), whose widowed, “virtuous” mother (xian mu) allegedly etched “repay the nation with utter loyalty” (jingzhong baoguo) on her son’s back, encouraging him to “transfer filial piety into loyalty” (yi xiao zuo zhong) by joining the army instead of overly worrying about his mother. Patriotism, accordingly, is seen as the “natural extension and highest fulfillment” of filial piety,84 the embodiment of “great filial piety” (da xiao). These films may generally, but not exclusively, come under the larger category of “policy and propaganda film” (zhengzhi xuanchuan pian), which in various ways responded to the dominant cultural establishment.

The Modernist Literary Movement, the Nativist Literary Movement, and Taiwan New Cinema a) From the Modernist Literary Movement to the Nativist Literary Movement A new generation of writers and filmmakers educated in the postwar period came of age in the late 1950s and started to challenge the dominant cultural establishment. The literary modernists of the 1950s first launched a highculture quest against the perceived shortcomings of Taiwan’s destitute cultural milieu, demanding artistic and institutional professionalism.85 Challenging the “unexamined devotion to an overly exalted traditionalist style,”86 modernist writers consciously experimented with language, voice, 83 Huang Ren, Zhengce dianying yanjiu, p. 220. On the film’s moral stance, see Huang Ren, Lianbang dianying shidai, p. 45. 84 Stafford, “Good Sons and Virtuous Mothers,” p. 370. 85 A recent anthology recounts the legacy of the modernist literary movement, and the key role played by Pai Hsien-yung and the Modern Literature magazine, see Bai Rui-wen (Michael Berry) and Tsai Chien-hsin (eds.), Chongfan xiandai (Return to the modern). 86 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, “Wang Wenxing’s Back Against the Sea,” p. 159.

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and narrative perspective,87 borrowing from Anglo-American literature such modernist techniques as surrealism, metaphor, symbolism, and streamof-consciousness.88 Taiwan’s literary modernism was characterized by the theme of “inward searching,” which epitomized the philosophy of the movement. As Yvonne Chang eloquently puts it, the modernists’ inward searching was “prompted by the existentialist assertion of life’s fundamental absurdity, Freudian skepticism of socially sanctioned ethical norms, and a rationalist conception of moral relativism.”89 Modernist aesthetics and themes (e.g. personal exploration), and philosophy (from existentialism, to psychoanalysis, to rationalism), along with the modernist recourse to “artistic autonomy,”90 thus provided Taiwan’s emerging writers with a cultural position marked by “iconoclastic individualism,” deviating significantly from “martial-law Taiwan’s neo-traditionalist moralism.”91 Peng Rui-jin likewise notes that Taiwan’s modernist literature “rebelled against” ( fanpan) the stifling dominant institutions by “placing individual selves at the center of life, so as to explore and emancipate individual selves.”92 Nevertheless, with its emphasis on the individual and the psychological, such rebellion strategically avoided direct confrontations with the state apparatus:93 it did not explicitly challenge the regime’s political foundations. The same, though, could not be said about the nativist movement that subsequently erupted in the 1970s. With a series of diplomatic setbacks that began with the jurisdictional dispute over the Diaoyutai islands in 1970 and culminated in the Republic of China’s forced withdrawal from the United Nations in 1971,94 domestic disquiet began to grow. Many intellectuals in Taiwan began to question the zealous race toward modernization; they turned inward, resulting in “the awakening of anti-imperialist nationalistic sentiments, a renewed interest in indigenous cultural tradition, and a general heightening of social consciousness.”95 Along with this larger cultural trend, commonly referred 87 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, pp. 62-73. 88 Peng, Taiwan xin wenxue yundong sishi nian, pp. 109-112. 89 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, “Wang Wenxing’s Back Against the Sea,” p. 158. 90 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, pp. 12-22. 91 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, “Wang Wenxing’s Back Against the Sea,” p. 157. 92 Peng, Taiwan xin wenxue yundong sishi nian. p. 110. 93 Ibid. 94 Hsiau, Huigue xianshi (Return to reality), pp. 104-108. See also Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History, pp. 128-137; Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, p. 150; Lu Feii, Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, pp. 179-181; Li Tian-duo, Taiwan dianying, shehui yu lishi, pp. 136-137; Liu Jun, Qing yu mei, p. 194. 95 June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan, p. 22.

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to as the “back to the earth” movement (huigui xiangtu),96 emerged the first nativists, who directed their ire toward modernists for their alleged complicity in western cultural imperialism. Wang Tuo (1944-2016), for instance, criticized modernist writers for allowing their artistic consciousness to be molded not by “indigenous concerns and the living, sensory experiences of modern Taiwanese life,” but by “imported notions of individualism, alienation, and sexual obsession,” as well as Western intellectual trends like existentialism, psychoanalysis, and symbolism.97 Wang and other nativist writers thus developed a genre characterized by the use of the Taiwanese dialect, emotional attachment to Taiwan’s rural landscapes,98 and “depiction of the plight of country folks or small-town dwellers in economic difficulty, and resistance of the imperialist presence in Taiwan.”99 In so doing, they voiced their criticism of the government’s pro-West, pro-capitalist policies in an oblique manner, while their deep concern for “the ‘here and now’ of Taiwan society” countered the romanticized China-centered vision underlying much of the KMT’s cultural policy.100 While the modernist literary movement could be considered “potentially subversive” and “alternative,” the nativist literary movement was beyond doubt “patently oppositional.”101 For the purposes of this book, we may reconsider aspects of Taiwan’s modernist literary movement in light of this criticism from nativists, who accused them of Westernizing their aesthetics and ideas, evading local politics and social reality, indulging individualism, and being obsessed with sexual psychology. Arguably, such characteristics not only allowed modernist writers to explore the intimate terrain of individuals, their intricate desires and obscure interiority, but also enabled them to distance themselves from entrenched literary traditions, including the overpowering political concerns in Taiwan literature (e.g. the anti-communist agenda), and the deep-seated concern with national destiny characteristic of modern Chinese literature (the “obsession with China” – ganshi youguo – identified by C. T. Hsia).102 Their detachment from national politics,103 combined with inter96 Ibid., pp. 26-29. See also Hsiau, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism, pp. 68-69. 97 Wang Tuo, “Shi ‘xianshi zhuyi’ wenxue, bushi ‘xiangtu wenxue’.” In Yu Tian-cong (ed.), Xiangtu wenxue taulunji. Quoted in June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan. p. 38. 98 June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan, pp. 60-64. 99 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, p. 149. 100 Ibid., p. 159. 101 Ibid., p. 2. 102 Hsia, “Appendix I: Obsession with China,” in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, pp. 533-554. 103 Pai Hsien-yung recounts that Taiwan’s modernist literature advocated “the refusal for any political intrusions in [our literary field], be it the ideological party politics of the KMT, the Communist, or otherwise. […] Of course, this principle was itself a form of political manifesto.”

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est in “depth” and interiority, helped modernist writers bring out socially marginalized desires and identifications without subjugating the latter to nationalist moralist discourses or allegorical interpretations. What emerged, in short, was a sense of spontaneity and nonconformist subjectivity. As Chu Wei-cheng points out, “Taiwan’s literary modernism […] developed outside the nationalist literary tradition. This marginal position [in retrospect] nonetheless helped open up a precious space for the representation of queer subjects with considerable spontaneity.”104 In his historical review of Taiwan’s queer fiction writing, Chu locates the emergence of queer subjects in the context of the modernist movement105 – in particular, the founding of the literary magazine Modern Literature (Xiandai wenxue) in 1960.106 Devoted to Western modernist literature, criticisms and theories, Modern Literature was launched by a group of college students, including Pai Hsien-yung, Ouyang Tzu, Wang Wenxing and Chen Ruoxi, who all became renowned novelists. In the inaugural issue, Pai Hsien-yung published two novellas: “Jade Love” (Yuqing sao) and “Moon Dream” (Yue mong), the latter of which tackled male homoeroticism (in dreams) and memory in the face of imminent death.107 Among Pai’s numerous publications in Modern Literature by 1970, at least four other novellas likewise depicted same-sex desires.108 By the early 1970s, more novelists – either directly involved with Modern Literature or within the modernist ambit – dealt with same-sex eroticism See Bai Rui-wen (Michael Berry) and Tsai Chien-hsin (eds.), Chongfan xiandai (Return to the modern), pp. 62-63. 104 Chu Wei-cheng, “Linglei jingdian: Taiwan tongzhi wenxue (xiaoshuo) shi lun.” In Chu Wei-cheng (ed.), Taiwan tongzhi xiaoshuo xuen, p. 14. 105 Ibid., p. 12. 106 It is worth noting that 1950s newspapers played a crucial part in Taiwan’s emerging queer fiction scene. As Chi Ta-wei argues, “abundant mis/information about homosexuality in the newspapers […] in effect diligently fostered the local readers’ grasp of homosexuality in ‘modern Chinese’. Without the seeds for the general public to mis/understand homosexuality through the local newspapers in the 1950s, there wouldn’t have been available readership for the novelists dealing with homosexual subjects in the 1960s.” See Chi Ta-wei, Tongzhi wenxue shi (A history of tongzhi literature), pp. 110-111. Chi identifies four categories of information in Taiwan’s newspapers during the 1950s: foreign news, everyday knowledge, translated fictions, and local news. (Ibid., pp. 117-129). 107 Pai Hsien-yung, “Yue mong.” In Chu Wei-cheng (ed.), Taiwan tongzhi xiaoshuo xuen, pp. 37-45. Originally published in Modern Literature 1 (Mar. 1960). 108 “Youth (Qingchun),” Modern Literature 7 (Mar. 1961); “Lonely Seventeen (Jimo de shiqi sui),” Modern Literature 11 (Nov. 1961); “A Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars (Man tian li liangjingjing de xingxing),” Modern Literature 38 (Jul. 1969); “Love’s Lone Flower (Gu lian hua),” Modern Literature 40 (Mar. 1970).

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in their writings. These included Ouyang Tzu, a prolific novelist known for her stylistic experimentation and liberal, feminist stance; Lin Hwai-min, now a world-famous modern dance choreographer and founder of the Cloud Gate Troupe (Yunmen wuji); Xi Song, a professional painter; and Jing Xiang, a veteran film critic and later a publisher of queer writers. 109 While Pai Hsien-yung’s early writings best exemplified the modernist movement’s impact on the emergence of queer representation before the mid-1970s (particularly representations with explicit subject consciousness), by 1977, when he published the first chapters of his queer epic Niezi110 – a “pinnacle” of Taiwanese modernist literature111 originally published between 1977 and 1981 as a series, then as a novel in 1983 – the nativist movement’s influence on Pai was, in fact, also perceptible. In particular, a sensitivity toward Taiwan’s landscape, indigenous culture, and even colonial history is consciously incorporated into the plots and narrative of Niezi. My analysis of Outcasts (1986), based on Niezi, will therefore likewise draw attention to this nativist influence. b) Taiwan New Cinema To address this specific influence on Outcasts, however, we must also take into account the nativist movement’s impact on Taiwan’s film industry in general and, in particular, the rise of the Taiwan New Cinema as a “homegrown innovation” of the early 1980s.112 Generally speaking, Taiwan cinema of the 1950s and 1960s operated on a parallel system in which Mandarinlanguage films were produced alongside their Taiwanese counterparts; however, Taiwanese-language cinema, for various reasons (including the government’s policy of privileging Mandarin in all mass media), went into drastic decline around 1970. 113 In the 1970s, then, Mandarin-language f ilm production had a virtual monopoly in Taiwan, and the assembly line, as Lu Feii notes, was dominated by three major genres: romantic 109 Chu Wei-cheng, “Linglei jingdian,” pp. 12-15. 110 As Chu Tian-wen recalls, Niezi was published in conjunction with the relaunch of Modern Literature in 1977. See Bai Rui-wen (Michael Berry) and Tsai Chien-hsin, Chongfan xiandai (Return to the modern), p. 177. 111 Yvonne Chang, “Wang Wenxing’s Back Against the Sea,” p. 159. 112 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, p. 56. 113 From 1969 to 1970, the number of Taiwanese-language film productions dropped from about one hundred to approximately ten. Only one Taiwanese-language film was made in 1971, one in 1972, and four in total between 1973 and 1980. See Lee Yong-quan, Taiwan dianying yuedu, pp. 23-24. See also Wang Chun-chi (ed.), Bai bian qian huan bu siyi, p. 265.

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melodramas, martial arts pictures, and policy and propaganda films.114 Although policy and propaganda films before the 1980s featured different themes and agendas – such as anti-communism, resistance to the Japanese, cultivation of nationalism, and propagation of agricultural reform and economic development 115 – they responded to the KMT’s cultural policy and, to varying degrees, complied with Nationalist sinocentrism. On the other hand, romantic melodramas and martial arts pictures – which avoided “politics and contemporary sociocultural problems altogether”116 – were both characterized by their “escapist” mentality.117 Challenging this cultural milieu, Taiwan New Cinema was inaugurated with two omnibus films: In Our Time (Edward Yang, Tao De-chen, Ko Icheng, Chang Yi, 1982) and The Sandwich Man (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang, Wan Jen, 1983). Notably, The Sandwich Man was based on three popular short stories by nativist writer Huang Chuen-ming. This nativist influence was to become a defining feature of the New Cinema: most stories were about past or present society in Taiwan, not set on the Mainland or in some fantasy world. Another recurring theme was “growing up” or “initiation,”118 as epitomized by In Our Time and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) and Dust in the Wind (1986), which drew parallels between “personal experience” and “Taiwan history.”119 These parallels, while foregrounding the memory of the postwar generation, simultaneously charted the trajectories of Taiwan’s changing social economy, particularly the move, in Chen Kuan-Hsing’s words, “from an agricultural to an industrial society, from a poor rural life to an urban one, from a political identification with China to one with Taiwan.”120 Simply put, the lived experiences of growing up in Taiwan portrayed in the New Cinema challenged both the sinocentric outlook and the escapist mentality of existing film culture. Moreover, the New Cinema’s emphasis on the social as experienced by the individual coincided with the spirit that underpinned filmmakers’ 114 Lu Feii, Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, pp. 130-143, 181-192, 221-225, 246. 115 Huang Ren’s propaganda categories additionally include military education, moral education, and the Republican revolution against the Manchu Qing court. See Zhengce dianying yanjiu. 116 Yip, Envisioning Taiwan, p. 52. 117 Peggy Hsiung-ping Chiao, “Qianyan – geren jingyan yu Taiwan lishi,” and “Tai gong dianying tese.” In Chiao Hsiung-ping (ed.), Taiwan xin dianying, p. 281 and pp. 400-402, respectively. Chiao, “The Distinct Taiwanese and Hong Kong Cinemas,” p. 156. 118 On the concept of “initiation” in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early work, see Tay, “The Ideology of Initiation.” 119 Chiao Hsiung-ping, “Qianyan – geren jingyan yu Taiwan lishi,” pp. 281-282; Lu Feii, Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, p. 280. 120 Kuan-hsing Chen, “Taiwan New Cinema, or a Global Nativism?” p. 140.

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exploration of film vocabulary – from the subdued style of Hou Hsiao-hsien to the modern, experimental aesthetic of Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers (1986). This self-conscious exploration of film language, alongside the New Cinema filmmakers’ pursuit of artistic autonomy, echoed the impulse of modernist literature from the 1960s onward. This is borne out by the fact that, between 1982 and 1986, the New Cinema films adapted from Taiwan’s modernist fiction outnumbered those based upon nativist novels.121 Taiwan New Cinema thus posed a challenge to dominant film culture and converged influences from both the nativist and modernist movements, resulting in an emphasis on Taiwan society, the individual, and the individualistically inflected pursuit of artistic expression.

The Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary in Outcasts a) The “Queer Family-Dark Kingdom” Imaginary Made a year before martial law was lifted, Outcasts challenges Chinese familialist nationalism – the dominant “family-state” ( jia-guo) discourse reinforced by the KMT government 122 – on two levels. On one level, it counters this discourse along the axis of queerness, establishing a potential “queer family-Dark Kingdom” imaginary as an alternative to prevailing heterosexism. On another level, it attends to the native and the local, confronting “family-state” discourse sinocentrism. The film sheds light on the complexity of a subject experience that defies ethnic binary and ethnic essentialism (i.e. the belief in unbridgeable differences between native Taiwanese and mainlanders, which sees authentic “Taiwan experience” as articulable only by native Taiwanese). Importantly, while incorporating the native, the film further foregrounds a flaw in nativist discourse that, not unlike its sinocentric counterpart, tends to ignore – if not overtly oppose – gay identities and queer issues, and is, in short, characteristically heteronormative. These features of Outcasts contribute to a particular formulation of “queer diaspora” that is not only in tension with dominant family-state discourse (operating on a local scale), but rethinks queer politics on a global scale 121 Lu Feii, Taiwan dianying: zhengzhi, jingji, meixue, p. 280. On New Cinema’s affiliation with literature, see Wen Tien-hsiang, “Taiwanese New Cinema’s Literary Origins.” 122 On the “family-state” discourse, see, for instance, Chu Wei-cheng, “Fuqin zhongguo, muqin (guaitai) Taiwan?”; Antonia Chao, Dai zhe caomao daochu luxing; Yeh De-hsuan, “Cong jiating shouxun dao jingju wenxun”; Chang Hsiao-hung, Guaitai jiating luomanshi, pp. 27-73; Martin, Situating Sexualities, pp. 47-71; Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, pp. 75-107.

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that, due to the particular history of this region, is at odds with the often unchallenged model of a universal queer culture characteristically centered on the West, and particularly the United States (as seen above in Watney’s diasporization of queer culture). Outcasts tells of a community of male hustlers and their patrons, who are based in and around New Park, the (in)famous gay hangout in central Taipei,123 toward the end of the martial-law era. At the outset of the film, the teenage protagonist A-Qing (Shao Hsin) is banished from his family home by his father, an ex-KMT army commander, after being expelled from school for immoral conduct with the male chemistry-lab supervisor. A-Qing finds his way to New Park, where he meets Chief Yang (Sun Yueh, 1930-2018), an elderly photographer and protector of the young male hustlers based in the park, who offers him a place to stay. Living with Yang and his close friend and landlady, Auntie Man (Li Dai-ling), A-Qing befriends other young male hustlers, in particular Little Jade, a quick and flamboyant teenager searching for his unknown father; Mousey, an orphan and petty thief; and Wu Min, a shy and tender youth who attempts suicide when discarded by an older man. Now a member of the New Park community of gay men and male sex workers, A-Qing works and hangs out in the park each evening. He soon encounters Dragon Prince (Jiang Hou-ren), a legendary character who frequented the park before his decade-long exile for fatally stabbing Phoenix Boy, with whom he had a fiery love affair. (Figure 1.1) When A-Qing and several other boys are arrested, Chief Yang, after bailing out the boys from the police station, decides to open a gay bar, “Blue Angel” (Lan tianshi), for the boys. “Blue Angel,” backed by Auntie Man, employs A-Qing, Little Jade, Mousey and Wu Min, and becomes a safe haven for the community. Chief Yang dies of a heart attack toward the end of the film, while Little 123 In his short film Green Island Serenade (2011; part of 10+10 by twenty Taiwan filmmakers), director Hou Chi-Jan uses the famous song “Green Island Serenade” (ludao xiaoyequ) to construct a soundscape that relates two different temporalities hinged upon the locale of the Radio Broadcast Tower (Guangbuo tai) in New Park. The film reenacts the scene of the original live broadcast of the song at a radio station in the mid-1950s, to an appreciated audience around the Tower. The song then bridges the past to the present, where we first see a young man leaning against the same Tower, before the song leads us back to the original singer, Chi Lu-shiya, now in her seventies, in the radio station. With the young man there alone at night coded by a desire for gay intimacy, that taboo desire resonates with the song’s controversial political tendency during Taiwan’s white-terror era (Green Island was historically infamous for political prisoners, so was New Park for gay men). Hou’s other queer-themed works include The Thrill Is Gone (2014), featuring an interracial vampire story, and the highly popular music video “Being Different, So What?” (2014), depicting a decades-long lesbian relationship soundtracked by pop-star Jolin Tsai, also a dedicated supporter for marriage equality in Taiwan.

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Figure 1.1 A-Qing and Dragon Prince in bed right after a sexual encounter (a scene cut from the Taiwan version)

Copyright: Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd.

Jade is on the road searching for his father. Having finally acquired some kind of understanding from his father, the film ends with A-Qing returning to his family home. The film keenly illustrates filial piety, along with its particular role in the dominant family-state discourse. Filial piety, as Chinese popular wisdom has it, is the first of all virtues (bai shan xiao wei xian). In addition to respecting one’s parents and providing them with physical care, Confucian filiality also requires self-cultivation: “To establish oneself and practice the Tao is to immortalize one’s name and thereby to glorify one’s parents.”124 Homosexuality, a social stigma, not only indicates the failure of one’s personal cultivation, but (when made public) brings shame, as opposed to “glory,” to one’s family, making one’s parents lose face. Homosexuality is thus considered a form of unfiliality (buxiao). Moreover, Chinese societies were (and, to some extent, still are) generally figured by the Confucian idea of the “Five Relationships” (wuchang) – ruler-minister, father-son, husband-wife, elder-younger, and friendfriend relationships – which are further conditioned by the social hierarchy of the “Three Bonds” (sangang): the ruler-minister, father-son, and husband-wife dyads.125 This societal system is based on male-centered, patriarchal thinking, and, in practice, is founded upon the son’s identification with his father. 124 “Hsiao Ching (The Classic of Filial Piety).” In Chu Chai and Winberg Chai (eds. and trans.), The Sacred Books of Confucius, p. 327. 125 Tu, “Probing the ‘Three Bonds’ and ‘Five Relationships’ in Confucian Humanism,” pp. 121-136.

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Here, “resemblance,” signified by the Chinese character that has the same pronunciation as filiality (i.e. xiao) and is in many cases interchangeable with filiality in writing, constitutes another crucial criterion of filial piety. That is, to fulfill his filiality, the son is expected to identify with or “resemble” his father by means of “perpetuating [his father’s] activities” and even “carrying on [his father’s] unfinished purposes.”126 For Chang Hsiao-hung, this identification with the “biological father” and the values and ethics he represents – the “phallic father,” in Lacanian terms – thus allows the son to enter the “symbolic order.”127 It thereby secures what Mei Chia-ling calls the “continuity and permanence” (yimai xiangcheng, yongxu bujue) of the overall schema that binds familial lineage to the larger culture, politics, and history.128 Homosexuality, however, poses a direct threat to the very foundation of this permanence by not securing posterity: “to have no posterity [to carry on the family line]” (wu hou) is considered the greatest threat to filial piety.129 Meanwhile, this continuum corresponds to the aforementioned discursive connection between filiality and loyalty, a connection strengthened by the Nationalist government to buttress its familialist nationalism. By following the interrelated logics of filiality and loyalty, that is, individuals were encouraged to cultivate themselves (xiu sheng), making themselves useful to their society and to nation-building, wherein an upward movement from the private to public spheres concurrently demarcated the proper trajectory for decent citizenship. By contrast, homosexuality, along with other lifestyles that deviated from heterosexual familialism and reproductive function, was deemed unproductive, producing downward momentum, and thus incompatible with familialist nationalism. This straight, reproduction-oriented “sexual consciousness”130 implicated in the KMT government’s nationalist discourse was epitomized by Chiang Kai-shek’s famous edict, “The goal of living lies in improving the living 126 “Hsiao Ching (The Classic of Filial Piety).” In Chai and Chai, The Sacred Books of Confucius and Other Confucian Classics, pp. 325-326. 127 Chang Hsiao-hung. “Buxiao wenxue yaonie shi – yi Niezi wei li.” Guaitai jiating luomanshi, p. 30. 128 Mei Chia-ling. “Gu’er? niezi? yehaizi? – zhanhou Taiwan xiaoshou zhong de fuzi jiaguo jiqi liebian.” Cong shaonian Zhongguo dao shaonian Taiwan (From adolescent China to adolescent Taiwan), p. 249. 129 In Chinese societies, particularly Taiwan under martial law, a widely circulated saying by Mencius (a Confucian master secondary only to Confucius himself) declared, “There are three ways of being an unfilial son, and to have no posterity is the worst” (Buxiao you san, wu hou wei da). Book IV: Part A, Mencius, p. 168. (Here I have slightly modified the original translation by D. C. Lau: “There are three ways of being a bad son. The most serious is to have no heir,” p. 169). 130 Yeh, De-hsuan. “Cong jiating shouxun dao jingju wenxun,” p. 135.

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of all humanity; the meaning of life resides in recreating the lives for the future across the universe” (Shenghuo de mudi zai zenjing renlei quanti zhi shenghuo; shengming de yiyi zai chuangzao yuzhou jiqi zhi shengming).131 In such discourse, heterosexual reproduction, to quote Yeh De-hsuan and Chao Yengning, was the primary purpose of human beings, and would serve the permanence or “diachronic temporality” of the nation.132 Outcasts’ opening credits are superimposed on a long take that pans left on a lone bird gliding against the mountain and blue sky. The bird image is a central motif of the film: this long take dissolves into the nighttime scene of a school chemistry lab where a patrolling guard catches A-Qing in flagrante with another man (before looking back at the guard/camera in great dismay, A-Qing is briefly shown face-down, half-stretched across a table, with the other man discernable only as a side-view of a bare torso). This is immediately followed by a “notice” dated 5 March, 1985, announcing A-Qing’s expulsion from the high school due to his “immoral conduct [yinwei xingwei] with the lab supervisor” that has “tarnished the school’s reputation” (youai xiaoyu). The subsequent shot, a moderately high angle extreme long shot, shows A-Qing crying and being chased, barefoot, from his familial home; his father is hitting A-Qing with a thick rod, screaming, “I’ll kill you! You unfilial son!” The father’s curse – “You animal! You unfilial son! You never come back!” – echoes through the next long shot: A-Qing runs for his life toward the camera, exiting the frame leaving his father catching his breath in the medium shot. Cutting to another long shot with a similar level setup, we see A-Qing’s breathless father, A-Qing’s shoes lying in the foreground while A-Qing himself disappears into the background, into the far end of the meandering alley. This is in sync with the furious command, “Never come back!” A telephoto lens in the last two shots – whose effects are seen in the flattened depth of field and tightened composition – also lends the visual a sense of being stifled. This double expulsion corresponds to the section of the novel titled “Banishment.”133 A-Qing’s expulsion from school is also a “warning to others” (yi jing xiaoyou), and though his banishment from his family home is likewise a reaction to his homosexuality, it is first and foremost a response 131 Documentary f ilm 2, 1: Couple, Single (Lee Hsiang-ru, 1999) follows the relationship of two young lesbians in Taipei, and at one point, the father of one is asked if he would attend his daughter’s wedding to another girl. Though not ashamed of his daughter’s lesbianism he replies he would decline, citing Chiang Kai-shek’s edict – the implication being that lesbianism does not reproduce new lives and is thus unworthy of the blessing of marriage. 132 Ibid. Chao Yengning (Antonia Chao), “Ku’er de shijian,” pp. 148-149. 133 Pai Hsien-yung, Niezi, pp. 1-2 (in English, Crystal Boys, trans. Howard Goldblatt, p. 13).

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to the rhetoric of unfiliality. Male homosexuality threatens the continuity of the family line; furthermore, A-Qing’s homosexuality can no longer be kept a secret: the stigma has been made public by the school, shaming his father/family. Moreover, expulsion from schooling prior to higher education limits a person’s opportunities to pursue a career in (socially valued) professions or civil services, ways to serve one’s country while glorifying one’s parents. In particular, as A-Qing later reveals to Dragon Prince with deep lament, his father always wished his son to enter the Army Off icers Candidate School and eventually become an outstanding military off icer. This paternal aspiration notably also involves a materialization of filial piety, where A-Qing is expected to “resemble” (xiao) his army commander father; or rather – because A-Qing’s father was, in fact, out of military service – A-Qing is now expected “to carry on his father’s unf inished purposes.” This paternal aspiration is ended with A-Qing’s expulsion from high school. Unlike A-Qing’s father, now a petty office clerk, Dragon Prince’s father is a high-ranking official (daguan) in the KMT government, and his extravagant public funeral is even covered by the mass media. Dragon Prince’s father once held high expectations of his son (in the novel he specifically wishes Dragon Prince to become a diplomat).134 However, Dragon Prince’s scandalous (and murderous) gay affair ends this dream. Dragon Prince is not only banished from the familial home, but from the country, with his father fiercely commanding, “I forbid you to come back as long as I am alive!”135 Dragon Prince was thus in exile in New York for ten years before his father’s death. Taken together, A-Qing’s and Dragon Prince’s personal stories represent a scenario in which male homosexuals are banished from their familial homes, deprived of full entry to the public sphere, and ultimately exiled from the dominant family-state imaginary. After A-Qing is chased out of his familial home, that evening he is found in New Park by Chief Yang, who says to him, “Little Brother, isn’t it time to go home?” The next long shot shows Chief Yang with his arm around A-Qing’s shoulders, walking him toward the far end of the frame while saying, “It must be your first visit to the ‘Company.’ We all call New Park ‘Company.’ Don’t be afraid, when you arrive here, you arrive home.” In a sense, Chief Yang becomes A-Qing’s surrogate father, and Auntie Man – Chief Yang’s longtime friend and live-in landlady – his surrogate mother. In the novel, 134 Pai, Niezi, p. 310 (Crystal Boys, p. 258). 135 Crystal Boys, pp. 35, 255 (Niezi, pp. 25, 306).

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Chief Yang has a noticeably different personality,136 and does not live with A-Qing; Auntie Man, a candid straight woman, is a completely new creation for the film. These changes pave the way for the formation of a queer family, as A-Qing is joined by Little Jade, Mousey, and Wu Min, who all – for one reason or another – end up at the same residence. Despite the lack of real blood relations, the four young gay men form a strong brotherhood. Their bond is clear when Wu Min attempts suicide: while Chief Yang and Auntie Man provide the money for Wu’s medical care, the young men willingly donate their blood for Wu’s transfusion, symbolizing their relationship as “blood brothers.”137 Interestingly, in this alternative family, Chief Yang – a feminine, soft-spoken character – cooks for the family and is more “motherly” than the outspoken Auntie Man, establishes the family rules. The surrogate parenting team thus incorporates a gender role-reversal. Intimate moments are shown as especially important: their private “family” talks, their meals together, the young men’s gestures of brotherly affection and fondly squeezing together into two beds, the family-style birthday celebration, and so forth. These intimate moments vividly embody the meaning of family while materializing the space it occupies. Though detached from blood relations and heterosexual relationships, a queer family is born. Corresponding to this queer family is the novel’s trope of the “Dark Kingdom” (hei’an wangguo), which can be read against the dominant familystate imaginary under discussion. For the local queer community, Dark Kingdom represents the location where its members’ (nocturnal) activities take place in New Park, particularly the area by the oval lotus pond with an octagonal pavilion in the middle (Figure 1.2.1). Unprotected by any fence, Dark Kingdom is also marked by a sense of precarious instability. As the novel’s manifesto-like opening of Book Two (“In Our Kingdom”) describes it, There are no days in our kingdom, only nights. As soon as the sun comes up, our kingdom goes into hiding, for it is an unlawful nation; we have no government and no constitution, we are neither recognized nor respected by anyone, our citizenry is little more than rabble.138 136 Chief Yang in Outcasts is an amalgamation of three characters from the novel: Chief Yang, Papa Fu, and Grandpa Guo. 137 This is Chang Hsiao-hung’s insight, although Chang further differentiates between literal blood transfusion and the archaic male bonding ritual in that the former “de-sublimates” the latter, while still queering the line between homosociality and homosexuality and challenging dominant familialist nationalism. See Chang, “Buxiao wenxue yaonie shi – yi Niezi wei li,” pp. 52-53. 138 Pai, Crystal Boys, p. 17 (Niezi, p. 3).

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Figures 1.2.1-1.2.4  Stills from Outcasts

Figure 1.2.4 is a scene cut from the Taiwan version. Copyright: Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd.

Because their anarchical kingdom offers them no protection, the gay men in New Park must rely on their instincts as they “grope in the dark for a path to survival.”139 They are keenly aware of the constant threat from the outside world: “We listen for the sound of the policemen’s hobnailed boots… [T]he minute we hear that they are invading our territory we scatter and flee as if on command.”140 In the film, though the term “Dark Kingdom” is never spoken (understandably, due to political sensitivity), the first major sequence of the main characters’ hanging out in New Park (the “Company”) is actually introduced by a seventeen-second segment that – focusing on the lotus pond, from a high angle – employs a dissolve to underline the transition from day to night. Although brief, this static, distantly shot footage deftly captures the kingdom emerging at nightfall, while the next medium shot, with Chief Yang walking across the kingdom’s epicenter and being warmly greeted by several young acquaintances, hints that the kingdom is now enlivened by a local gay community (Figure 1.2.1 to Figure 1.2.3). The ensuing long sequence (which includes A-Qing’s first encounter with Dragon Prince) further confirms that New Park by night transforms into a popular site (the “Dark Kingdom”) for meeting up, socializing, and hustling (Figure 1.2.4). On the other hand, in another sequence where 139 Pai, Crystal Boys, p. 18 (Niezi, p. 4). 140 Pai, Crystal Boys, p. 17 (Niezi, p. 4).

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A-Qing, Little Jade, Mousey, and Wu Min end up in the police station, the film also shows this kingdom’s defenselessness and the vulnerability of the gay community to state policing. Despite the lurking threat from the police and the outside world in general, for many, New Park – especially in the era before the Internet – designates the entrance to the gay social network. In particular, by physically stepping into such concrete spaces as New Park and participating in the gay social network, many men, to paraphrase Lai Cheng-che, strengthen their gay identities while imagining themselves as members of the larger gay community ( jin quanzi).141 This process, in other words, effectively animates an alternative “imagined community,” which deviates from its official familial nationalist counterpart and characteristically takes shape against the parameter of heterosexual normativity. b) The Local and the Postcolonial through the Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary Aside from the challenge of homosexuality, the dominant family-state discourse in Outcasts is simultaneously confronted by a nativist concern, which is very much in evidence in Niezi. As Pai’s novel consciously incorporated various local elements, so, too, did the film adaptation include a nativist dimension – although this, I suggest, would have been less viable without New Cinema’s previous endeavors. As far as Outcasts is concerned, the native dimension is evident, first of all, in the film’s emphasis on local geographic sites, particularly those with specific histories and cultural significance (as opposed to the vaguely identifiable settings and overly used landmarks that dominated on film before the 1980s). For instance, on his first night at Chief Yang’s, A-Qing informs Chief Yang of his life story by first locating his familial home in the neighborhood “behind the International House of Taipei (Guoji xueshe).” Though succinct, it is a crucial piece of information, for that area by the early 1990s was widely known as one of the veterans’ villages ( juancun) originally built in the early 1950s for the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s

141 Lai Cheng-che. Qu gongsi shangban: Xinggongyuan nan tongzhi de qingyu kongjian, pp. 133-134. For comparable anthropological analysis of “insiders” (guan nei ren) among butch lesbians in Taiwan, see Antonia Chao’s illuminating long-term research on tomboys’ lifestyles and social networks: “Lao T banjia” (Moving house); “Wangsheng songsi, qinshu lunli yu tongzhi youyi” (Death rituals, kinship ethics and queer friendship); “Bu/Ke jiliang de qinmi guanzi: Lao T banjia san tan” (In/Calculable intimacies: ‘moving house’ thrice visited); “Yu zhi gong lao de ku’er qinggan lunli shizuo” (Queer ethics of aging together).

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army.142 The mere location of A-Qing’s family home suggests A-Qing’s father’s army background and political loyalty to the Nationalist party-state. Both assumptions, based on the neighborhood’s distinct geopolitics, are confirmed by, for example, the unloaded pistol A-Qing’s father possesses,143 the stiff bodily gestures he performs (due to rigorous military training), the small framed picture of Chiang Kai-shek on his desk, and the mainlander ethnicity (waishengren, as opposed to benshengren, the “native” Taiwanese)144 revealed by his thick, peculiar accent when speaking Mandarin Chinese. All this attests to the way a particular geographic site functions as an integral part of the film’s diegesis, while the film, by consciously integrating such a locale, conversely reflects how, in reality, political forces have historically marked Taipei’s urban landscape in a micro, local sense. Along with the veterans’ village, an array of other local sites are specified, including different corners of New Park, the expansive pool of water lilies at Taipei Botanical Garden (where A-Qing’s younger brother Buddy was caught in a sudden downpour and later died of acute pneumonia), the famous red-light district in Taipei’s Da-tong District (where Mousey’s older brother and sister-in-law live and work), the suburban theater in Sanchung County where A-Qing’s mother (Su Ming-ming) allegedly worked as an erotic dancer after eloping with a trumpet player, the dilapidated slum where she ends up alone after falling seriously ill (only A-Qing occasionally visits her), and the historic Donghe Temple where her ashes are temporarily preserved (until A-Qing brings the urn back to his familial home). In addition to local geographic sites, the film’s native dimension also takes musical and verbal expressions, and informs the belief system. A-Qing recollects that his mother, before leaving her family for the trumpet player, used to croon a popular Taiwanese folk tune, “Waiting for the Spring Breeze” (“Wang chunfeng,” a song about young women “eager for love [sichun]”),145 while she did the laundry. A-Qing had also witnessed his mother flirtatiously singing the words during the trumpet player’s performance of the same tune 142 Braester, “If We Could Remember Everything, We Would be Able to Fly,” pp. 31, 36, 50-51. For a discussion of the “juancun pathos” of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early films, see Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors, pp. 154-157. On juancun in Taiwan fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, see Mei Chia-ling, Xingbie, haishi jiaguo? (Gender or nation?), pp. 159-189. 143 Interestingly, in the novel we are told the pistol is “unloaded” because A-Qing’s father had been forcibly discharged from service and was hence no longer qualified to keep bullets. See Pai, Niezi, pp. 318-319 (Crystal Boys, p. 265). 144 Chen Kuan-hsing. Asia As Method: Toward Deimperialization, p. 55. 145 Li Ming-cong. Shidai huiying, p. 75. The song was once banned for its ambivalent political overtones from the Nationalist government’s perspective (ibid., p. 85)

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in a nearby park. The young protagonist himself, as the flashback shows, had thus picked up the same song and hummed its melody to comfort his little brother Buddy after their mother has left them. Moreover, A-Qing’s first flashback shows a street vendor outside their house, hawking bean curd, dried bean curd, and vegetables commonly used for Taiwanese dishes, all in Taiwanese dialect. The mother is shown talking to the vendor in Taiwanese, but when she tells her younger son what they are having for dinner, the name of the dish is actually half in Taiwanese (caipo, dried radish) and half in Mandarin (chao rosi, stir fry with shredded pork). Not only is her Mandarin occasionally mixed with Taiwanese terms, but it is, in fact, generally inflected with a slight Taiwanese accent. Apparently, A-Qing’s mother is more comfortable with the Taiwanese language than Mandarin Chinese, the only official language in martial law-period Taiwan. This native dimension in everyday speech is likewise seen when Mousey’s older brother and his wife (Yang Li-ying) speak Taiwanese in their brief appearance. Furthermore, in A-Qing’s last visit to his mother, on her death bed, she asks him to pray for her to Mazu, a specific goddess very popular in Taiwan’s indigenous religious system,146 instead of fozu, the more generic term used in the novel,147 indicating key Buddhist gods with great power and mercy. It should be clear that A-Qing’s mother is native Taiwanese, while Mousey is characterized by a Taiwanese underclass background. Equally important, through his mother A-Qing is exposed, if not formally introduced, to certain aspects of Taiwanese culture: the language, songs, food, religion, and the erotically suggestive performance. Although A-Qing is considered unworthy for his failure to establish a proper identification with his father and fulfil paternal aspirations, he nonetheless establishes a certain identification with his mother and remains in contact with her until her last days. A prime example is the scene where A-Qing hums “Waiting for the Spring Breeze” while gently patting Buddy’s back in the manner that their mother would have done. After A-Qing is chased out by his father, he and his mother, in a sense, are in the same boat: they are exiled from their familial home due to their “illegitimate” desires (homosexuality and an extramarital love affair, respectively). The particular dynamic between A-Qing and his parents, together with its complex ramifications, is rendered in an expressive dream-sequence. 146 Mazu is widely venerated in Southeast China and Taiwan. While her cult originated in the Mainland city of Meizhou (in Fujian), the most popular Mazu temples are in the Taiwanese city of Dajia and the town of Beigang. See Sangren, Filial Obsessions, pp. 42-43. For another account of the Mazu cult, see Lin Jin-lang, Shenling Taiwan, pp. 40-55. 147 Pai, Niezi, p. 54 (Crystal Boys, p. 59).

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Figures 1.3.1-1.3.4  Stills from Outcasts

Copyright: Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd.

A-Qing follows his late little brother into a pitch-dark, limbo-like space where all actions take the form of slow motion movements, and embers of ritually burned money keep floating down. A-Qing stops near the entrance, watching Buddy run toward a big flame in the distance. The vision of Buddy and the flame then dissolves into an image of blazing fire, behind which is a woman wearing a wide, scarlet cape, sitting on the ground with her back to A-Qing. Then a bare-chested man sits up before her. While the man, now recognizable as the trumpet player, lustfully buries his face in the woman’s chest, the woman is affirmed to be A-Qing’s mother when she looks back and smiles mystically at A-Qing. In a medium close-up, A-Qing’s mother is shown in heavy makeup; her expressively whitened face, in particular, registers a Japanese kabuki influence (Figures 1.3.1 and 1.3.2). Suddenly, A-Qing notices a hand holding a pistol beside his right shoulder (Figure 1.3.3). His glance back, the camera tracking counterclockwise, brings A-Qing’s father into shot, dressed in full Nationalist army uniform. His father fires a gunshot at his mother, and the son, in extreme shock, looks back in his mother’s direction while screaming in silence. The camera, though, does not follow A-Qing’s changing viewpoint, but remains fixed on the father and son in a medium close-up (Figure 1.3.4). The last shot shows the father staring at the son before A-Qing wakes up in fright to bright daylight. On one level, this dream sequence hints at mother and son’s shared fate, both banished and symbolically in limbo. The son’s own projection of the

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mother’s mystic smile at him, however, also implies an understanding, concomitant with his special connection, if not identification, with his mother. The tension between his parents, at the same time, is symbolically played out on the level of ethnicity. As the father, a mainlander, cannot help but carry his sinocentric cultural heritage and historical burden, so the mother, a native Taiwanese, cannot detach herself from the indigenous cultural and historical context in which she was born and raised. In particular, due to Japan’s half-century colonization of Taiwan (1895-1945), Japanese influence has always been part and parcel of Taiwanese culture and history.148 Admittedly, many native Taiwanese people also hold a very different view of Japan from the majority of mainlanders. Because most of the mainlanders who came to Taiwan in the late 1940s had been personally involved in the fight against the Japanese invasion of Mainland China, degrees of hostility toward the Japanese were always perceptible. By contrast, many native Taiwanese, while not forgetting the social oppression of the Japanese colonizers, also remembered the modernization those colonizers once brought to Taiwan. Exacerbated by forms of conflicts between the native Taiwanese and mainlanders over the years, together with “the entanglements of colonialism and Cold War in contemporary Taiwan” stressed by Kuan-hsing Chen,149 many native Taiwanese simply could not perceive the Japanese the way many mainlanders did, and they generally showed a deep appreciation of Japanese culture instead.150 The scenario where A-Qing’s father (coded Mainland Chinese) kills his wife (coded Taiwanese and Japanese-inflected), emphasizes this differing mentality, or “emotional structures of feeling,”151 alongside the important fact that aspects of Japanese culture are always already inscribed in Taiwanese culture. Our present investigation of the local and native vis-à-vis the dominant family-state discourse should likewise not exclude consideration of the local and native that is already hybridized due to Taiwan’s particular colonial history. Japanese influence is indeed discernable in other aspects of Taiwanese society in the film. For instance, the performing company “Little Toho Dance Troupe” (Xiaodongbao Gewutuan), to which A-Qing’s mother and 148 Ching, Becoming “Japanese.” 149 Chen, Kuan-hsing, Asia As Method. p. 124. 150 Ye, Riban dianying due Taowan de yingxiang, 1945-1972 (Japanese cinema’s influence on Taiwan, 1945-1972), pp. 8-18. For an account of the deep-seated ethnic tensions on the island of Taiwan, see Josephine Ho, Ning Ying-bin, Ding Nai-fei, and Chen Kuan-hsing, “Renshi Taiwan shehui mailuo,” in Ho et al., Xing zhengzhi rumen, pp. 1-39 (especially Ning Yingbin’s remarks on pp. 10-15). 151 Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method, p. 124.

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Figure 1.4 The Japanese-style Bell Tower of Donghe Temple Figure 1.5 The Minnan architectural style of the Guanyin Edifice (epitomized by its roof) combined with the Japanese style of the Edifice’s entrance

Pictures by the author, January 2012

her trumpet-player lover once belonged, is in fact partially modeled after “Toho Dance Troupe,” the celebrated Japanese revue that caused a sensation when it visited Taiwan in the early 1960s, and inspired numerous local imitators. Those imitators were often affiliated with preexisting native performing companies, particularly Taiwanese opera, as seen in their shared performance locations, overlapping audiences, and the incorporation of Taiwanese opera (as opposed to “Chinese” Peking opera promoted by the KMT) into revue programs. This essentially reflected such performances’ stronger appeal to the native Taiwanese demographic. Over the years, however, many such local revues lapsed into erotic suggestiveness, as in the Little Toho of the mid-1970s flashback in Outcasts. Another location likewise marked by Taiwan’s colonial history is Donghe Temple (Donghe chansi), the place where A-Qing’s mother’s ashes temporarily stored. Originally built between 1910 and 1930, Donghe Temple in fact belonged to a specific sect of Zen Buddhism, namely the Caodong School from Japan.152 Although the particular section of the temple shown in the film (Guanyin Edifice, also Donghe Temple’s only functioning section by the 1980s) demonstrates the local Minnan architectural style, the main body of the temple was nonetheless built in a Japanese style (as epitomized by the Bell Tower now protected by historical preservation laws; Figures 1.4 and 1.5). That A-Qing’s Taiwanese mother ends up in Donghe Temple, an edifice characterized by a particular colonial history and hybrid architectural 152 Ling, Zong-kui. Zhi shang Mingzhi cun erdingmu, pp. 76-79. See also the official website of Donghe Temple: www.mon-donghe.com.

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Figure 1.6 A-Qing walks by the Japanese-style Bell Tower of Tonghe Temple (a scene cut from the Taiwan version)

Copyright: Dragons Group Film Co., Ltd.

style, is another nod to the widespread Japanese influence that is at once inscribed into local Taiwanese society and constitutive of a kind of native Taiwanese subjectivity (Figure 1.6). The Japanese influence is arguably seen most vividly in the character Little Jade. While his mother is not unacknowledged (at one point, Little Jade invites A-Qing to join him for dinner at his mother’s house), Little Jade’s obsession is his absent father. His mother tells him his father’s name is Lin Cheng-hsiung, and he is a Japanese huaqiao – a Chinese person (or here, Taiwanese) with permanent residence in Japan or even naturalized Japanese citizenship. While determined to find his biological father, Little Jade also shows a special liking for older gay men – “sugar daddies” (gandie) – with Japanese connections. He develops a relationship with a middle-aged Chinese-Japanese man known as “Lin San” (“san” literally meaning mister in Japanese), and later encounters a customer at the Blue Angel named Captain Long, whose frequent visits to Japan and remarks on Japan’s vibrant gay nightlife catch his attention. Little Jade and Captain Long begin a love affair, and Long promises to take Little Jade to Tokyo and let him jump ship, to help Little Jade realize his dream of finding his biological father. Toward

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the end of the film, we see Little Jade in various places in Tokyo and hear (in voiceover) his letter to A-Qing. Though he has tracked down more than a dozen “Lin Cheng-hsiungs,” none of them has turned out to be his father. However, his resolution is undiminished, even if he has to go to Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, or even further.153 Interestingly, Little Jade finishes his letter by joking that if he does find his father, the first thing he will do is “bite off his ‘thing’” (yaodiao ta na ‘dongxi’), to punish him for conceiving “unworthy offspring” (nie zhong). Japan looms large in Little Jade’s search for his own self-identity, but this jest also registers as homoerotic. Little Jade’s obsession is not only his currently absent “(Taiwanese) Japanese” father, but mingled with his particular desire for older men with Japanese connections. Moreover, Little Jade’s identification with Japan challenges martial-law Taiwan’s emphasis on a cultural identity originating from Mainland China and marginalizes experience associated with Japanese colonization. His queer identity is rendered through a transcultural framework that is arguably preconditioned by Taiwan’s colonial history, nodding, as Liou Liang-ya notes, to “Taiwan’s past as a colony of Japan, as well as Taiwanese attachment for Japan and the Japanese.”154 Little Jade’s attraction to Japanese men and culture differs significantly from and is juxtaposed with Dragon Prince’s queer experience in the United States. In a montage sequence, Dragon Prince tells A-Qing about his decade in New York after his banishment: “By day I was around Manhattan; by night I was in Central Park. I wandered around endlessly until one day I found a skeleton-like figure reflected in shop windows. In that moment I really saw myself, and I started to regain my own life…” The montage shows several famous Manhattan landmarks: the Twin Towers, the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, the Jumeirah Essex House near Central Park. Yet the images are far from celebratory: shot in black and white, they are tinted by a bleak, surreal relish (achieved through superimposition). Dragon Prince’s own take on his gay life in New York stands in stark contrast to Little Jade’s Japanese odyssey – not characterized by liberation, self-affirmation, and positivity, but overshadowed by disorientation, desolation and lurking death. While Little Jade’s “cherry blossom dream” (yinghua meng, as opposed to the American Dream)155 is inseparable from both his paternal identification 153 This sequence was cut from the American version to show a tighter focus on the story of A-Qing. 154 Liou Liang-ya. “At the Intersection of the Global and the Local,” p. 197. 155 In the novel, Little Jade’s buddies make fun of his obsession with the Japanese, calling it a “cherry blossom dream.” See Pai, Niezi, pp. 91, 377 (Crystal Boys, pp. 87, 315).

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and homosexual desire, Dragon Prince’s sojourn in New York holds negative, even ghastly memories. Given that New York has been perceived as the world center of myriad modern cultures, including post-Stonewall gay culture, the film’s portrayal of diasporic queer experience that nonetheless privileges Japan over the US must, to some extent, echo the (once repressed) recognition of Taiwan’s past as a Japanese colony,156 following the reorientation toward the local and native in Taiwanese culture since the late 1970s.

Other Tropes for the Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary Whereas in Taiwan “niezi” itself has become a crucial trope of male homosexuality, it is by no means the only one. Tsai Ming-liang’s “Taipei trilogy” – Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive L’amour (1994), and The River (1996) – explores a number of important themes, including the rebellious figure of “Nezha” from Chinese mythology. Compared with New Cinema director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Taiwan trilogy” – City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), and Good Men, Good Women (1995) – which reflects on Taiwan’s once-taboo history, from Japanese colonization through the February 28 Incident to the “white terror” era under KMT rule,157 Tsai’s Taipei trilogy focuses solely on the contemporary, and the films’ plots interweave with the geography of Taipei city on a microscale, ranging from the decadent West Gate District (Ximen ting) to the unfinished Da’an Forrest Part and the filthy Danshui River. This resonates with Lin Wen-chi’s general observation on contemporary Taiwan cinema: whereas New Cinema “stresses that Taiwan is never the imaginarily projected ‘China,’” Taiwan cinema of the 1990s depicts Taipei’s “postmodern urban spaces,” and “informs its audience that Taiwan is no longer the Taiwan as once conceived of.”158 a) Tsai Ming-liang’s Taipei Trilogy Sometimes called the “Xiaokang” trilogy, Tsai’s Taipei trilogy revolves around the central character Xiaokang (played by Lee Kang-sheng), whose queer coding noticeably evolves from a somewhat ambivalent homoeroticism to 156 Here I am indebted to Zeng Xiu-ping’s brilliant discussion of the “Taiwan-Japan complex” (Tai-ri qingjie). See Zeng Xiu-ping, “Liuli aiyu yu jiaguo xiangxiang,” pp. 77-115, esp. pp. 90-105. 157 For an analysis of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwan trilogy, see June Yip, “Remembering and Forgetting, Part II,” in Envisioning Taiwan, pp. 85-130; Chris Berry, “From National Cinema to Cinema and the National.” 158 Lin Wen-chi, Huayu dianying zhong de guojia yuyan yu guozu renting, p. 142 (my translation).

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overt homosexuality. In Rebels, the adolescent Xiaokang rebels against his parents and the college entrance exam system, and finds himself attracted to an older man called Ah-Ze (Chen Chao-jung). Vive L’amour subsequently elaborates on their “ambiguous” (aimei) relationship,159 and Xiaokang’s desiring “gaze,”160 this time on Ah-Rong (also played by Chen). The two gain illicit entry to a vacant apartment, having each stolen a key from the realtor, Miss Lin (Yang Kuei-mei). Xiaokang’s growing attraction eventually leads him to kiss the sleeping Ah-Rong toward the end of the film. Finally, in The River, Chen plays an anonymous man who frequents gay saunas in Taipei and at one point has a sexual encounter with Xiaokang’s father (Miao Tien). In the film’s climax, Xiaokang, making a trip to Taichung to cure a mysterious neck pain, unwittingly engages in sex with his own father in a dark bathhouse. Given that current English scholarship on the queer politics of Tsai’s work has predominantly focused on Vive L’amour and The River, but not on Rebels (owing to the latter’s lack of explicit depictions of homosexuality), I would like to address this by offering a queer reading of Rebels that re-examines Xiaokang’s implicit, bourgeoning homosexuality against the workings of family and f iliality, intersected by specif ic discourses on “Nezha” and AIDS. Rebels opens on a rainy Taipei evening: the f irst eye-level shot shows the interior of a public phone booth, in which enter two teenage boys, Ah-Ze and Ah-Bin (Jen Chang-bin), who appear to seek shelter from the pouring rain. After lighting some cigarettes, however, they proceed to force open the coin box of the phone with an electric drill. They leave, and the sequence cuts to Xiaokang, shot from a low angle, sitting at his desk and staring out of the bedroom window. Noticing a cockroach, he calmly impales the insect with the point of his compass. Intercut by two more scenes showing Ah-Ze and Ah-Bin stealing money from other public facilities and retreating to a videogame parlor, we see Xiaokang toss the roach out of the window. At the end of the sequence, he observes the tossed-out roach crawling up the outside of the window and attempts to knock it off, but accidentally breaks the windowpane and cuts himself. A close-up of the blood dripping on a map of the island of Taiwan in Xiaokang’s geography textbook is followed by a stationary, deep-focus long shot that has the bathroom door in the background as its focal center. Xiaokang’s parents notice him rushing to the bathroom, and join in the commotion caused by the accident. 159 Li You-xin. “Qingshaonian nezha,” in Nan tongxinglian dianying, p. 246. 160 Luo, Po-cheng (Robert Ru-hsiu Chen). “Heliu zhi binglixue yanjiu,” p. 98.

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Along with the shots of Xiaokang and Ah-Ze/Ah-Bin, the opening sequence of Rebels establishes a number of themes that Tsai continues to explore in his later films, including “confined spatial areas,” and “water and fluidity,” as Carlos Rojas observes.161 In Rebels, the spatial enclosure associated with Xiaokang clearly contrasts with the roaming freedom of Ah-Ze and Ah-Bin. The ubiquity of water, including the torrential rain that opens the film (as critic Li You-xin notes), also helps connect the seemingly opposite characters of Xiaokang and Ah-Ze, both on a literal and a figurative level.162 Wen Tien-Hsiang pays close attention to the more concrete and prevalent theme of family. Along with the indoor/outdoor parallel, Wen draws a stark contrast between two kinds of families: “One family [Ah-Ze’s] without a parent, and the other [Xiaokang’s], despite the presence of both parents, with an alienated family relationship.”163 Ah-Ze shares an apartment with his older brother. However, not only is this dilapidated, barely furnished apartment almost constantly flooded with wastewater, but in the whole film Ah-Ze and his brother never have any direct interactions. In fact, Ah-Ze’s brother’s face is not even shown during his only appearance, which takes place in his own bedroom (next to Ah-Ze’s) on the morning after his apparent one-night stand with Ah-Gui (Wang Yu-wen), the teenage girl who, after an awkward encounter with Ah-Ze that morning, starts to hang out with Ah-Ze and Ah-Bin. While Ah-Ze has invisible parents and a faceless and irrelevant brother, Xiaokang lives with both his parents, and they are portrayed as having vivid personalities. Even so, the relationship between the three family members is marked by a sense of alienation. The particular dynamic within this family is heavily hinted through the mise-en-scène in the last shot of the prologue, in which Xiaokang’s father and mother occupy the dining and living room areas respectively, the composition of the apartment and the shot divided by the bathroom. Facing in opposite directions, Xiaokang’s parents are dining and watching television, separately, without any communication. The estranged relationship and miscommunication between the father and son is further revealed by the stationary long shot during the commotion of that scene, which captures the father’s movements outside the bathroom while he interrogates Xiaokang about why he broke the windowpane. 161 Rojas, “‘Nezha Was Here’,” pp. 70-71. For these images in Tsai’s later film The River (1996), see Martin, “Perverse Utopia: Reading The River,” in Situating Sexualities, pp. 163-84; Marchetti, “On Tsai Ming-liang’s The River,” pp. 113-26. 162 Li You-xin, “Qingshaonian nezha.” Lianhe bao (Union Daily) (November 16, 1992), p. 22. 163 Wen Tien-hsiang. Guangying dingge, p. 78.

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Xiaokang’s father’s eagerness to find out about this incident indicates his care for and attempt to understand his son, but he fails to get inside Xiaokang’s head, repeating the inexplicable “correlation” between the broken windowpane and Xiaokang’s lack of interest in studies in the first place. This sense of alienation and miscommunication resonates through the dysfunction of the heterosexual nuclear family. The sequence also brings together for the first time Xiaokang and Ah-Ze’s parallel plot lines; a chain of events is thereafter set in motion. Prior to their chance encounter, Xiaokang has just informed the administrator of his tutorial school that he has decided to drop out. However, he is talked into attending the rest of the originally scheduled classes before his termination officially takes effect. During his lunch break, Xiaokang finds his scooter towed away by the police and, while waiting for the bus, runs into his father driving his cab in the neighborhood. His father asks Xiaokang to hop into the car; then, making a stop at a street vendor so that he can share some prepared fruit with Xiaokang, he proposes spending the afternoon together at a movie. In a frontal medium two-shot, with a tinge of nostalgia, he continues, “I haven’t watched movies for ages. When you were little, your mom and I always took you to the movies. Do you still remember?” Without answering the question, Xiaokang simply looks back at his father, and the brief eye contact between father and son sparks a moment of shared intimacy. This moment of shared intimacy, however, is soon interrupted by Ah-Ze, who is giving Ah-Gui a ride on his motorcycle. Meeting at a red light, they argue over who has the right of way, before Ah-Ze finally smashes the cab’s mirror in a fit of anger and rides away. After these unexpected aggravations, there is a prolonged close-up of the cracked taxi mirror, overlapping with the perspective of Xiaokang’s father and followed by his remark, “I’m not going to the movies. You’d better go to class.” Without a word, Xiaokang gets out of the car, and, with looking annoyed, slams the door behind him. Foreshadowing the aborted cinema trip, in the previous scene, the father pushes a piece of fruit from his own plate onto his son’s as a gesture of paternal love, before it accidentally slips off Xiaokang’s plate. More importantly, the film consciously signals the imaginary nature of the heteronormative family, whose bonding is performatively sustained by such ritualistic practices as moviegoing, and whose mediated image (as reinforced by mainstream media) can be as illusory as a reflection. Because the ritualistic social function of cinema has been much attenuated – not least because of changes in the larger social economy and film industry, together with the proliferation of forms of mass media and public entertainment in Taiwan since the late 1980s – the shattering of the mirror here not only symbolically disrupts the

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father’s “nostalgic vision of cinema as [a means] of family bonding,”164 but mercilessly jettisons the romanticized (if not illusory) image of the family in the moviegoing practice of the good old days. This particular incident between Xiaokang’s father and Ah-Ze, furthermore, plants the seed of Xiaokang’s vengeance. After he drops out, Xiaokang comes across Ah-Ze (with Ah-Gui and Ah-Bin) in a video-game arcade, follows him around, and eventually vandalizes Ah-Ze’s motorcycle. While Xiaokang’s vengeance for his father is an act of filial piety, some critics have nonetheless pointed out the seemingly contradictory mindset involved in Xiaokang’s vengeance, particularly his identification with Ah-Ze through the autonomy Ah-Ze represents.165 Here I would like to add that Xiaokang’s seemingly contradictory mindset may also involve his bourgeoning homoerotic desire for the handsome Ah-Ze. In fact, right before the conflict between Xiaokang’s father and Ah-Ze, there is a shot/reverse shot of Xiaokang gazing at Ah-Ze and Ah-Gui on their vehicle as they gradually pass by Xiaokang’s father’s cab. While the particular psychological mechanism behind Xiaokang’s intriguing gaze is opaque, I suggest that Xiaokang’s potential identification with Ah-Ze (and the roaming freedom and patent virility Ah-Ze represents) also awakens his desire, directed not so much toward Ah-Gui as Ah-Ze. This ambiguous blending of identification and homoerotic desire is further invoked through the large poster of James Dean hanging in the video arcade, in which Xiaokang is to encounter Ah-Ze for the second time. Xiaokang is deeply drawn to the portrait of the iconic screen rebel. Not only does he stand (awkwardly) close to the poster, but the framing shows Xiaokang facing Dean at waist level; Dean’s left hand rests on his waist, with his right index finger pointing in the direction of Xiaokang’s face. Sexually suggestive as it is, this shot invites an interpretation that sees Xiaokang’s imagined relationship with James Dean – along with his projected relationship with Ah-Ze – as both identificatory and sexually charged. The blending of homoerotic desire with the identificatory mechanism, which complicates Xiaokang’s seemingly filial act of vengeance, ultimately paving the way for Xiaokang’s leaving his natal family as an autonomous, queer-identifying individual, may also be understood through the story of Nezha. In Rebels, this parallel is introduced by Xiaokang’s mother: after visiting a Taoist temple, she informs her husband that Xiaokang, according to the priestess, is the reincarnation of the legendary god Nezha. Although 164 Rojas, “‘Nezha Was Here’,” p. 77. 165 See, for example, Wen Tien-hsiang, Guangying dingge, pp. 81-83. Zhang Jing-bei, “Taipei qingshaonian de xinling kongjian,” p. 95.

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Xiaokang’s father is clearly unconvinced, Xiaokang’s mother notes that both Xiaokang’s father and Nezha’s father share the same family name – Lee – and, more importantly, that the tension between Nezha and his father resembles that within their own family. As Xiaokang’s mother tells her husband, “Do you know whom Nezha hated the most? His old man, Lee Jing… He was the celestial king who built a bejeweled pagoda, so as to lock up his [rebellious] son.” If Xiaokang is seen as increasingly rebellious and unfilial, how, then, does this square with Xiaokang’s subsequent revenge for his father – an act that can be taken as one of filiality? More generally, in what sense can the figure of Nezha help illuminate the character of Xiaokang? The great tension between Nezha and his father is, in fact, only one aspect of the whole Nezha story, as seen by a parent whose perspective is largely aligned with the social establishment. Vividly portrayed in the Ming epic The Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi),166 Nezha is an intractable seven-year-old boy endowed with magical potency, but he is also widely known for “slicing his flesh and returning it to his father, and cutting his bones and returning them to his mother” (ge rou huan fu, ti gu huan mu), as Jiang Xun and Zhang Jing-han note.167 After Nezha has wreaked havoc in the Dragon King’s territory,168 he must commit suicide, so as to release his parents from the threat of punishment by the Jade Emperor.169 Nezha’s return of his flesh and bones to his parents is “an act of highly filial selfsacrifice,”170 anthropologist Steven Sangren explains: “Even though this act violates the filial injunction against harming one’s body, because Nezha does so to protect his parents, up to this point in the tale his behavior is consistent with filial convention.”171 Yet by returning his flesh and bones to his parents, Nezha has in effect “severed the parental relationship.”172 Before his reincarnation, Nezha is “a spirit without bonds while wandering between heaven and earth” (taixu zhong yilu wu yikao de wangling), to paraphrase Jiang Xun.173 Even after his subsequent transformation through the lotus 166 Xu Zhonglin, Fengshen yanyi. 167 Jiang Xun, “Tsai Ming-liang zhege ren!” p. 16. Zhang Jing-han, “Bianzhe de hua.” In Zhang (ed.), Qingshaonian nezha. p. 19. 168 Xu Zhonglin, Fengshen yanyi, pp. 79-80. 169 For the description of this particular episode, see Xu Zhonglin, Fengshen yanyi, pp. 89-90. 170 Sangren, “Myths, Gods and Familial Relations,” p. 45. 171 Sangren, “Myths, Gods, and Family Relations,” pp. 157-158. 172 Sangren, Chinese Sociologics, p. 202. 173 Jiang Xun, Roushen gongyang, p. 230. In Jiang’s account, however, the prototype of Nezha harks back to a Buddhist sect from India in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), centuries before the writing of The Investiture of the Gods in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). See Jiang, Roushen gongyang, pp. 227-228.

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(lianhua huashen), facilitated by a Taoist immortal,174 Nezha is characterized by an “overwhelming insistence on establishing his own autonomy to the point of negating any relation to his parents at all.”175 This last point is driven home during a heated confrontation between Nezha and his father: “I cut open my belly and split my guts, and returned my flesh and blood to him. Now I have no relationship with him; how can there be anything of parent and son between us?”176 The confrontation is finally ended by the intervention of yet another Taoist immortal, who provides Nezha’s father with a magical pagoda that overpowers Nezha and thus maintains a critical equilibrium between the father and son.177 By focusing on the friction between father and son in the Nezha story, Xiaokang’s mother thus unwittingly ignores Nezha’s process of transformation, which is just as important for our understanding of the character of Xiaokang. Nezha’s destructive behavior in the Dragon King’s territory, indicating the failure of his familial education and bringing trouble to his parents, is characteristically unfilial. As Sangren writes, filial relations “are frequently expressed in terms of obligations incurred and debts owed to the parents.”178 By returning his flesh and bones to his parents, Nezha not only saves them from punishment but repays his debts. Furthermore, this repayment severs Nezha’s familial bonds, endowing him as an independent being with full autonomy, albeit with a transitional phase marked by disoriented meandering and ghostly existence. Before the reincarnated Nezha’s confrontation and eventual reconciliation with his father, then, his story shows him being unfilial, returning filial debts, and finally becoming an autonomous individual largely independent of the family-based social institution. This trajectory, from rebellious unfiliality to repayment to independence, not only informs the characterization of Xiaokang but also my queer appreciation of the character as well. While Xiaokang’s revenge on Ah-Ze for his father is generally taken a filial gesture, the intensity of its execution somehow suggests that this revenge is at once motivated by something more personal for Xiaokang himself. This added personal dimension suggests that Xiaokang’s repayment of his filial liabilities – like Nezha’s return of his filial debts, precipitated by a sequence of unfilial deeds – has emerged 174 Xu Zhonglin, Fengshen yanyi, p. 93. 175 Sangren, Chinese Sociologics, p. 205. 176 Xu Zhonglin, Fengshen yanyi, p. 94, (trans. by Sangren, Chinese Sociologics, p. 202). 177 Xu Zhonglin, Fengshen yanyi, pp. 97-98. 178 Sangren, Chinese Sociologics, p. 207.

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as a more urgent response to something unfilial presently unfolding within Xiaokang. On one level, this “something unfilial” could be directly linked to Xiaokang’s decision to drop out of school, and hence to deviate from Taiwan’s socially sanctioned, education-based path to success, wherein to achieve decent or even prominent social status is a fundamental criterion of filial piety. On another level, this “something unfilial” could also allude to the bourgeoning homoerotic desire that resonates with Xiaokang’s intriguing and lingering gaze upon both Ah-Ze and James Dean. Interestingly enough, on the first day that Xiaokang follows Ah-Ze and Ah-Bin, prying into their plot to steal electronic circuit boards from a video arcade, he accidentally finds himself locked inside the arcade overnight (though he does manage to sneak out the next morning without the store owner noticing). That is, Xiaokang’s following Ah-Ze as a part of his revenge plan and fulfillment of filial piety ironically results, for the first time, in Xiaokang’s staying out overnight without notifying his parents beforehand. This deeply worries his parents and is, of course, a sign of unfilial misconduct. Dwelling upon the ironic synthesis of intended filiality and unexpected unfiliality, this particular incident, I suggest, reveals the tension between Xiaokang’s observable behavior and his covert homosexuality (subtly encoded through his “coincidental” – or rather, “symptomatic” – curfew breaking), which speaks to the perceived tension between homosexuality and the heterosexual natal family. Lurking behind and precipitating Xiaokang’s filial revenge (as a means to repay his father for the debt incurred in accordance with the unwritten filial contract prevailing in Chinese culture between parents and children), Xiaokang’s bourgeoning homosexual desire is also overshadowed by the specter of AIDS. Xiaokang’s vengeance takes place on a rainy night, when he locates Ah-Ze’s motorcycle parked near the cheap hotel that Ah-Ze and Ah-Gui have just checked into. While the young couple starts to engage in passionate sex, Xiaokang begins to vandalize the motorcycle. He stabs the vehicle’s tires with a compass, slashes the pad with a cutter, smashes the windshield and front light with a padlock, pours instant glue into the keyhole, and spray-paints the word “AIDS,” in English, across the right side of the motorcycle, alongside the words “Nezha Is Here” (in Chinese, Nezha zaici), on the pavement behind the vandalized vehicle. Three points merit special attention. First, by sabotaging Ah-Ze’s vehicle, Xiaokang’s revenge seems disproportionate, considering the damage done to Xiaokang’s father’s cab (a broken side mirror). Xiaokang’s overt anguish in his revenge is, second, potentially sexually charged. This point is reinforced by the technique of crosscutting, with Xiaokang’s vengeful outburst juxtaposed

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with Ah-Ze’s and Ah-Gui’s passionate sex. While Xiaokang’s squeezing liquid glue from the long tube into the keyhole is unmistakably sexually suggestive, perhaps more interesting is that the completion of Xiaokang’s revenge, fueled by displaced sexual energy, is followed by the sound of satisfaction from Ah-Ze and Ah-Gui right after their sexual climax. (In retrospect, this climactic sequence also corresponds to the climax of Vive L’amour, where the film’s three main characters are brought together in the vacant apartment. While Miss Lin and Ah-Rong have sex, unbeknownst to them, Xiaokang is hiding under the bed. His masturbation, attuned to the couple’s own rhythm, highlights the sexual energy of his violent outburst in Rebels). Thirdly, the spray-painted word “AIDS” indicates that Xiaokang’s sexually charged anguish may be more specifically associated with his repressed same-sex desire. Instead of downplaying the role of the AIDS trope as a signifier of male homosexuality, while at the same time considering it a more generalized “symbol of contagion [that signifies] the processes by which unrelated individuals are brought into contact with one another,”179 I would like to emphasize the local context in which this particular AIDS discourse took shape. As Wu Jui-yuan’s research shows, the dissemination of AIDS discourse in Taiwan greatly accelerated in the second half of 1985, during which “the official encroachment of AIDS into Taiwan” (thanks to the confirmation in August of the first domestic case of HIV+)180 triggered public panic and a media craze. In the widespread media coverage and official publications on AIDS prevention, however, male same-sex behavior was unwittingly construed as the dominant channel of virus transmission, while gay men were the focus of AIDS prevention efforts.181 Prejudice and misinformation thus forged close associations between (male) homosexuality and AIDS in public discourse after 1985.182 Amid the rapid proliferation of AIDS discourse in the summer of 1985, the phonetic translation of AIDS as “ai-si bing” also emerged in the press. Simplifying the prior usage that combined the word AIDS and the Chinese translation of the term’s full scientific name,183 the neologism ai-si bing 179 Rojas, “‘Nezha Was Here’,” p. 76. 180 Wu Jui-yuan, Niezi de yingji (As a “Bad” Son), pp. 103-104. 181 As Ding Nai-fei points out, the AIDS Prevention Clause of the era cast AIDS as a “sin” and “criminalized” sufferers. It also endowed local medical institutions with powers analogous to those of the “police” system, reinforcing hatred, discrimination, and social hostilities, which ironically did not work toward AIDS prevention after all. See Ding Nai-fei, “Shi Fangzhi tiaoli, haishi zuifan chunchu tiaoli?” pp. 2-3. 182 Wu Jui-yuan, Niezi de yingji, p. 111. 183 Ibid., p. 104.

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– literally “love-death disease” – nonetheless moralistically wedded homosexuality and death through this fatal disease, so much so that AIDS, as Hans Huang notes, “turned out to be an illness signified as ‘[driven by] love to the point of self-destruction’.”184 Even though the term ai-si bing was gradually replaced in public circulation by yet another phonetically translated but morally neutral term, ai-zi bing (zi literally means nourishment),185 the connotations of doomed desire retained their haunting influence. Outcasts entered production in April 1986 amid heightened anxiety in Taiwan about AIDS, which claimed its first local victim that very month. When A-Qing and his buddies are taken from New Park to the police station, the film reflects upon the moralistic tendency in AIDS discourse when a policeman asks, “Aren’t you even afraid of ai-si bing?” Despite increasing public awareness in the 1990s of the problematic equation between AIDS and homosexuality, this equation retained its discriminatory puissance.186 Even by 1995, when Tsai Ming-liang was commissioned to make the AIDS documentary My New Friends, he worked against the producer’s advice precisely by choosing two gay men with HIV as his subjects. Rather than avoiding the prevalent idea that linked AIDS to (male) homosexuality, he wanted to confront that deep-seated bias and “the double discrimination at work against both homosexuals and HIV sufferers.”187 Given the close associations between AIDS and (male) homosexuality in local public discourse, it is plausible to interpret the “AIDS” inscription in the vandalism scene in Rebels as symptomatic of Xiaokang’s personal struggle with his sexuality. Significantly, this desire involves a “displacement mechanism” (zhuanjia, in Chi Ta-wei’s words):188 by invoking the stigma of AIDS, Xiaokang projects onto Ah-Ze his own repressed homoerotic attraction to Ah-Ze. After this episode, Xiaokang immediately returns home. However, he is confronted by his parents, who demand to know his whereabouts for the past few days. Xiaokang remains silent, and his father – yelling at his wife, “He is not coming in!” – slams the door in Xiaokang’s face. Xiaokang, in a sense, is “banished” from his familial home189 right after he completes 184 Huang Hans Tao-ming, Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan, pp. 76-77. 185 Ibid., p. 77. Wu Jui-yuan, Niezi de yingji, p. 105. 186 Ni Jia-zhen, “Taiwan de AIDS fanzhi daodi zuole shemo?” 187 Interview with Tsai Ming-liang by Daniele Riviere: “Scouting,” p. 92. See also Wen Tienhsiang’s interview with Tsai Ming-liang, “Appendix A: Liang hua – Tsai Ming-liang fangtan lu,” Guangying dingge. p. 223. 188 David Ta-wei Chi, Wan’an babilun (Sexually Dissident Notes from Babylon), p. 311. 189 It is worth noting, however, that toward the end of the film, we see Xiaokang’s father leaving the door unlocked as an initial gesture on his part that he welcomes the son’s possible return.

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the vengeance for his father that simultaneously answers Xiaokang’s call to repay his filial liabilities; this call is precipitated not only by his dropping out of school but also by his emerging “unfilial” homosexual desire, which he deals with through the displacement mechanism that attends his vengeance. The spray-painted words “Nezha Is Here” again raises the parallel between Xiaokang and Nezha; this time it is from Xiaokang’s own perspective (as opposed to his mother’s). Since Nezha manifests the trajectory of a particular kind of Chinese male subjectivity – from rebellious unfiliality to repaying one’s filial liabilities, before gaining one’s autonomy – so, too, does Xiaokang, returning his filial debts even as his unfilial homosexuality unfolds, and finally attainig a certain independence from his parents and natal family. Xiaokang never returns to his familial home. Instead, he is shown wandering around the city independently, searching for the significance of his existence and an affirmation of his sexual orientation. His search for existential meaning echoes the impalement of the cockroach in the film’s prologue, which implies Xiaokang’s awakening from his stifling way of life (including the educational institution that is the constitutive basis of straight society)190 and alludes to Franz Kafka’s existentialist classic, The Metamorphosis. As for Xiaokang’s affirmation of his sexual orientation, I would like to point to the sequence toward the end of the film where Xiaokang visits a telephone dating center (dianhua jiaoyou zhongxin) whose business model is summed up as “nan lai dian, nu lai dian,” literally “men come in (to the dating center), women call in (by phone).” Sitting in one of the cubicles (comparable to those in the gay saunas in Tsai’s The River) and sipping his iced tea, Xiaokang stares at the flashing red lights in front of him that signal the girls’ call-ins. However, Xiaokang finishes his iced tea and simply walks out, without answering any call-ins. While the continuously flashing red lights may aptly signify “how many lonely people there are in this city who try to reach out,”191 Xiaokang’s decision to walk out of the center, I suggest, may indicate his seeing through the nature of this dating system: it is only for straight-identifying people and not for him. His rejection may thus indicate not so much despair as a step toward his self-affirmation of his sexual orientation. 190 Xiao Ye incisively comments on the ironic relationship between the impaled cockroach and Xiaokang: the impaled cockroach on Xiaokang’s desk signifies the generations of Taiwan’s youths who have been pinned to their desks by the endless readings of this suffocating educational system. Xiao Ye, “Dang zhanglang yudao zhanglang,” p. 43. 191 Wen Tien-hsiang, Guangying dingge, p. 87.

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On the other hand, Nezha, after breaking his familial bonds and before his reincarnation, goes through a phase of disoriented meandering, a ghostly existence. In Rebels, this reflects the situation of Ah-Ze, whose parents are constantly absent while his older brother is rendered irrelevant. Barely furnished or functioning, the apartment Ah-Ze shares with his brother is located in a rundown civic compound, whose elevator notably always stops on the fourth floor, even though nobody is there. In one scene, Ah-Gui remarks that the elevator’s affinity with the fourth floor makes the building appear haunted – Ah-Ze (jokingly) agrees. The metaphor for Ah-Ze’s homeless condition as a kind of ghostly presence is made explicit. This sense also becomes a clearer marker of Xiaokang’s presence after his expulsion from his familial home. Xiaokang’s relatively autonomous pursuit of his existential meaning and affirmation of his sexual orientation, in other words, comes at a price. If Xiaokang, in the vandalism scene, displaces his repressed homosexual desire via violence and the stigma of AIDS, here the association between homosexuality and homelessness is likewise prescribed by the signifier of AIDS, wherein the moralistic si (death) in ai-si-bing (AIDS) coincides with the superstitiously ominous number si (fourth) in “si lou” (fourth floor);192 the allegedly haunted floor symbolizes Ah-Ze’s homeless, ghost-like subsistence. By invoking AIDS, therefore, Xiaokang unwittingly enlists the displacing effects of both homosexuality and homelessness at a symbolic level. The interrelated themes of homosexuality, home/homelessness, and ghostly presence are dealt with in a more elaborate fashion in Vive L’amour. In this f ilm, Xiaokang makes a living selling columbaria, or niches for funeral ashes. In contrast to Miss Lin, who handles real estate, Xiaokang’s vocation is associated with the dead. Even his personality is marked by a suicidal tendency, which clearly has something to do with his (maladjusted) homosexuality. As a gay columbarium salesperson, Xiaokang, moreover, never returns to his familial home; he either drifts about the city on his scooter peddling funerary niches or, when off duty, spends time in one of the vacant apartments Miss Lin handles, so as “to work through needs that could not be realized within family,”193 to quote Chris Berry. All this speaks to Xiaokang’s ghostliness and homelessness, symptomatic of the tension between homosexuality and the heteronormative family. 192 In Taiwanese culture, the ominous connotation of the fourth floor is comparable to that of the thirteenth floor in Western culture, mainly because “death” and “four(th)” in Taiwanese dialect are pronounced exactly the same – si. 193 Chris Berry, “Asian Values, Family Values,” p. 222.

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In her analysis of Vive L’amour, Fran Martin elaborates on this triangulation between homosexuality, the heteronormative family, and ghosts. As Martin points out, homosexuality in the public imagination is frequently aligned with “ghostly or cipher-like non-human ( feiren) forms,” because it “transgresses the rules of the ‘human’ when the human is defined by its relationship of interiority to the heterocentric [family].”194 According to the central logic here, homosexuality’s perceived threat (ending the family line) is “deflected defensively back onto [homosexuality] itself, which is then, in place of the [family], made to appear ‘dead’ and ghostly.”195 The cultural logic that opposes family to homosexuality is indeed “homophobic,”196 and Martin considers the way in which Tsai Ming-liang (along with other queer literary authors) appropriates this cultural logic in terms of a Foucauldian “reverse-discourse,”197 which reworks the homophobic syllogism in a new way, and to different effect. Following Martin, I would like to draw attention to two particular sequences from Vive L’amour that similarly illustrate the way Tsai negotiates the dominant ideology underlying the triangulation between homosexuality, family, and ghostliness. At one point, Xiaokang brings Ah-Rong to see where he keeps the rows of columbaria he sells. As they walk up and down the aisles, another salesman is talking animatedly to a group of potential buyers. He tells them the niches designed for couples designate the couple’s everlasting love, and how a couple has actually brought their friends to buy another niche above theirs so that they can play mahjong together in the afterlife. Of course, the salesman also introduces the niches for families and extended families ( jiazu), which echo the rhetoric “Be with Your Ancestors,” seen on the flyers Xiaokang gives out in a previous scene. In the second sequence, Xiaokang, after missing a phone call in the office, walks into a side room where his colleagues are playing a corporate-bonding style game similar to musical chairs. Organized into three-person make-believe family units, the players respond to the callout “Fathers/mothers/sons/all want to move!” by rearranging themselves into new “family” units. Throughout the game, however, Xiaokang only looks on from the sidelines, and again does not interact with the others. In the former sequence, it does not occur to Xiaokang that he and Ah-Rong have already wandered apart for some time, while in the latter sequence a colleague of Xiaokang’s even directly passes by 194 Martin, “Vive L’amour: Eloquent Emptiness,” p. 177. 195 Ibid., p. 179. 196 Ibid., p. 180. 197 Ibid., p. 177.

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him at the doorway. Xiaokang, in brief, appears to exist in a separate world, and his reticence and emotionless face, along with his old-fashioned, overly formal dark blue suit, confer on Xiaokang a ghoulish demeanor. Moreover, while the former scenario clearly draws attention to the role that ritual and imagination play in the perpetuation of the patrilineal family system, the latter playfully dramatizes the interchangeability, nonessentiality, or even emptiness of the roles of an archetypal nuclear family (the father-mother-son trinity). Xiaokang’s haunting presence and alienation highlight the irony that sees the heteronormative family as some preexisting essence. We see this irony again when Xiaokang entertains himself in drag in a scene parodying the “constructed naturalness” of gender. Echoing Butler’s notion of “gender performativity,”198 I call this familial performativity. Predicated on the compulsory reiteration of socially entrenched conventions about patrilineal family that simultaneously supply the patrilineal family’s sense of originality and realness, familial performativity is integral to family-based subject formation in Chinese societies in general, and inasmuch as it relegates “unfit” subjects such as homosexual individuals to the extra-familial realm, it is imperative to the figuration of the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary. Two points can be added here. First, the notion of familial performativity has actually been touched upon in Rebels. In particular, through the nostalgic remarks Xiaokang’s father addresses to his son in their moment of intimacy, the film consciously points to the imaginary nature of the heteronormative family, with its performative rituals and carefully maintained image. Second, the Nezha story can also be understood as an effort to break the pattern of familial performativity mediated by the idea of filiality. Whereas Nezha’s uneasy accommodation of familial performativity, culminating in his filial self-sacrifice, is reworked through the interior logic of Rebels, and Nezha’s disembodied, ghostly wandering between heaven and earth squarely coincides with Xiaokang’s spectral subsistence in Vive L’amour, the reincarnated Nezha’s direct confrontation with his biological father essentially derails familial performativity. This is correspondingly translated into the scenario of The River, in which Xiaokang comes back home for vengeance: the son and father ultimately confront each other, after unwittingly having sex in a gay sauna. That is, not only do the son and father come out to each other, but this is done under extreme conditions. There is no return; with the wall dividing homosexual and familial loves demolished, there are now only 198 Butler, Gender Trouble. Chris Berry also elaborates on the notion of gender performativity in his seminal piece on Vive L’amour. See “Where Is the Love?” pp. 89-100, 179-181.

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“new ways of being [human]” to be imagined.199 By this point, the “magic pagoda” in the Nezha tale that functions as the last resort for reinforcing filiality and familial performativity is completely abandoned. The River, in this sense, ultimately takes a step away from the legend. Although critics tend to read The River as the sequel to Rebels, rather than to Vive L’amour, because of the re-appearance of the family from Rebels, Tsai Ming-liang prefers to read it otherwise. He says, I prefer to read [The River] as the sequel to Vive, because of the continuity of growth and experience in the character of Xiaokang, along with certain conditions and feelings newly developed around him in each installment. […] In fact, I pretty much intend to use the film to revisit the subject of “family.” In Vive L’amour, I actually designed Xiaokang as someone who has a family, and that family is possibly the same as in Rebels, only that he never returns home. Clearly he dislikes that family. By The River, the continuity of the family theme emerges, but that family for Xiaokang is not worthwhile. He has no choice but stay in that house only because he gets sick. He is trapped in it.200

Even though Tsai does not mention the influence of the Nezha tale on his work after Rebels, the resemblance of Nezha’s trajectory from The Investiture of the Gods to Xiaokang’s throughout Tsai’s Taipei trilogy is evident. In particular, the legend of Nezha, as I have shown, provides Tsai with an effective discourse through which Tsai negotiates, on a local scale, the idea of filiality and family, along with the moralistic discourse on AIDS and the homophobic syllogism that places homosexuality beyond the bounds of the human. In so doing, Tsai foregrounds the performativity imbricated in the social practices of the patrilineal family while giving the audience one of the most memorable gay male characters in Taiwan’s popular film culture. b) The Chinese Queer Diasporic Imaginary: From Outcasts (1986) to Fleeing By Night (2000), and Beyond From the latter half of Rebels into Vive L’amour, Xiaokang’s drifting and ghoulish presence outside the patrilineal family due to his homosexuality represents a crucial aspect of the larger Chinese queer diasporic imaginary. 199 Martin, “Perverse Utopia: Reading The River,” Situating Sexualities, p. 166. 200 Interview with Tsai Ming-liang by Chen Bao-xu (my translation). “Yuwang, yapo, bongjie de shengming – fang Tsai Ming-liang.” In Peggy Chiao Hsiung-ping (ed.), Heliu (The River), p. 53.

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As noted, this queer diaspora differs from prevalent conceptions about diaspora that focus on the dispersion of a particular racial or ethnic population across national borders. Rather, it primarily addresses the exilic experience of queer subjects who feel immense tension within their family-based social networks, but who either cannot afford (economically or otherwise) to leave their home country or simply do not have a strong enough incentive to do so. They may, if their queer identities become known, face expulsion from their familial homes, as seen in the case of both A-Qing and Dragon Prince from Outcasts; for Dragon Prince, the familial home simultaneously means homeland. If not directly banished, these subjects may well choose (involuntarily or otherwise) to stay away from their families to avoid tension, which is essentially the case of Xiaokang in Vive L’amour. As for The River, because the film portrays the dislocation of the character’s body and mind (since Xiaokang’s illness forces him to stay home), it further calls attention to the psychological dimension of this queer diasporic imaginary. There are also hints of this psychological dimension in the character of Dragon Prince, in that his strong sense of internal exile does not simply end with his returning home following his father’s death. For Dragon Prince, reconciliation with his father – which, unfortunately, will never come – is imperative for ending his psychological internal exile. Interestingly enough, the year between Vive L’amour and The River saw two other local film productions that contribute differently to our understanding of the queer diasporic imaginary. As suggested by its title, Yee Chih-yen’s Lonely Hearts Club (1995) features a web of lonely Taipei people, centering on three coworkers: Miss Chen (Bai Bing-bing) and Miss Lin (Yang Kuei-mei), and their new male colleague, Xiaolong (Xie Xian-tang). While the two women, one married with a teenage daughter and the other of marriageable age, both have feelings for the handsome 23-year-old, Xiaolong is actually a gay man who frequents gay bars while living away from his parents. Revolving around themes of loneliness and disconnection, the film opens with a sequence depicting Xiaolong and another young man cruising each other on the street late at night. Several scenes throughout the film, in effect, feature Xiaolong strolling the streets or running across spaces, concomitant with a prolonged sequence featuring Xiaolong’s new gay friend weaving through the streets on his motorcycle on the eve of his departure for a foreign land. In part inspired by Tsai Ming-liang and his Rebels in particular (in Lonely, Rebels is even shown twice on television screens), the queer experience overall in Lonely coincides with the drifting that is pivotal to the queer diasporic imaginary – except that Xiaolong, unlike the sullen Xiaokang, appears to be well-adjusted and mostly positive about his sexual orientation. (This last

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point can be taken as a direct response to the call for self-empowerment mobilized by the local tongzhi/queer movement of the 1990s). Meanwhile, the first third of Chen Kuo-fu’s The Peony Pavilion (1995) focuses on Lily (Zhang Ben-yu), an introverted teenage girl who, just weeks before the college entrance exam, has a recurring dream in which she falls for a handsome scholar in an old-fashioned garden. Lily is so consumed by the dream that she soon lapses into delirium in real life. Finally, she recognizes the scholar from her dream, in the face of a new female singer, Liu Yu-mei (Rene Liu). But before Lily can find out more about this mystery, she accidentally falls to her death. The story recommences three years later, when Yu-mei coincidentally moves into the apartment Lily and her mother (Pan Li-li) once lived in. Disappointed by her career and love life, Yu-mei is visited by the same dream Lily once had, and in her own suicide attempt, becomes possessed by Lily. Lily’s mother decides to appease and release her daughter’s soul from purgatory, and Yu-mei is inspired to turn over a new leaf. Despite its opaque supernatural element and operatic cross-dressing, the shared dream sequence, I suggest, can be taken as symptomatic of their repressed same-sex desire. Because of the intense oppression against homosexuality in real life, this desire is instead expressed in a dream in which it suggested that Yu-mei, in the guise of a man, has sex with Lily.201 Enlivened by what Patricia White calls “spectral lesbianism,”202 the dream further haunts the subjects in real life; with “the simultaneous existence of two aspects of sexual personhood on the same temporal plane,”203 to quote Arnika Fuhrmann, it results in Lily’s delirium and, subsequently, Yu-mei’s haunting by Lily’s ghost. Whereas the film’s resort to the ghost trope echoes the ghostly presence integral to the queer diasporic imaginary, the shared dream sequence becomes a direct embodiment of internal psychological exile that is filtered through a dislocation of body and mind against the policing of family-centered, heteronormative reality. Alongside the ghost trope, The Peony Pavilion also draws attention to the significance of Chinese opera to the queer diasporic imaginary. In particular, the film’s dream sequence is staged according to the famous libretto of the same title used for the film’s English release (note: the film’s original Chinese 201 In the film, Lily describes Yu-mei’s face as “good-looking” (piaoliang) but not quite clear, as it is “moving back and forth” (hu yuan hu jin). Lily’s friend takes this as evidence of their sexual intercourse. In the play, the second Act contains a sex scene in which “falling petals” on the stage are meant to suggest the “deflowering” of the young girl. See Jiang Xun, Shenghuo shi jiang (Ten talks on life), p. 203. 202 White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. 203 Fuhrmann, Ghostly Desires, pp. 22-23.

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title, Wo de meili yu aichou [My beauty and sorrow], does not allude to the play). The filmmaker wisely adopts the libretto of “The Peony Pavilion” (“Mudan ting”) for its emphatic thesis about the power of qing (affect or life-force; see Chapter 2 for more details), which transcends the bounds of reality while bridging the gap between life and death; a parallel can thus be drawn between this thesis and the film’s narrative progress.204 Further, the cross-dressing technique integral to the particular kind of opera to which “The Peony Pavilion” belongs, namely kunqu or kun opera, is crucial to this film’s homoerotic connotations, and to contemporary queer appreciations of the operatic culture (both their performances and viewership).205 Combining cross-dressing technique with the idea of “jianghu,” evoking underworld society (itself a form of “diaspora” outside of Confucian officialdom and familial system),206 Chinese operatic tropes thus effectively facilitate the imaginary of the Chinese queer diaspora. An earlier example is The Silent Thrush (Cheng Sheng-fu, 1991), based on Ling Yan’s award-winning novel of the same title, rooted in Taiwan’s nativist literary movement. Told from the perspective of a teenage girl who joins a traveling Taiwanese opera company in the mid-1980s, the film depicts her disillusionment about Taiwanese opera. After seeing the dilapidated performance environment and the lesbianism of the troupe’s all-female performers, the girl eventually returns to the “warm embrace” of her heteronormative family, while the “‘environmental’ lesbianism”207 invoked through the trope of opera is left behind in the queer diaspora. Fleeing by Night (Hsu Li-kong and Yin Chi, 2000), another Taiwanese production, further incorporates various Mainland Chinese cultural references through, for example, its main settings, the casting of one of its lead characters (played by Huang Lei), and numerous crewmembers and supporting actors. Bracketed by a flashback set in today’s New York, the film is primarily set in Tianjin, in 1930s China, and tells the story of a theater owner’s daughter (Eng’er, played by Rene Liu) and the cellist who 204 For a discussion of qing, the haunting, and modernity rendered through the intertexts of Tang Xianzu’s classic The Peony Pavilion and Pai Hsien-yung’s acclaimed modernist novella “Youyuan jingmong” (along with Yu Hua’s “Gudian aiqing”), see David Der-wei Wang, “Youyuan jingmong, Gudian aiqing – xiandai Zhongguo xiaoshuo de liandu ‘huanhuen’.” Hou yimin xiezuo, pp. 109-136. Pai Hsien-yung’s “Youyuan jingmong” is collected in his Taipei ren, pp. 257-292. 205 The best-known example is arguably Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993), which dramatizes the decadent theater culture and the alleged gender confusion faced by a female impersonator. For a recent study, see Hee, Cong yanshi dao xingshi, pp. 218-248. 206 Silvio, “Lesbianism and Taiwanese Localism in The Silent Thrush,” p. 227. 207 Ibid., pp. 226-227.

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would have been her fiancé (Shaodong, played by Huang Lei), both of whom have an unrequited passion for a mesmerizing kun opera actor (Lin Chong, played by Yin Chao-te); he, in turn, is kept by a wealthy, controlling, yet oddly sympathetic lover (Huang Zilei, played by Leon Dai). The film dramatizes the homosexual acts within this itinerant all-male company (wherein the mentor is unveiled as the chief predator), as well as the homoerotic relationship between the actor, Lin Chong, and his patron, Huang Zilei. However, Lin Chong, named after the role for which has become famous, is not involved in female impersonation: it thus deviates from the heteronormative convention that perceives male cross-dressing in theater as a precondition of male homoeroticism. Moreover, having been born into a wealthy family, Shaodong has lived and studied overseas since his childhood. His visit to his hometown, for his marriage with Eng’er, is nonetheless complicated by his scandalous love affair with Lin Chong. His return to New York City, with his family ties cut off, is virtually transfigured from voluntary emigration into a form of expatriation and exile. Furthermore, the whole drama is played out against the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese War. Shaodong loses track of Lin Chong during the conflict, and only learns afterwards that Lin has passed away in the United States on his way to him. Here, the imaginary of the Chinese queer diaspora registers with that of the Chinese diaspora in general, where the latter is often narrated through the Sino-Japanese War and the ensuing socio-political turmoil. With its deepened historical resonance with Mainland China, the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary in Fleeing By Night, however, is set beyond the region of Greater China but simultaneously connected to the United States and the West.

Concluding Remarks Between the release of The Outcasts to the making of Fleeing by Night, the Taiwan film industry’s intervention in the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary had come full circle and reached a critical point. On the one hand, crucial tropes had all been used to great effect, and would retain their haunting influence in the years to come: niezi in The Way We Write (Amy Wen, 2006), AIDS and Taiwanese theater troupes in Drifting Flowers (Zero Chou, 2008), huangmei opera in Love Me If You Can (Alice Wang, 2003), Taiwanese opera in Encore (Anthony Lian, 2011), and the spectral queer presences in Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2004), Prince of Tears (Yonfan, 2009), and The Tenants Downstairs (Adam Tsuei, 2016).

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On the other hand, this imaginary also provided a fundamental infrastructure that could be further connected to other queer representations that simultaneously address the Taiwanese experience of being part of an ethnic/racial diaspora overseas, such as The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993), Saving Face (Alice Wu, 2004), and Tomorrow Comes Today (Chen Ming-lang, 2013). All these films explore being queer with Chinese/Taiwanese family ties in New York City. My initial intervention, adding the Chinese factor to “diasporizing the queer” (pace Watney and Sinfield), thus contributes to the effort of “queering the diaspora” (as in Eng, Gopinath, Nguyen, and Manalansan). Examples that illustrate this intersection also include I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2006), in which a “Chinese homeless” Xiaokang develops bisexual and interethnic relationships in underclass Kuala Lumpur,208 and Ghosted (Monika Treut, 2009), in which a mysterious, interracial lesbian relationship is conducted between Taipei and Hamburg. Examples that tackle not so much ethnic/racial diaspora as short-term sojourns or travels may include What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001), in which a lonely, traveling Taiwanese girl and a Hong Kong woman spark a one-day relationship in Paris, and Miss Kicki (Håkon Liu [1975-2017], 2009),209 in which a Swedish teenage boy develops a homoerotic relationship with his Taiwanese friend when he travels with his mother to Taiwan. One crucial intervention in this Chinese queer diasporic imaginary is the rethinking of ethnicity on the island of Taiwan. While the political economy of postwar Taiwan has been deeply marked by the tension between the “native” Taiwanese (benshengren) and the mainlanders who came to Taiwan with the KMT (waishengren), the conflicts between the two ethnic groups have, in effect, largely played out among the Han Chinese on the island.210 With rising Taiwanese consciousness and the emphatic development of multiculturalism since the 1990s, ethnic minorities have also come into focus.211 Witness the title character of Alifu: the Prince/ss (Wang Yu-lin, 2017), a Taipei-based hairdresser from the Paiwan tribe, who struggles to 208 The “intersection” I underline here echoes Kenneth Chan’s notion of “queer connectivity” in his brilliant analysis of racialized sexuality in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. See Kenneth Chan, “Queerly Connecting.” 209 On Håkon Liu’s short-lived career and Miss Kicki, see Ryan Cheng, Taiwan dianying bianhuan shi (Taiwan cinema in transition), pp. 391-393; Ryan Cheng, Taiwan dianying ai yu si (Love and death of Taiwan cinema), pp. 326-327. 210 Kuan-hsing Chen, Asia as Method, p. 55. 211 Indeed, other than the aborigine peoples, all the residents on the island of Taiwan are essentially immigrants. For an overview of the different aborigine tribes and cultures on the island, see Chen Yu-lan, Taiwan de yuanzhumin (Taiwan’s aborigine peoples).

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reconcile his dream of gender reassignment with his father’s expectation that he inherit the tribal leadership. In the Taiwan-Filipino co-production Tale of the Lost Boys (Joselito Altarejos, 2017), an Atayal aborigine gay man studying in Taipei city comes across the straight Filipino young man looking for his remarried mother; together, they come to terms with their respective predicaments regarding their identity: the double marginalization of aboriginal by heteronormative Han Chinese culture, and the women-centered Filipino diaspora on the island of Taiwan. Another crucial intervention in the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary, of course, is the unraveling of the tongzhi/queer movement in Taiwan since the 1990s. The ramifications vis-à-vis the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary, I suggest, are threefold. The first was initially seen in gay activist-filmmaker Mickey Chen’s pathbreaking documentary Boys for Beauty (1999), whose deliberately joyful, positive portrayal of young gay men was so effective that it became an unexpected commercial success. This trend was later picked up by Formula 17 (Chen Yin-jung, 2004),212 a local box-office hit that comically portrays a group of good-looking gay youths in ardent pursuit of love, and Go Go G-Boys (Yu Jong-jong, 2006), which surrounds a farcical gay beauty pageant. Echoing the positivist politics in the tongzhi/queer movement, this comic turn directly (albeit briefly) counters the bleak tone prevailing the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary. More important, the conspicuous absence of blood families in Formula 17 joins the second ramification of the movement’s intervention in the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary in the new millennium. Here, gay subject matter, which has become a profitable part of local popular culture, foregrounds neither comedic nor tragic but amply “sentimental” love affairs, involving young queer characters whose natal families have been rendered trivial, if not totally invisible. This is true of Blue Gate Crossing (Yee Chih-yen, 2002), Eternal Summer (Leste Chen, 2006), and Miao Miao (Cheng Hsiao-Tse, 2008), among others.213 This tendency, I believe, echoes the public’s changing attitude toward homosexuality, from overt rejection of homosexuality to refraining from open rejection so far as it does not enter their own families. Thirdly, the tongzhi/queer movement’s intervention in the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary manifests a rethinking of family. 212 For a discussion of Formula 17’s complex self-positioning, see Brian Hu, “Formula 17: Mainstream in the Margins,” pp. 121-127. 213 On Blue Gate Crossing, see Martin, “Taiwan (Trans)National Cinema”; on Eternal Summer, see Shiau, “Marketing Boys’ Love.” Interestingly, both articles highlight the Japanese influence on these films.

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Tongzhi/queer individuals and their families have been shown reconciling in a number of films: the gay son’s long “homecoming” journey in The Way We Write; the mother’s gradual acceptance of her son’s tongzhi identity in Artemisia (Chiang Hsiu-chiung, 2006); the married husband coming out in Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (Arvin Chen, 2013); the “diverse family formation” (duoyuan chengjia)214 consisting of a gay paternal guardian and his deceased close female friend’s twin daughters in Girlfriend Boyfriend (Yang Ya-che, 2012);215 and a new widow and her son coming to terms with the deceased husband’s male lover in Dear Ex (Mag Hsu and Hsu Chih-yen, 2018). In tandem with the more recent tendency to either sidestep or reconcile the confrontation between homosexuality and the patrilineal family, of course, is the trend that continues to tackle the immense tension between tongzhi/queer individuals and their original families. This is exemplified by award-winning TV-movie Shaonian wu meng (Tsao Jui-yuan, 2000, PTS) and two tremendously popular TV series, each based on a novel of the same title, Ninü/The Unfilial Daughter (Ko I-cheng, 2001, TTV) and Niezi/Crystal Boys (Tsao Jui-yuan, 2003, PTS),216 along with documentary film Corner’s (Zero 214 For an account of the progress and setbacks in legalizing same-sex marriages and the push for legal recognition of “diverse family formations,” see J. Michael Cole, “Article 972 and the Rise of Christian Evangelicals – Yes, in Taiwan,” Black Island, pp. 189-246. 215 Facing the Christian-mobilized backlash against same-sex marriages and the idea of “diverse family formation,” a popular horror teen-picture, Mon Mon Mon Monsters (Giddens Ko, 2017), unfolds around the themes of real monsters and campus bullying, while responding to the heated social issue with irony. In one particular sequence, we f ind the leader of the bullies taking pleasure in torturing a child-monster in captivity, while the back of the chair he sits on is emblazoned with “In Support of Diverse Family Formations.” The social message of this ongoing Christian-mobilized public bullying against sexual minorities is thus underlined. After Girlfriend Boyfriend, director Yang Ya-che came back with The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful (2017), a film not specifically about tongzhi/queer lives but Taiwan’s larger political milieu. When asked by an audience member at the 2017 Busan Film Festival to comment on the combined theme of politics, love, and religion, Yang pointed out that many socio-political oppressions are carried out by religious groups “in the name of love” (yi ai wei ming). I took Yang’s response as implicitly acknowledging the film’s comment on Taiwan’s current situation, wherein various religious groups indeed paint their anti-gay actions as love of family, children, society, etc. The post-screening Q&A session I attended took place on October 17, 2017, as part of the 22nd Busan International Film Festival. For a detailed, illuminative analysis of the of Western Christian conservatives’ global expansion into East Asia and their impact on the anti-gay agenda of Taiwanese pro-family mobilization, see Kao, Organizing Transnational Moral Conservatism. For an analysis of the affective politics mobilized by hate groups in the name of love, see Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, pp. 122-143. 216 For an analysis of TV series Ninu/The Unfilial Daughter, see Wang Chun-chi, “Zhuliu zhong de panni.” For an intertextual study of TV series Niezi/Crystal Boys, see Li Jia-Hsuan, Translating Niezi into Crystal Boys.

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Chou, 2001), experimental narrative The Life of Silence (Ying Cheng-ru, 2015), narrative short Tidal (Li Yan-xun, 2017), and narrative features such as Make Up (Lien Yi-chi, 2011) and Thanatos, Drunk (Chang Tso-chi, 2015). To a large extent, a series of films by lesbian filmmaker Zero Chou, including Corner’s and fiction features like Splendid Float (2004) and Drifting Flowers (2008), are also rooted in and respond to this tradition. The three-part Drifting Flowers, in particular, portrays the drifting life experiences of a group of lesbian and gay individuals, wherein the film’s second and third sections resort to the tropes of AIDS and theater troupes, respectively. While the subject of Chinese opera will likewise comprise the main theme of Chapter 2 and will be partially dealt with in Chapter 6, I will first return to Zero Chou’s work in Chapter 4 in the particular context of a queer-inflected camp aes­thetic, alongside an in-depth analysis of the way “tongzhi camp” is employed by Tsai Ming-liang in the feature following his Taipei trilogy. Significantly, my elucidation of tongzhi camp will not only create a dialogue with mass camp (Chapter 3), but it will also be predicated on my current discussion of the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary.

2

Two Stage Sisters: Comrades, Almost a Love Story Abstract Chinese opera is a prime focus of Chapter 2, which analyzes Two Stage Sisters (Xie Jin, 1965), a film classic from socialist China based on the evolution of Shaoxing opera. Paying special attention to the tension between the film’s text as a political melodrama and its subtext, replete with homoerotic overtones, my analysis invokes a queer intervention that rewrites the historical “surplus” of homoeroticism back into the official history of the socialist “seventeen years” (1949-1966). My integration of the social history into the textual analysis represents an alternative historiography intended to counter the ahistorical tendency underlying certain queer reading practices. Keywords: Yueju, Two Stage Sisters, political melodrama, qing, socialist China

As noted in the Introduction, two salient patterns of Chinese queer representation develop around the familial-kinship system and forms of Chinese opera. Alongside the seemingly inextricable tension between tongzhi/ queer subjects and the familial-kinship system, Chapter 1 also considers the tropes of Chinese opera as an important way of facilitating the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary via the theatrical convention of cross-dressing, as well as itinerant travel in an underworld society (analogous to the idea of “jianghu”) – itself a kind of diaspora outside Confucian officialdom and the familial system. This chapter develops these associations further, focusing on Shanghai-based Shaoxing opera or Yueju (as opposed to Kun opera and Taiwanese opera, discussed in Chapter 1, and Peking opera, to be discussed in Chapter 6). In particular, I analyse Two Stage Sisters (a.k.a. Stage Sisters), a 1965 film classic from Mainland China directed by veteran filmmaker Xie Jin (1923-2008) that revisited the history of Shaoxing opera.

Chao, Shi-Yan, Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462988033_ch02

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Xie Jin made his directorial debut in 1951, although he truly announced his presence to the Chinese film world with his breakthrough feature Woman Basketball Player No. 5 (1957), followed by his highly acclaimed revolutionary epic The Red Detachment of Women (1960). While Woman Basketball Player and Red Detachment marked the beginning of Xie’s interest in films featuring women, which continued with Two Stage Sisters, by the mid-1980s his expansive oeuvre had come to be identified by critics as a mode of film production dubbed “Xie Jin’s model” (Xie Jin moshi),1 and at the time, a series of heated debates raged over its artistic and political value.2 Whether or not the notion of “Xie Jin’s model” directly referred to the term “melodrama,” the critics generally agreed that Xie’s work demonstrated a strong appeal to the audience’s emotions through a calculated format that is, in a word, melodramatic. In fact, in English-language scholarship Xie’s films have been assessed predominantly through the melodramatic approach. For instance, Ma Ning discusses Xie’s film melodrama of the 1980s in terms of diegetic spatiality and the construction of a coherent social subject at a time of ideological crisis,3 while Nick Browne, discussing Hibiscus Town (1986), speaks of “political melodrama” when examining the political economy specific to Chinese film melodrama. 4 Whereas both Ma and Browne situate their analyses in post-Mao China, Paul Pickowicz focuses on the May Fourth critical legacy of the 1920s and 1930s, expressing reservations about the political progressiveness of Xie’s melodrama.5 Jerome Silbergeld, however, counsels a closer look at specific deployments of melodrama in Chinese cinema, and argues that Xie’s melodrama is “deeper in thought and richer in expression” than usually recognized.6 Robert Chi’s revisionist look at The Red Detachment of Women,7 meanwhile, resonates with scholarship by Linda Williams, Christine Gledhill, Emilie Yeh, and Zhang Zhen. For 1 See for instance, Zhu Dake, “The Drawback of Xie Jin’s Model”; Li Jie, “Xie Jin’s Era Should End”; Shao Mujun, “The Road of Innovation in Chinese Cinema.” Zhu’s essay originally appeared in Wenhui Daily (July 18, 1986), Li’s in Wenhui Daily (August 1, 1986), and Shao’s in Dianying Yixu (September 1986). 2 For an overview, see Semsel et al., Chinese Film Theory, pp. 141-143; Chiao Hsiung-ping, “Xie Jin de shidai jieshu le?”. 3 Ma Ning, “Spatiality and Subjectivity in Xie Jin’s Film Melodrama of the New Period.” 4 Browne, “Society and Subjectivity.” 5 Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation,” p. 300. 6 Silbergeld, “The Force of Labels,” China into Film, pp. 188-233. Another notable essay is Hayford, “Hibiscus Town: Revolution, Love and Bean Curd.” 7 Shuqin Cui also devotes a chapter to the film; see “Gender Politics and Socialist Discourse in Xie Jin’s The Red Detachment of Women,” Women Through the Lens, pp. 79-95.

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them, melodrama operates not so much as a particular genre,8 but “as a mode of aesthetic articulation distilled from and adaptable across a range of genres, across decades, and across national cultures,”9 as is also seen in the wide-ranging appeal of a similar term wenyi (or “wenyi melodrama”) in the Chinese context.10 For Chi, seeing melodrama as “neither strictly gendered nor strictly a genre” helps explain why Red Detachment is able “to fold women into a masculinist vision of women’s liberation,” while the transformation of a female individual is tied to the production of “memory” that is not only cognitively known but felt and inscribed in the bodies across the viewers.11 Gina Marchetti’s article12 on Two Stage Sisters is the most important English-language analysis of this picture to date.13 Reading the film as the nexus of various theatrical, political and Hollywood industrial influences, Marchetti provides a number of illuminating insights into the film’s aesthetic, although the melodramatic mode is not a primary concern. In recognition of and in dialogue with the ongoing assessment of Xie’s work as melodrama, I offer below a reading of Two Stage Sisters in these terms. On the one hand, I borrow Browne’s idea of “political melodrama” to highlight the synthesis of a melodramatic format and a socialist political agenda, locating this conceptualization in Pickowicz’s historical context. On the other hand, I emphasize the tension between the dominant address of this political melodrama and the queer messages emerging from this very text. As we will see, this foregrounds a continuum of homosexuality and homosociality between women (as opposed to the comparatively “disrupted continuum […] between sexual and nonsexual male bonds” that Eve K. Sedgwick identifies).14 This continuum is simultaneously mediated by a 8 Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field”; Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised”; Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre”; Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card; Gledhill and Williams (eds.), Melodrama Unbound. 9 Gledhill, “Prologue: The Reach of Melodrama,” in Gledhill and Williams (eds.), Melodrama Unbound, p. xiii. 10 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, “Pitfalls of Cross-Cultural Analysis”; Zhang Zhen, “Translating Melodrama”; Emilie Yeh, “A Small History of Wenyi”; Zhang Zhen, “Transnational Melodrama, Wenyi, and the Orphan Imagination.” 11 Robert Chi, “The Red Detachment of Women: Resenting, Regendering, Remembering.” 12 Marchetti, “Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic.” 13 Two Stage Sisters has been discussed in English-language scholarship, albeit not at great length. Chris Berry discusses the film at various in Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China; see also Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, pp. 212-216; Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, pp. 114-116; Wicks, “Two Stage Brothers,” in Transnational Representations, pp. 23-51, esp. pp. 25-28, 30-31. 14 Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 23.

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sociopolitical impulse diverting women’s life-force (i.e. a kind of qing, or what Audre Lorde terms “the erotic”) away from homoeroticism toward a specific kind of homosociality known as “comradeship” – all in the name of the socialist revolution. The title of this chapter, “Comrades, Almost a Love Story” (originally the English title of a celebrated 1996 film melodrama from Hong Kong), refers to precisely this libidinal transformation or the competing definitions of comradeship, shifting between its original socialist usage and its revisionist queer ramification, highlighting aspects of the individual and sexuality traditionally downplayed by socialist politics. Moreover, this chapter pays special attention to historicity on two levels. First, it underscores the connections between Two Stage Sisters and the world of the film, namely the development of Shaoxing opera or Yueju. Second, it recasts the aforementioned impulse to regulate women’s energy against the backdrop of Yueju’s development. In so doing, the transformative mechanism operating between text (political melodrama) and subtext (queer messages) is reassessed in a historically contextualized, historically grounded way.

Two Stage Sisters and Its Historical Connections Yueju was a style of theater ( ju) that originated in China’s Yue region, which corresponds approximately to the Zhejian province near the Shanghai metropolis. In the early twentieth century, Yueju was created by small theatrical troupes of peasant balladeers, who performed folksongs with simple narratives. Accompanied by percussion instruments such as clappers and drums, Yueju performances in their nascent form incorporated basic role-playing, simple gestures, movements, makeup, and costumes. The 1910s witnessed the transformation of Yueju from a fledgling “minor” theater into an established “major” theater. In particular, Yueju performers adopted and adapted a wide range of stylistics and techniques from Peking opera and Shaoju,15 including their more sophisticated movements and makeup, stage setups, and music (both sung melodies and their accompaniment). They also extended their repertoires and learned to “serialize” their dramas (lian tai ben xi).16 With these reforms, by the early 1920s Yueju finally gained status in Shanghai’s performance scene. By this 15 Shaoju is a regional theater that, like Yueju, originated from Zhejiang province, though it has a much longer history. Shaoju was originally aff iliated with religious activities and was especially known for its treatment of the ghost narratives (gui xi). 16 Lu Shijung. “Xin Yueju de lishi gongxung,” p. 39.

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time, Yueju was known as Shaoxing opera, after the district in which it originated. Nowadays the terms “Yueju” and “Shaoxing opera” are used almost interchangeably. It is noteworthy that, like the vast majority of Chinese theater forms in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), early Yueju performers were exclusively men. A Yueju training school was set up for girls in 1923, however, and the first all-female Yueju troupe founded; 17 Yueju actresses became popular in Shanghai in the 1930s.18 For several years individual Yueju actresses commonly shared a stage with their male counterparts.19 By the mid-1930s, virtually all male performers in Shaoxing opera gave way to their female counterparts.20 Interestingly, though the founding and maturation of Yueju were in the hands of men, Yueju – growing in popularity in Shanghai – was subsequently reshaped by its female performers. For instance, a score consisting of principal Yueju tunes and melodies (such as the “Si gong” melody) was actually tailored for actresses from the 1930s onward.21 Due to Yueju’s gender demographic, romantic love stories also became a strong point of Shaoxing opera, while military scenes and acrobatics were mostly or entirely absent from Yueju performances.22 During the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), Yueju attained and maintained immense popularity in the concessions of the Shanghai metropolis, which (under international treaty) were largely spared from the battles and bombings. Though able to escape the immediate violence of the war, Yueju artists in Shanghai were not exempted from involvement with political power. In fact, various Yueju performers began to exhibit their political tendencies after World War II, while certain Yueju performances were gradually wedded to the “progressive” thinking commonly associated at that time with socialism. With the change in government from the KMT Nationalist Party 17 The first Yueju school for girls was established in Zhejiang province by businessman Jingshui Wang. Its students formed the first all-female Yueju company; it lasted about six years, and did not succeed in Shanghai. See Gao Yilong, Yueju shihua, pp. 42-49. 18 According to Xia Lan, Yueju actresses entered Shanghai in the late 1920s. According to Qian Fachung, however, it was not until the late 1930s. Gao Yilong provides more detail: an all-female Yueju company first performed in Shanghai in 1931, but this and several other attempts were commercial failures. According to Gao, all-female companies had little success until the breakout of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, when they sought refuge in the concessions in Shanghai. See Xia, “Yueju,” in Zhongguo xiqu wenhua, p. 37; Qian, Zhongguo yueju, p. 15; Gao Yilong, Yueju shihua, pp. 58-67. 19 Gao Yilong, Yueju shihua, p. 50. 20 See Mackerras and Scott, “China,” p. 58. 21 On the evolution of Yueju scores, see Yuan Xuefen, “Xiqu liupei han changqiang yijia yan.” 22 Mackerras and Scott, “China,” p. 58.

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to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, Yueju on the Mainland even became a major state theater form. It is precisely against the backdrop of Yueju’s entanglement with China’s socio-political turmoil that Xie’s Two Stage Sisters unfolds. Although Two Stage Sisters focuses on the intimate story of two actresses and the vicissitudes of their relationship, Xie also gave the film an epic scope by drawing viewers’ attention to the women’s lives as affected by tremendous political and social turbulence. Covering the period 1935 to 1950, the film follows the main characters from rural Zhejiang to metropolitan Shanghai during the periods of Japanese occupation, KMT rule, and eventually the “liberated” era of the CCP. As “one of the best-remembered film stars from the pre-Cultural Revolution era,” 23 actress Xie Fang plays Chunhua, a child bride who runs away from her arranged marriage in 1935. Taking refuge with an itinerant Yueju company, Chunhua becomes an apprentice and befriends the master’s daughter, Yuehong (Cao Yindi); onstage, Chunhua and Yuehong play duets together. After the troupe master’s demise in 1940, however, Chunhua and Yuehong find themselves sold to an opera theater in Shanghai, where all-female Yueju is now enormously popular. Both rise to stardom in the following years. However, Yuehong falls for manipulative stage manager Tang (Li Wei). She squabbles with Chunhua and gradually recedes from the performance scene. Chunhua, by contrast, is firmly dedicated to her career, and is gradually drawn to left-wing politics under the tutelage of a female journalist, Jiang Bo (Gao Yuansheng). Chunhua’s newly politicized performances irritate those in power, namely the KMT Nationalists. A failed attempt to blind and ruin Chunhua follows, which infuriates the public. To alleviate public anger, Tang – under the guidance of the Nationalists – forces Yuehong to bear responsibility for the attack by giving false testimony in court. Yet the public does not fall for the ruse, and the courthouse descends into chaos. Then the “Liberation” arrives. With profuse apologies and a sense of humiliation, Yuehong disappears into the countryside, but Chunhua manages to track her down. Yuehong realizes the errors of her past, and the two sisters ultimately reconcile and reunite. Crucially, the story of Two Stage Sisters is steeped in history; the fate of the sisters parallels the development of Shaoxing opera. The film begins in 1935, coinciding with the period when itinerant troupes performing in rural areas were a major force in Yueju theater. Historically, Yueju actresses gained a solid footing in Shanghai only in the second half of the 1930s: Two 23 Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, p. 114.

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Stage Sisters dexterously situates the demise of the troupe master amid this change, which in turn paves the way for the sisters’ fate in Shanghai in a way that is fictional and yet historically grounded. Furthermore, I believe the character Shang Shuihua (Shangguan Yunzhu) is loosely based on Yueju star Xiao Dangui (1920-1947),24 who was hailed by the press as the “Queen of Yueju” as early as 1935.25 The story arc for Shang’s character, from her relationship with her exploitative manager-boyfriend Tang to her suicide and lavish funeral, follow closely the autobiographical details of Xiao’s life: Xiao, too, was considered a tragic figure, ruthlessly exploited and controlled by her manager-boyfriend Zhang Chunfan, and she committed suicide in October 1947.26 Interestingly, in Two Stage Sisters, Tang is depicted as the main antagonist, affiliated with first the Japanese and then the KMT regimes. In historian Gao Yilong’s account, Zhang Chunfan was similarly associated with both the Japanese and the Nationalists, and Zhang, with all his seedy behavior, was described by Gao as “the prototype of the villain from a perverse society.”27 Here it seems that, through the discourse of socialist revolution, Zhang has found his perfect reincarnation in Tang: both embody “evil” in the socialist imaginary and revolutionary melodrama. Moreover, in her seminal article on Two Stage Sisters, Gina Marchetti asserts that the life of famous Yueju actress Fan Ruijuan (1924-2017) informs that of the fictitious Chunhua. Fan’s personal account of her life in Yueju “reflects the same sense of desperation and determination evident in the f ilm,” since Fan, like Chunhua, joined a Shaoxing opera troupe in 1935 to avoid what Fan describes as “the miserable life of a child bride” that a girl born into an indigent family in 1930s Zhejian would endure.28 This 24 For Xiao’s biography, see Qian, Zhongguo yueju, pp. 64-65. 25 Gao Yilong, Yueju shihua, p. 58; Qian, Zhongguo yueju, p. 15. In the film, Shang Shuihua is introduced to the audience as “Queen of Yueju,” literally in a newspaper report. 26 Not unlike Chunhua accusing Tang of “coercing [Shang Shuihua] into death,” the Shanghai Yueju circle back then allegedly rallied against Zhang: “Xiao Danguei was coerced into death by [Zhang]; we must seek her revenge” (see Gao Yilong, Yueju shihua, p. 190). Even the gossip surrounding Xiao’s burial and money find their way into the film: Shang’s “luxurious burial” is depicted as a trick by Tang’s clan to deflect public anger. In another sequence, Tang suggests Chunhua for a new show, “Widow Ma Opening A Store” (Ma guafu kai dian). Without even looking at the script, Chunhua refuses, saying she has heard “something” about this show from Shang. Although what this might be is unclear, historically, Xiao was supposedly “forced” to star in that play, widely denounced as “dissolute.” Gao Yilong, Yueju shihua, p. 185; Qian, Zhongguo yueju, p. 64. 27 Gao Yilong, Yueju shihua, p. 186 (emphasis added). 28 Marchetti, “Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary Aesthetic,” pp. 62-63.

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comparison of the early years of Chunhua and Fan is indeed insightful. Yet Marchetti seems to forget another Yueju actress, Yuan Xuefen (1922-2011). Arguably the most influential and respected Yueju artist in China today, Yuan has been credited with overseeing, instigating, and implementing various reforms and innovations in Yueju since the 1940s. Among other things, she has been credited with the 1943 invention of the “chi melody” which, with its numerous variations, has become “the most fundamental and important melody” in Yueju.29 In many ways, in the f ilm’s depiction of Chunhua’s political development she bears a stronger resemblance to Yuan Xuefen than to Fan Ruijuan. For instance, both Yuan and Chunhua take artistic inspiration from historical patriot Wen Tianxiang (1236-1283). The transitional montage sequence that indicates the arrival of Chunhua and Yuehong in Shanghai notably includes a shot of a neon sign, showing slides of Chinese characters that end with “Wen Tianxiang.” During the Sino-Japanese War, a spoken drama (huaju, as opposed to opera) based on Wen was indeed performed in Shanghai, affirming the steadfast Chinese patriotism. Yuan undoubtedly established her principles of behavior and performance (zuoren he zuoxi de yuanze) with Wen in mind.30 Likewise, Chunhua’s motto, “Show integrity in life; be serious on stage” (qingqing baibai zuoren; renren zhenzhen yanxi), literally echoes Yuan’s philosophy. In addition, both Chunhua and Yuan perform the lead role in the stage adaptation of Lu Xun’s novella, The New Year’s Sacrifice (a.k.a. Zhufu). The success of this adaption proved a milestone in Yueju’s development, as it paved the way for Yueju to deal with modern subject matter (as opposed to themes set in ancient times). This change was made possible under the leadership of Yuan Xuefen.31 In another parallel, both Yuan and Chunhua are attacked by Nationalists and roundly defended by the public. In Two Stage Sisters, after her success with The New Year’s Sacrifice, Chunhua has limestone powder thrown into her eyes by a henchman of Tang and the Nationalists, who have failed to compel Chunhua to “spontaneously” cancel the show. It was reported that Yuan Xuefen was once attacked in broad daylight by someone who pitched a bag of feces at her. Allegedly, the Nationalists were behind this assault, intended to intimidate Yuan and the other Yueju performers into, among 29 Zhou Laida, Zhonguo yueju yinyue yanjiu, p. 2. 30 Wu Chen, “Yueju gaige yu Yuan Xuefen de yishu daolu,” p. 4. 31 On early Yueju reforms led by Yuan, see Lu Shijung. “Xin Yueju de lishi gongxun – sishi niandai Yueju gaige.”

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other things, canceling The New Year’s Sacrifice.32 In the summer of 1947, after this incident, Yuan led various eminent Yueju actresses in a “coalescence performance” staged to raise funds to build a theater for Yueju actresses;33 a similar scene is depicted in Two Stage Sisters. Encountering forms of interference by those in power, the ultimate triumph of The New Year’s Sacrifice has been interpreted by historians like Gao Yilong as a significant “struggle” of the Yueju circle against the “reactionaries” ( fandong pai).34

A Queer Feeling in a Socialist Political Melodrama These and other examples throughout the film illustrate the connections between Yueju history and Two Stage Sisters, which is fictional by nature, but deeply embedded in the pre-Liberation development of Yueju. While I will return to the issue of historical context in the next section, in this section I would like to focus on the text. My analysis will address first the melodramatic dimension in Two Stage Sisters, followed by my queer reading of the film. As will become clear, there is a tension between the political melodrama of Two Stage Sisters and its queer subtext. And this tension, as we will see, embodies specific ramifications in the development of Yueju after the Liberation. a) Two Stage Sisters as a Socialist Political Melodrama Inherently neither progressive nor conservative, melodrama, in Thomas Elsaesser’s view, is an ambivalent form open to a variety of political inflections.35 By tracing various embodiments of the “melodramatic imagination” in certain European countries and in different epochs, Elsaesser sees melodrama as representing “the struggle of a morally and emotionally emancipated bourgeois consciousness against the remnants of feudalism.”36 In his study on melodrama in European/French literature, Peter Brooks likewise associates the formation of melodrama with the changing political economy of “a post-sacred universe” in modern Europe.37 In other words, both Elsaesser and Brooks conceive of melodrama as an artistic mode 32 Gao Yilong, Yueju shihua, pp. 159-160. 33 Ibid., pp. 173-182. 34 Ibid., p. 160 35 Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury.” 36 Ibid., pp. 166, 168. 37 Brooks. The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 15.

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favored by the rising European bourgeoisie for representing history and establishing its own universe of values. How, then, was this melodramatic mode related to early Chinese cinema? What are the political and historical ramifications of that relationship? Paul Pickowicz, in his historical investigation into melodramatic representation in Chinese cinema, first challenges the “myth that the Communist Party brought the May Fourth movement to the film studios of Shanghai in 1932.”38 Such a view is already questionable since it implies that “the Party had a coherent policy toward filmmaking that was systematically implemented by its operatives in the film world.” Moreover, a number of leftist filmmakers – even if they had intentionally introduced May Fourth thought into Chinese films after 1931-32 – virtually became “prisoners of the film media,” as they drew on a melodramatic tradition characterized by “moral polarization, excessive emotionalism, exaggerated expression, unusual suffering, and extreme suspense.”39 Put another way, to make melodrama serve revolutionary rather than conservative politics, those early leftist filmmakers introduced “basic Marxist notions of class struggle, capitalism, and imperialism to sharpen the vague images of good and evil that abounded in classic melodramas.”40 However, relying as it does on simplified concepts and polarized values, melodrama was incapable of elucidating the intricacy of Marxist ideas, which were instead “reduced to stereotypes and caricatures” and hence “swallowed up” by the very medium of their expression. 41 Even so, those Marxist-inflected melodramas made in the 1930s and 1940s, in Pickowicz’s opinion, still embodied a form of the May Fourth tradition, insofar as they played a critical role in contemporary politics and society. Chinese filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s, by contrast, broke with this tradition, precisely because they no longer made film melodramas that “[criticized] contemporary social conditions and thus subverted state authority.”42 The most memorable film melodramas of the time, including Xie Jin’s Two Stage Sisters and The Red Detachment of Women, focused not on socialist society, but on the dark times before the 38 Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation,” p. 300. 39 Ibid., pp. 300, 302. 40 Ibid. p. 312. 41 Ibid. Miriam Bratu Hansen, however, expresses reservations, arguing that Pickowicz’s view of early Chinese film melodrama “assumes a monolithic and condescending notion of melodrama” and “does not consider their visual, narrational, and performance style – cinematically specific qualities that make them rank among the most sophisticated and vibrant works of silent cinema worldwide.” Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons,” p. 14. 42 Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation,” p. 314.

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“Liberation.” Aimed at legitimizing the new rule of the CCP, they belonged, in short, to “a propagandistic victor’s cinema.”43 Corresponding to Pickowicz’s observations, I find it useful to approach a significant percentage of the film melodrama made in the PRC through what Nick Browne terms “political melodrama.” Writing around the same time as Pickowicz, Browne questions the analogy of Chinese “family melodrama” to its Western counterpart. In assessing Xie Jin’s more recent works from the 1980s, Browne proposes the concept of “political melodrama,” which he defines as “an expression of a mode of injustice whose mise-en-scène is precisely the nexus between public and private life, a mode in which gender as a mark of difference is a limited, mobile term activated by distinctive social powers and historical circumstances.”44 Two points merit our special attention. First, political melodrama in the PRC is a mode of representation that addresses “the relation of the individual to the social as a fully public matter.” Such a relation, according to Browne, is ineluctably mediated by both “the expectations of an ethical system” constituted by Confucianism and “the demands of a political system” dominated by socialism.45 Second, Browne’s focus on Xie’s film melodramas from the 1980s allows him to emphasize the changing dynamic between the ethical system and the political system in the post-Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) era, wherein Maoist socialism has lost its credibility by instilling a deep sense of disillusionment, and political ferment has given way to a strong appeal to certain older ethical standards and to humanism. 46 Significantly, the “propagandistic victor’s cinema” characteristic of various film melodramas from the 1950s and 1960s has been reconfigured in relation to this changed sociopolitical climate. The causes of the “injustice” central to those political melodramas, for instance, are finally portrayed not only from outside socialist society but sometimes, as Hibiscus Town shows, from within. 47 What cannot be overstressed in Browne’s approach to the Chinese film melodrama is thus his emphasis on the political in relation to the historical specificity of the 1980s. For the 43 Ibid. 44 Browne, “Society and Subjectivity,” p. 43. 45 Ibid., pp. 46-47. 46 Humanism is more accurately known as “rehumanism” in Chinese, since the Cultural Revolution “had distorted or ignored human nature and now it was time to restore it.” See Kuoshu (ed.), Celluloid China, p. 26. Nick Browne also borrows the term “rehumanism” from Esther Yau. See “Society and Subjectivity,” p. 53. 47 In Pickowicz’s words, “it was finally possible not only to talk about socialist society in terms of darkness and light, but to identify the Party as the agent of darkness.” See “Melodramatic Representation,” p. 325.

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purposes of this chapter, though, I borrow the term “political melodrama” to highlight precisely this marriage between melodramatic format and blatant political agenda, particularly the socialist revolutionary ideology that was barely (allowed to be) challenged in the PRC until the late 1970s. China’s political melodrama also has recourse to “affect” in the audience. Arousing sympathy and righteous indignation in the audience, political melodrama – to borrow Pickowicz’s words – provides its viewers with “both the depraved intrigues of villainy and the pathetic suffering of its innocent and helpless victims.”48 As Peter Brooks notes, “[m]elodramatic good and evil are highly personalized;”49 political melodrama likewise shows the audience “the highly personalized human faces of virtue and evil,”50 while the meaning of the self and the fate of the family are, importantly, articulated through the public and the political. Regarding the significance of “gender” in China’s political melodrama from the 1950s and 1960s, I will elaborate on this in the second half of this section. In Two Stage Sisters the antagonistic or “evil” forces are undoubtedly affiliated with those who contradict the political-economic interests of both the CCP and the “people” it represents. Such antagonistic forces include the Japanese intruder (against the parameter of Chinese nationalism), the KMT Nationalist (adversary of the “progressive” politics represented by the CCP), rich people and landlords (versus the proletariat), and the USA (the ultimate representative of capitalism and Western imperialist influence, and a strong supporter of the KMT from the 1940s to the 1960s). Importantly, such oppositional forces are highly personalized, vividly embodied by such characters as Lord Ni, Manager Tang, and Auntie Shen. Lord Ni, a gentrylandowner in the Zhejian countryside, appears early in the film. Watching Yuehong and Chunhua performing on a public stage, Ni lusts after the two sisters, and engages the troupe for an all-night small-scale performance at his residence. However, they defy his demand that Yuehong remain after the performance. Next day the local police interrupt their public performance, arrest Chunhua, and punish her with “public exhibition,” in which she is lashed to a pole in the public square. Lord Ni is portrayed as someone who not only possesses land and wealth, but is also salacious, immoral, and well-connected to the local police – who, unfortunately, are equally venal and corrupt. These incidents involving Lord Ni also emphasize, in melodramatic terms, the high dramatization of events, the suffering of 48 Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation,” p. 322. 49 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 16. 50 Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation,” p. 322.

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the innocent, and an intense moral and emotional engagement with the audience. Given that the police abuse their power in public, the suffering of one individual thus goes beyond the personal, and is transmuted into a public matter with political overtones. Antagonistic forces in Two Stage Sisters are also personified in two opportunist characters: Manager Tang and Monk Ah-xing. As manager of the opera troupe, Monk Ah-xing is to blame for involving the two sisters with Lord Ni. Soon after Yuehong’s father dies, Ah-xing profits by “selling” the two sisters to Manager Tang, in whose theater they must perform without pay for three years. After Chunhua and Yuehong become stars in Shanghai, it is Ah-xing who – backed by Tang and the Nationalists – carries out the assault on Chunhua and then falsely blames it on Yuehong. Ah-xing is, in short, an opportunist lacking any virtue or political conviction; as the political environment changes, he backs anyone with money and power. Manager Tang is also an opportunist, though he, unlike Ah-xing, possesses wealth. Tang is affiliated with the Japanese and then with the Nationalists. In a sequence from 1944 set in Manager Tang’s office, we see a doll in kimono in a glass case. This decoration indicates Tang’s rapport with the Japanese, and thus his treacherous character. After the Sino-Japanese War, however, Tang’s liaisons with the Japanese are replaced by his relationships with the Shanghai-based Nationalists, as he befriends both Commissioner Pan – a KMT delegate in Shanghai – and a Nationalist agent who spies on political activities in Shanghai. Evidently, in this political melodrama Manager Tang’s pivotal function is to involve reactionary forces. Though all the aforementioned antagonists are male, one female character is also portrayed as negative and reactionary. A wealthy middle-aged woman, Auntie Shen, first appears in the story sometime after 1944, when Chunhua and Yuehong are both stars, and (their contract having expired) collecting their pay. Shen tries to establish a quasi-maternal relationship with Chunhua, but her complicity with reactionary influences is gradually revealed. For example, after Shang Shuihua takes her own life, Shen becomes the selfanointed mediator between Tang and the actresses. Shedding crocodile tears, Shen softens the sisters’ attitude by exploiting “feminine” rhetoric, and persuades Tang to arrange a sumptuous funeral. To Chunhua, in hindsight, this deflects public attention away from avenging the wronged. When Shen later joins Tang to deter Chunhua from performing “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” she resolutely rejects her appeal to social networking (renqing). Significantly, in attempting to dissuade Chunhua from performing a drama that criticizes society, Shen plays on her image as an amicable woman (not an option for Tang and Ah-xing, with their tough looks). Similarly,

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her mediation between Tang and the actresses, resorting to the notion of “woman,” supports an intrigue that suppresses social justice. Gender is thus appropriated by the reactionary in order to perpetuate reactionary interests. Two Stage Sisters strategically makes gender a secondary issue to class. The point of Auntie Shen in this political melodrama is not so much gender itself as class struggle in the guise of gender. Complicit with Tang in reactionary behavior, Shen personifies the forces opposing the socialist revolution. Amid the conflicts between the revolutionary and the reactionary, between good and evil, Yuehong unfortunately chooses the “wrong” side. In a sequence where Chunhua refuses Tang’s proposal to perform “Widow Ma Opening a Store” (Ma guafu faidian, a “dissolute” play in public opinion), Yuehong stays aside, preoccupied with practicing her autograph. When Tang says Chunhua is missing out on the current trend, Yuehong unthinkingly agrees. Although this scene is brief, it effectively casts the first symptom of Yuehong’s “degeneration” as her strong desire for fame, combined with her lack of awareness of the bad influences surrounding her. In the same sequence, Tang then prepares to pay the two sisters. We see that Tang inserts an extra bill into Yuehong’s pay. After the two sisters return to the dormitory, as Chunhua attempts to lend some of her pay to the needy (i.e. Shang Shuihua), Yuehong simply puts hers away, along with the additional bill. Yuehong is thus portrayed as both morally weak and vulnerable to material temptation. This is underscored by her inclination to vanity, as also seen in her pursuit of extravagance in her costumes and offstage garments alike.51 Eventually, Yuehong marries Tang and gives up her career. Though she still preserves some feelings for Chunhua, Yuehong becomes a member of the anti-revolutionary camp. By contrast, journalist Jiang Bo personifies the positive and righteous forces around Chunhua. While Yuehong is lured by promises of luxury and becomes a reactionary, Chunhua dedicates herself to the pursuit of social justice, and is drawn to progressive politics under Jiang Bo’s guidance. Before Chunhua meets Jiang in person, she reads one of her articles, headlined: “Yueju is at a crossroads/Allow me to ask my stage sisters/Do you prefer that it heads toward progression/Or degeneration?” This occurs halfway through the film, as the two sisters begin to disagree over Yuehong’s deepening interest in fame and vanity. Though the author’s name may not register with Chunhua 51 As Harriet Evans notes, “Texts of the 1950s and mid-1970s repeatedly suggested that women were ‘by nature’ drawn more to matters of sartorial interest and physical appearance than men. Stories about women who had strayed from the socialist straight and narrow often started with references to their materialist interest in fine clothes.” Evans, “‘Comrade Sisters’,” p. 73.

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Figure 2.1  Still from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

at this point, the article clearly does. Jiang and Chunhua first meet during the actresses’ confrontation with Tang over Shang’s death. Along with Xiaoxiang (Chunhua’s longstanding actress friend), they form a special bond, vowing “to redeem the suffering lives and avenge the unjustly dead” (in Chunhua’s words) and swearing “to teach their living sisters right from wrong, black from white” (as Jiang asserts). Jiang recommends that Chunhua see various movies and dramas that supposedly represent a more “progressive” political stance than that of traditional Chinese theater. Chunhua and Jiang also visit the exhibition commemorating Lu Xun (1881-1936), signifying the influence of left-wing politics on Chunhua’s performing art. When Chunhua performs the lead in “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” Jiang is among the audience members in the packed theater. Interestingly, Jiang’s affiliation with the CCP is never made clear until after the government-enforced cancellation of “The New Year’s Sacrifice.” When Chunhua later brings her the written announcement of the “coalitional performance,” Jiang is surely happy for Chunhua, but manages to look beyond these feelings and warns Chunhua to be alert to her safety, because their “enemies” must be desperate at a time when “we” – the CCP – are making

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progress inland. With the actresses’ victory over theater ownership in sight, Jiang further warns that behind Tang there exists a “big boss” (namely, the KMT Nationalist Party), and “that big boss is backed up by the USA.” This is the only moment that the US is clearly pointed out,52 even though its existence in the diegesis, like its Japanese counterpart, is never personified. However, the US is depicted as antagonistic to China’s revolution. This ideology is played out on two levels: the late-1940s setting in diegetic terms and, in extra-diegetic terms, the Cold War ambient of the early 1960s when the film was made. Throughout the film, Chunhua’s past suffering is gradually transformed into the imperative for her current dedication to socialist revolution. Chunhua’s identification with Xianglin’s Wife (the protagonist of “The New Year’s Sacrifice”), for example, is established by connecting the images of Xianglin’s Wife, Chunhua’s public humiliation early on, and Little Chunhua – another child bride who shares her name and sympathizes with Chunhua during that humiliation. While Chunhua tells Little Chunhua that she will never return to the village where she has been unjustly punished, towards the end of the film she nevertheless revisits that very location. Notably, her visit is made possible by the communist revolution, in which she has engaged through her art. If, as noted above, Chunhua’s earlier humiliation was public and political, her ensuing transformation and ultimate devotion to the “public” likewise attest to the tenets of the Chinese political melodrama, namely that the state’s political discourse must be translated through the personal, and vice versa. Furthermore, Chunhua’s visit designates that these wrongs are now rectified through the repudiation of the class enemies represented by Lord Ni. If the interaction between Chunhua and Auntie Shen is informed by the ideology that privileges class over gender in China’s proletarian revolution, this finale seems to reiterate the same idea from another angle. That is, despite the fact that the revolution does not concentrate on gender issues, women’s emancipation is assumed to automatically follow the victory over class-based oppression. Revisiting the place of her persecution, Chunhua is depicted on tour performing “The White-Haired Girl” (Bai mao nü), arguably the most famous 52 In the “literary screenplay,” Chunhua’s limestone attack includes details like the coat Chunhua grabs being “American-styled,” though this is unclear, if not completely missing in the film. Also missing is a policeman described as “excitedly witness[ing] the attack happening without taking any action,” as if “appreciating a murder or robbery scene from some American movies.” Lin, Xu, and Xie (eds.), Wutai jiemei, p. 133.

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revolutionary drama in the People’s Republic.53 “The White-Haired Girl” – like Two Stage Sisters – also narrates the fate of a peasant girl through the sociopolitical vicissitudes of the Republican era and the Liberation. In her study on the adaptations of this story, Meng Yue identifies two axes along which the story has evolved. One is “a gradual strengthening of [the protagonist’s] political instincts,” and the other is “a gradual erasure of [the protagonist’s] body and her sexual situation.” With the female protagonist’s body and sexuality fading from the story, the term “class,” as Meng observes, gradually displaces “the sexual code” and becomes the most essential part of the story.54 Writing about the representations of women in films from the PRC in general, Dai Jinhua also comments on the images of women in the “classical revolutionary cinematic mode.” Given that classic Hollywood cinema revolves around a male-centered mechanism (i.e. male audiences’ “active” subjectivity is reinforced through their privileged positions onscreen, emboldening them to look at women as passive objects for men’s desire, as Laura Mulvey argues),55 Dai notes the decline of this desiring male “gaze” in revolutionary narratives. Despite the absence of the objectifying male gaze, however, women are still not represented as autonomous, for the gender binary between the characters is simply “replaced by class antagonism and political difference.”56 Within the proletariat, then, men and women alike are the children of the same “spiritual father – the Communist Party, the socialist system, and the project of communism.”57 In other words, women are subjugated to a kind of gaze that is not strictly “male,” but which is constituted by a rigid and confining political rhetoric.58 This look, in short, is no less paternal and patriarchal.59 53 Pang, Fuzhi de yishu (The art of cloning), trans. by Li, pp. 166-167. 54 Meng, “Female Images and National Myth,” p. 121. 55 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 56 Dai, “Kanbujian de nüxing,” p. 39. 57 Dai’s article “Kanbujian de nüxing” was translated by Mayfair Yang as “Invisible Women,” although Yang notes this is a “slightly edited and condensed version” of the original. See Dai, “Invisible Women,” pp. 262-263 (slightly modified from the original). 58 In “Sexual Difference and the Viewing Subject,” Chris Berry similarly analyzes the politics of the gaze in Chinese cinema from the People’s Republic, identifying “an anti-individualistic aesthetic” distinct from the Western paradigm of subject-object play mediated by a male-centered gender politics. 59 Judith Stacey, in Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China, sees the Confucian tradition and the socialist order as two mutually supportive patriarchal systems in the PRC. While the former maintains the family as the basic socioeconomic unit of the society, the latter places the family under the leadership of the CCP.

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For Dai, images of the “New Women” are also significant in the classical revolutionary canon. They represent either those who are saved and “turned over” (fanshen) by the CCP, or those who mature into heroic women warriors. Generally, women in revolutionary narratives are caught up in the political struggle between the glorious Communist Party and the abysmal Nationalist Party, fated to suffer until a male Communist saves them from Nationalist domination. As Dai puts it: Though determined to acquire their spiritual identity and enjoy the freedom and rights of a liberated New Woman, the purpose of being redeemed is to sacrifice themselves again to their savior. The liberated new women will become sexless members of a large collective group identity – women disguised as men, women who have to [put aside their personal interests] and grow up in a large collectivity as “women heroes.”60

In many cases, the male Communist who saves the suffering woman is also her spiritual mentor. In Two Stage Sisters, though, this Party authority figure is embodied not by a man but by a woman: Jiang Bo. Aside from this variation in gender dynamics,61 Two Stage Sisters generally fits within the larger picture of Chinese revolutionary cinema that Dai addresses. Significantly, those two kinds of “new women” that Dai highlights are vividly embodied by Chunhua and Little Chunhua, respectively. With child marriage abolished and the yoke of her enslavement shattered,62 Little Chunhua represents 60 Dai, “Kanbujian de nüxing,” pp. 39-40. Here I follow Yang’s translation (p. 263); however, I have slightly modified “dissolve their female subjectivity” to “put aside their personal interests.” I find Dai’s original sentence, incorporating the writer’s feminist stance, likewise presupposes an essentialist notion (as if women were born into a specific kind of subjectivity, which is somehow distorted by political power, and which could be restored and retrieved). 61 See Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen. p. 115. 62 This came with the introduction of the Marriage Law in 1950. As Leta Hong Fincher writes, the Marriage Law “abolished exploitative practices such as arranged marriage, the purchase of girl brides and the complicated rituals of betrothal gifts marking the transfer of the woman from her father’s to her husband’s home. It set a minimum marriage age, allowed women to divorce, gave the young generation the right to choose their own marriage partners without meddling from their relatives, and gave women new rights to inherent family property.” This, according to Rebecca Karl, fit in Maoist notion that saw women as imperative to a strong family: women could be “happy and secure enough in their marriages to be productive members of society and strong bulwarks for family unit.” However, several years after the law was introduced, party officials, as Fincher notes, “backed away from efforts to enforce it after encountering resistance from parents and parents-in-law.” See Fincher, Leftover Women, p. 125; Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World, p. 76. For further details about the Marriage Law and its effects, see Hershatter, Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century, Chapter 1, esp. pp. 16-18.

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the women redeemed by the CCP. Although Chunhua and Yuehong are both caught up in the political struggle, and Yuehong joins the dark side, Chunhua successfully transforms herself into a valiant heroine – a woman warrior of the socialist state. b) A Queer Feeling in Two Stage Sisters Two Stage Sisters as “political melodrama” rests on a double operation. On a narrative level, the film focuses on the gradually bifurcating fate of two actresses, the imagery of female bonding perforated by a deepening differentiation. Their differentiated femininities are then, on a political level, recruited for a particular agenda. The polarized political and moral valuations are in part shaped by the film’s melodramatic format, which itself is informed by the rigid politics of Maoist socialism, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Certainly, this combination animates the film’s dominant address to its audiences. However, does this dominant address account for the whole story of this work? To what extent does the film’s political message muffle ideologically dissonant voices? Or, in line with Xiaomei Chen’s and Harriet Evans’s observations, can its “ambiguous space […] relating to gender identity”63 and its “ambiguities of address”64 be amplified in its receptions over time? I still remember my first viewing of Two Stage Sisters in the Taipei Film Archive in 1996. I was rather surprised by the extent to which queer undertones were, unconsciously or otherwise, allowed into this political melodrama.65 In retrospect, my preliminary response was partly shaped by my unfamiliarity with the political and historical circumstances of the PRC. But that unfamiliarity allowed me to more easily sidestep the film’s political message and concentrate on its queer traces. Looking beyond the intended political ramifications, I paid special attention to the dynamic between the two sisters, rendered through the visuals. I still find this strategy crucial to my subsequent reading of Two Stage Sisters. However, instead of downplaying the film’s overt political appeal as I used to, below I underline the tension between this explicit appeal and the less explicit queer connotations in the same text. This tension echoes Xie Jin’s own remarks on the f ilm while being interviewed for Stanley Kwan’s noted documentary Yang ± Yin: Gender in 63 Chen Xiaomei, “Growing Up with Posters in the Maoist Era,” p. 110. 64 Evans, “Ambiguities of Address.” 65 Tze-lan Sang likewise notes that the intense bond between the two sisters “may have struck some viewers as little different from love.” Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, p. 164.

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Chinese Cinema (1998). As Xie, with hindsight,66 commented on the nature of the two actresses’ relationship: I wrote [the script] in 1961. At that time in China, we had to deal with “issues” (state politics) all the time. There should have been sexual elements [between the main characters]. But we couldn’t bring them out. The “issues” had to come first.

For Xie, the undercurrent of female homoeroticism in his film was plausible. Several points inform my interpretation of Two Stage Sisters as a queer text, for they appear to indicate that the relationship between Chunhua and Yuehong is something beyond simply straight. At the beginning of the film, for example, Chunhua’s escape from her parents-in-law is portrayed foremost as the character’s resistance to the plight of the child-bride custom in old China. Ingrained in the feudal system, the child-bride practice was certainly about social inequality of both class and gender. However, I suggest it is no less about a functioning marriage institution predicated on the interests of heterosexuality, which oppresses any voluntaristic expressions of nonnormative desires. That is, the rejection of the unjust child-bride practices should not be conflated with repudiation of a marriage system implicated in class and gender inequalities. In fact, such a rejection would foreclose the possible objection to marriage per se as being a heteronormative practice in the first place. Chunhua’s escape thus does not detract from the possibility of Chunhua being a woman who, with her awakening nonnormative sexuality, rejects a compulsory heterosexual relationship. Second, Chunhua ends up seeking refuge in the opera troupe, and hiding in Yuehong’s costume case in particular. In terms of iconography, the image of a costume case is – in the eyes of contemporary queer beholders – easily enough associated with that of the “closet,” a widely used trope for gay people concealing their sexual orientation from others. Like Chunhua’s refusal to become a child bride, or even a bride, this “closet” iconography is 66 Xie Jin’s interview was given in the mid-1990s, in the context of the recent international acclaim for Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993), which Xie praised for its “delicate and detailed treatment” of homosexuality. Xie’s interview also implied his knowledge of his own son’s gay identity. Xie Yan (1949-2008), a NYU-trained filmmaker, was known for Maiden Rose (1995) and My Rice Noodle Shop (1998), both of which feature women’s stories, as Xie Jin had been famous for. (This somehow reveals the gay son’s inner pursuit of filiality/xiao by way of its meaning of resemblance: ‘like father like son’; see Chapter 1.) Xie Jin was known to be very proud of his eldest son Xie Yan, despite the son’s gay identity. Xie Yan’s death came as such a blow that Xie Jin himself passed away barely two months later.

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Figures 2.2.1-2.2.2  Stills from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

also doubly encoded. When Chunhua is found hiding in Yuehong’s costume case, she is actually uncovered twice. She is first uncovered by Yuehong, who immediately closes the case to keep Chunhua hidden. Chunhua is then again uncovered by Monk Ah-xing, who has perceived Yuehong’s dismayed countenance and pushed his way to the case. Ah-xing at first does not want to be involved in Chunhua’s escape and refuses to take her in with the company. Ah-xing’s “outing” of Chunhua in a sense represents the complicity with the (straight) interests of society at large. Yuehong uncovering and “closeting” Chunhua, by contrast, represents her involvement with Chunhua on a personal level, which may go beyond the dictates of heteronormativity. Yuehong then engages her father, Master Xing, to talk Ah-xing into keeping Chunhua. Upon Chunhua being signed up by the company, Yuehong and Chunhua hold each other’s hands tightly, rejoicing over this good news and their potential relationship (Figures 2.2.1 and 2.2.2). Indeed, Chunhua’s and Yuehong’s same-sex intimacy, if not lesbianism, quickly develops and remains strong in the years to come. Although onstage Yuehong generally plays the male role and Chunhua the female, their offstage personae are reversed. Though appearing girlish with her long hair, Chunhua has a stronger personality than Yuehong. Chunhua’s willfulness first appears in her rejection of an arranged marriage, and subsequently in her devotion to Yueju and socialist politics. Her resoluteness is also shown in the early episode when the policemen interrupt the troupe’s performance and attempt to abduct Yuehong for Lord Ni. Without hesitation, Chunhua dashes out from backstage to protect Yuehong. Significantly, Chunhua seems to be playing a martial female character. With her long hair bound up, she is dressed to somewhat downplay her expressive features (Figure 2.3.1). With the onstage/offstage boundary breached, Chunhua’s

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Figures 2.3.1-2.3.2  Stills from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

gender-bending appearance unites her strong personality and valiant physical defiance toward the policemen. The resulting image, I would posit, echoes the kind of masculinity that pertains to a butch woman or tomboy (known as “T” in contemporary Chinese lesbian culture: see Chapter 5). To a certain degree, Chunhua’s tomboyish image supports my argument that she defends her partner – a femme (known as “P,” the feminine partner of “T,” in contemporary China) – against sexual assault by a man, as well as against heterosexual domination. Through the lens of the butch-femme interplay of the lesbian cultural imaginary,67 Chunhua’s unjust punishment in the following sequence can also be understood as a butch lesbian’s suffering for her girlfriend. However, this queer interpretation encounters an off-screen twist. During her punishment, Chunhua, with her long hair down and her androgynous accoutrement stripped off, is portrayed as less butch than in her previous image, and the queer overtones are simultaneously less visible (Figure 2.3.2). What are the implications of this change in Chunhua’s image? I read the lack 67 The sociologist Li Yinhe records an interviewee who recounts her time on a state farm during the Cultural Revolution, where two female sent-down youth (zhiqing) were in love. “One was very delicate, like a girl,” while “the other very coarse, like a boy.” Other girls gossiped about how “those two have mated,” how they insisted on sleeping under a single mosquito net and blanket, and how they would watch each other bathe. See Li Yinhe, Nüxing de ganqing yu xing (Love and sexuality of women), pp. 246-247. For an anthropological account of the butch-femme (or T-P) role model in contemporary China (by way of Taiwan), see Engebretsen, Queer Women in Urban China, pp. 43-55. For a historical account of the T identity in Taiwan’s context, see Antonia Y. Chao, “Drink, Stories, Penis, and Breasts: Lesbian Tomboys in Taiwan from the 1960s to the 1990s.” See also Chao’s “Lao T banjia” (Moving house). On the butch-femme imagery in film and theater, see especially Straayer, “Femme Fatale or Lesbian Femme”; Case, “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic.”

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of visual continuity in Chunhua’s masculinity from the previous scene as an effort to amend or “straighten up” the film’s bifurcated themes, lest the continuity of Chunhua’s androgyny diffuse the film’s political message. As political melodrama, the film ostensibly utilizes the suffering of the innocent female protagonist as a rallying call for political action from the audience: Chunhua is first and foremost a disenfranchised woman. Implicitly, such a disenfranchised woman must also be straight; an androgynous-looking woman may suggest something otherwise. The change in Chunhua’s image, in other words, enables the film to streamline its address to the general public, even though such a change unwittingly recognizes the very coexistence of queerness and the film’s dominant address at the same time. Moreover, the “intimate” relationship between Chunhua and Yuehong seems to be acknowledged, not challenged, by some of those close to them. Two sequences merit special attention. The first takes place in rural Zhejiang in late 1940, when Yuehong’s father is on his deathbed, and Yuehong and Chunhua are alone at his bedside. The master gives Chunhua some textiles before turning to Yuehong and placing a book (supposedly on Yueju pedagogy) in her hands. In a medium shot with the master at the center, he tearfully bids the two girls farewell, saying, “Show integrity in life; be serious on stage.” He then begins, “Never –” and pauses to hold Chunhua’s left hand and Yuehong’s right, putting the former on top of the latter. The moment is emphasized as the camera pulls back from a medium close-up, accompanied by dramatic non-diegetic music. On the surface, this highlighted moment simply indicates the last wish of the master, that the two in front of him will take care of each other and never part. From a queer perspective, however, this dramatic moment is not only sad, but also moving. There is something that is beyond verbal expression – if not “unspeakable.” To some degree, the father’s loving final gesture signifies his acknowledgment of his daughter’s relationship with another girl (Figure 4.6). By placing his daughter’s hand under Chunhua’s, Mr. Xing expresses his wish that Chunhua take care of Yuehong, while his gift to Chunhua conveys his heartfelt gratitude.68 68 The dynamic at play here echoes that in a sequence featuring the father f igure in The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993). Toward the end of the film, the father has come to realize that his son, Wei-tung, living in NYC, is gay. On the eve of his return to Taipei, the father in private gives his son’s partner, Simon, a red envelope with money. This private, loving gesture in effect indicates the father’s ultimate recognition of the son’s relationship with Simon, and his gratitude to Simon for taking care of his son. Similarly, we find in Two Stage Sisters that the father, in his final moment, gives Chunhua a meaningful present. Not unlike the father in The Wedding Banquet, who thanks Simon for looking after his son, Master Xing here literally puts his daughter’s hand under Chunhua’s, letting Chunhua take care of his daughter.

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Figure 2.4  Still from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

The second sequence takes place after the death of Master Xing and before Monk Ah-xing takes Chunhua and Yuehong to Shanghai. In preparation for the master’s burial, Ah-xing informs the troupe that theater managers in Shanghai are only interested in the two actresses who play the romantic couple onstage. That is, the whole troupe, bar Chunhua and Yuehong, will be dismissed. On the eve of Chunhua’s and Yuehong’s departure, actress Xiaoxiang and her musician husband come to bid them farewell in a desolate small temple. “Have this bowl of sweet dumplings. We wish you two a smooth journey,” says Xiaoxiang, who then backs away with her spouse. The straight couple appears in a long shot, standing either side of the door, followed by a medium shot of Yuehong and Chunhua standing shoulder-to-shoulder. The cinematography captures the impending separation, while a non-diegetic soundtrack incorporates lyrics of farewell. The next shot once more captures all four characters in the same frame. In the center, Chunhua and Yuehong – before a holy shrine – bow their heads in prayer, witnessed by Xiaoxiang and her husband in the background. Ostensibly, Chunhua and Yuehong are formalizing their sisterhood through this semi-religious ritual ( jiebai, a ritual to strengthen the bonds between people of the same sex, more commonly

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Figure 2.5  Still from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

practiced in old China). From a queer perspective, however, the scene also evokes a same-sex wedding. The two lit red candles in the front resembles those of a wedding ceremony (baitang), which like any for an unapproved couple would be privately held, with few attendees. Whereas the ritual of jiebai requires only spiritual witnesses, the two attendees here seem almost to be witnessing a baitang, which usually involves a third, secular party. In many cases, the parents of same-sex couples do not approve and remain absent from their children’s weddings. Given that Yuehong’s father has “recognized” the couple’s relationship before his death, however, this small-scale secluded wedding is not completely unblessed by their blood families (Figure 2.5). Furthermore, it would be almost impossible for viewers familiar with contemporary Chinese queer culture to miss the significance of “Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai” (or “Liang Zhu”) in Two Stage Sisters. This wellknown folktale is important in various kinds of Chinese theater, and numerous film and television adaptations have been broadcast throughout Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic. It has also been hailed as one of the outstanding works in the Yueju repertoire: the 1954 film version,

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starring the aforementioned Yuan Xuefen (as Zhu) and Fan Ruijuan (as Liang), became a box office sensation in the PRC. Set in old China, “Liang Zhu” tells the story of Zhu, who impersonates a man in order to attend school and befriends her classmate, Liang, via jiebai. Upon completing her schooling, Zhu reveals her gender identity to Liang, in hopes he will propose. However, Zhu’s parents decline Liang’s proposal due to his inferior social status. The story turns tragic, with a magical, somewhat consolatory twist. In contemporary Chinese queer culture in particular, the story of “Liang Zhu” has been widely interpreted as a queer fable owing to the ambivalent desires at once triggered and disguised by Zhu’s cross-dressing. Such ambiguity in diegesis is even amplified on a non-diegetic level by cross-gender casting, as seen in several famous f ilm renditions. While the intricate cultural phenomenon of “Liang Zhu” deserves attention far beyond this chapter’s scope,69 here I stress that, for contemporary Chinese queer audiences, “Liang Zhu” has become a text very much invested with queer connotations. In Two Stage Sisters, it represents a trope of love (qing) that transcends not only class but also gender. In Two Stage Sisters, “Liang Zhu” is the play that Yuehong and Chunhua perform together for the f irst time in rural Zhejian, and it remain an important piece within the sisters’ repertoire even after they have moved to Shanghai. In a montage sequence showing their f irst three years in Shanghai, the title “The Tragic Romance of Liang Zhu” (Liang Zhu hen shi) briefly emerges and dissolves, indicating that over the years the work has continued to play a significant part in their careers. Offstage, “Liang Zhu” may also have a broader influence on the sisters’ lives. Such an influence is made clear during a backstage sequence where Yuehong, already running late for the stage call, reveals to Chunhua that she has decided to marry Manager Tang and forsake her career. Yuehong’s decision is strongly challenged by Chunhua, who begs, “Are you really drunk? […] Do you know the real background of Tang?” Finally, she cries, “You can’t do that! Have you forgotten the last words of the master?” What Yuehong sees in Tang’s proposal, however, are the promises of “a formal and public marriage” 69 For an overview of the “Liang Zhu” phenomenon in theater and film, see Siu Leung Li’s article, “Un/queering the Latently Queer and Transgender Performance,” in Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera, pp. 109-134. For a study of Li Han-Hsiang’s phenomenal huangmei-opera film Love Eterne (1963), see Tan See-kam and Annette Aw, “The Love Eterne: Almost a (Heterosexual) Love Story”; Peggy Chiao, “The Female Consciousness, the World of Signif ication and Safe Extramarital Affairs”; Chun-chi Wang, “Xunzhao Taiwan dandai ku’er dianying zhong Liangshanbo yu Zhuingtai ji ‘Ling Bo re’ lunshu zhi yixu.” On the two Cantonese-opera f ilms starring iconic performer Ren Jianhui, see Michael Lam, “Cong Zhu Yingtai dao Liang Shanbo.”

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(mingmei zhengqu) and “a normal family” (zhengdang de guisu); she disdains her vocation as merely “xizi” (a dated term that labels stage performers in a derogatory manner). This conversation is abruptly frozen as Chunhua slaps Yuehong’s face. The state of shock that ensues is soon broken by a message that Xiaoxiang and her husband have come to visit. Notably, all of Chunhua’s challenges to Yuehong dodge the issue of how Chunhua feels. Yet when Chunhua tries to tell Xiaoxiang what is going on, she likens the scenario to “Liang Zhu”: “On stage, Liang Shangbo and Zhu Yingtai are not separated by fate; off stage we are about to break up.” She adds, “We have been sisters all these years. How can I just let go of her like this?” It seems that Chunhua’s feelings for Yuehong and the nature of their relationship are both filtered by something not easily put into words. Even so, they find their expression through the story of “Liang Zhu.” While Chunhua compares her own steadfastness to “Liang Zhu,” her love, after all, also converges with “Liang Zhu” in homoeroticism in disguise. From a queer perspective, Yuehong is now betraying Chunhua for a man, as well as for what Chunhua – as a woman – cannot provide her: namely “a formal and public marriage” and “a normal family.” In another scene, Chunhua tells Xiaoxiang and her husband, “You are a couple who, despite of all the difficulties, remain committed to each other.” This is difficult to translate into English word for word; the exact phrase Chunhua uses to describe the straight couple’s lasting commitment translates literally as “authentic love and earnest feelings” (zhen qing shi yi); the two key words here are “authentic” (zhen) and “earnest” (shi). In the context of their usage, Chunhua is talking to the straight couple and has her back to Yuehong; however, Chunhua’s remarks are actually directed to Yuehong, who is only steps away. Chunhua’s line includes an irony that virtually signifies the opposites of “authentic” and “earnest”: namely “fake” ( jia) and “pretentious” (xu). On the one hand, the relationship between the two sisters seems to be contaminated by some “pretentious love and fake feeling” (xu qing jia yi). On the other, “fake” and “pretentious” also impose a heteronormative judgment on non-straight love affairs. An idiom like “jia feng xu huang” (literally “fake female phoenix and pretentious male phoenix”) can allude to queer couples and relationships, though it has also been appropriated by local queer-informed writers to comment, with a sense of self-parody, on queer representations in popular culture, including texts such as “Liang Zhu.” In Two Stage Sisters, the expression “authentic love and earnest feelings,” and the manner in which it is used (i.e. ironically) thus open up a space for queer interpretation, where Chunhua’s comment, I suggest, points to her own sense of disillusionment about her same-sex

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Figure 2.6  Still from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

love (as if, in Chunhua’s mind, “Our relationship turns out to be a play of ‘jia feng xu huang’ after all”). Interestingly, Xiaoxiang and her consort had witnessed Chunhua and Yuehong formalizing their sisterhood and, implicitly, “marrying” each other right before the two sisters left for Shanghai. Now they witness Chunhua and Yuehong break up. When drawing a parallel between those two couples, the difference in their sexual orientations should not be neglected. The failed same-sex relationship as a form of “jia feng xu huang” does not, after all, endure without the “zhen qing shi yi” embodied by the heterosexual couple. In further contrast with the earlier image, the straight couple returns, significantly, accompanied by their newborn child. They have, in short, become an archetypal heterosexual family (Figure 2.6). The procreative function integral to this straight union, now made visible in the film, lends the chord “zhen qing shi yi” yet another tone, where shi is redefined as outcome or fruitfulness. From the standpoint of heterosexual patriarchy, the continuity of family lines cannot be overemphasized: homosexuals have been ostracized in Chinese societies not least because of their assumed sterility and unfruitfulness. What Chunhua says to Xiaoxiang

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and her husband, therefore, implicitly yet inexorably hints at the “lack” of procreativity in Chunhua’s and Yuehong’s same-sex relationship,70 along with Chunhua’s inability to offer her partner a heterosexually-styled “normal” family, something her partner strongly desires. Although Chunhua asks Yuehong once again if she really loves Tang, when Yuehong divulges her uncertainty about this, she nonetheless adds, “No need to discuss this anymore. I already belong to him.” That is, Yuehong has already had sex with Tang. To Chunhua, Yuehong’s revelation is “like a bolt out of the blue sky” (qingtian pili), to quote Hong Kong gay critic Michael Lam (a.k.a. Mai Ke).71 In Lam’s words, Yuehong’s remarks are “perhaps the ultimate nightmare for [Chunhua]. Not only has her lover fallen out of love with her. But her lover has joined the heterosexual bloc. It is virtually a double betrayal.”72 With this, Chunhua and Yuehong formally break up, and the divergence in their destinies widens. Without Yuehong by her side, Chunhua then forges a special bond with Jiang Bo and, to a degree, with Xiaoxiang. That is, without Yuehong as the object of her affection, Chunhua channels all her energy into stage performance and the greater cause of socialist revolution. A vitally important sequence here sees Chunhua and Xiaoxiang, after Shang Shuihua’s funeral, meeting up with Jiang at her rooftop abode. Thematically, this sequence indicates the growing bond among the three. The mise-en-scène and the composition of the imagery, however, also delicately define the particular nature of their relationship. Take, for example, the second half of this sequence, in which Jiang and Chunhua discuss what kind of attitude they should assume in this bleak sociopolitical environment. As the primary speaker here, Jiang constitutes the main focus of the scene. With all three characters in the same frame, a long shot conspicuously portrays Jiang sitting by a desk and facing front, while Xiaoxiang, also facing front, stands next to Jiang. Chunhua, facing Jiang, is seated across the room in the foreground (Figure 2.7). Although she is virtually silent, Xiaoxiang is crucial to the scene for two reasons. First, she is the third member of Chunhua’s and Jiang’s meeting. In Chinese, “three” is the magic number that, though relatively small, potentially stands for a public. They say three is company: “three” straddles the fine line between a group of individuals and the masses, and Xiaoxiang animates this metaphor. Second, just as Jiang begins her speech, 70 Lee Edelman sees “reproductive futurism” as characterizing heteronormative societies. See No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 71 Michael Lam/Mai Ke. “Wutai jiemei,” p. 157. 72 Ibid.

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Figure 2.7  Still from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

Xiaoxiang – as Figure 2.7 shows – stands between Chunhua and Jiang. During her speech, Jiang moves closer to Chunhua, her main addressee, while Xiaoxiang is left in the background. Following a slight camera movement, however, Xiaoxiang also shifts a little so that, once again, Xiaoxiang stands between Chunhua and Jiang in the composition (Figure 2.8). What does this visual device reflect in relation to the configuration of (homo)eroticism? To answer this, I compare these two images with Figures 2.2.1 and 2.2.2, which represent a bonding between two women that, from a heteronormative standpoint, is far too “close.” Such closeness is symptomatically visualized through the tight framing of the shot, combined with the couple’s intimate physical contact (with Yuehong lovingly touching Chunhua’s face). Eying each other at very close range, Yuehong and Chunhua seem in a trance-like state, forgetting those around them. From a heteronormative vantage point, they fail to maintain an “appropriate” distance from each other, and have an overly emotional relationship (with potentially homoerotic overtones). By contrast, Figures 2.7 and 2.8 show scenes composed to repeatedly locate Xiaoxiang between Chunhua and Jiang. Xiaoxiang’s “intervention” here, I contend, guarantees that Chunhua

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Figure 2.8  Still from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

and Jiang do not get too close to each other, as Chunhua and Yuehong had done. Given this distance, Chunhua’s and Jiang’s relationship is largely free from “unhealthy” erotic overtones, essentially unsullied and straight. After all, this new sisterhood is forged for the cause of socialist revolution. Further, if the triangular composition in Figure 2.1 is dominated by a dividing force – money and Manager Tang – the triangular structure here (in Figures 2.7 and 2.8) is shaped by a rallying call for social justice. Here Chunhua, Jiang and Xiaoxiang finally reach an agreement that they will not only “redeem the suffering lives and the unjust dead,” but they will also “teach their living sisters right from wrong, black from white.” With this affirmation, the rain symbolically ceases, while the dark night begins to give way to the dawn. This sequence ends with a stationary long shot, which faces the doorway to the rooftop balcony. We see Chunhua alone in the doorway, looking out meditatively. Then Jiang Bo walks up to Chunhua. Facing her, she holds up Chunhua’s hands (Figure 2.9.1). Crucially, while Chunhua and Jiang continue to hold hands, they soon divert their gazes from one another. Shoulder to shoulder, they both look ruminatively into the distance (Figure 2.9.2). Like a still photo, this last image freezes for a short moment

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Figures 2.9.1-2.9.2  Stills from Two Stage Sisters

Copyright: Shanghai Film Studio

before it fades out. Notably, Xiaoxiang is absent from this last shot. The emotional distance between Chunhua and Jiang seems thereby shortened. Nevertheless, the alteration of their gazes bears witness to the mechanism in play: the reorientation of women’s energy. If Figure 2.9.1 represents an emotional condition underlining the libidinal interplay between the two women, and that is for the most part “trapped” in a personal venue, then Figure 2.9.2 highlights the “release” of that energy, which must at the same time be channeled into a “higher” cause. Richard Dyer’s insight into visual composition in relation to gender politics is relevant here. In his study of the (male) pin-up, Dyer emphasizes that the visual meaning of the pin-up depends not on “whether or not the model looks at [the] spectator(s), but how [the model] does or does not.”73 The female model typically averts her eyes to express “modesty, patience and a lack of interest in anything else.” When the male model averts his eyes, however, he looks “either off or up.” In the case of the former, his look suggests “an interest in something else that the viewer cannot see,” whereas the latter “always suggests a spirituality.”74 If the pin-up returns the viewer’s gaze, the female usually does so with “some kind of smile, inviting.” By contrast, the gaze of the male, who “more often than not [does] not look at the viewer,” seems to reach beyond the marked boundary, “as if he wants to reach beyond and through and establish himself.” In other words, if the female model’s gaze usually “stops at the boundary, the male’s looks right through it.”75 Returning to Figure 2.9.2, we find that both Chunhua’s and 73 Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment, p. 104. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., p. 109.

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Jiang’s shared gaze does not stop with the viewer. Instead, it reaches beyond that boundary, and is not meant to engage the audience in an intimate or erotic manner. Importantly, both characters look up, evoking that sense of “spirituality.” Presupposing the sacrifice of any personal interests, this spirituality is associated with a “higher” political ideal.76 From the narrative’s privileged agenda, the characters must not “waste” their energy on personal concerns (including latent lesbianism); rather, they should sublimate that energy, reinvesting it in socialist revolution. From Figure 2.9.1 to Figure 2.9.2, if the unchanged gesture of Chunhua and Jiang holding each other’s hands signifies their sisterhood, then the alteration of their gaze bespeaks the transformation of that sisterly energy: from one with homoerotic overtones into another for the good of the public.

Transformation of Qing through Two Stage Sisters and Yueju To a large degree, the libido and transformative energy in Two Stage Sisters can also be understood as what Audre Lorde terms “the erotic.” Lorde connects “the erotic” to a multitude of senses and experience associated with women, “whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem,” or “moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”77 In Lorde’s view, the erotic is a “creative energy” in women, which – when released from “its intense and constrained pellet” – lends a woman’s life “a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all [a woman’s] experience.”78 The erotic is, in short, “an assertion of the life force of women.”79 Judith Zeitlin, meanwhile, writing on Chinese classical literature, makes similar comments on the notion of “qing.” Abstract and polymorphous as it is, qing is foremost a sentiment that finds expression in an array of emotional or psychic processes, such as love, passion and obsession, sometimes through the operation of dreams.80 Manifesting on the borders of life and death, 76 Here we may supplement Dai Jinhua’s and Chris Berry’s analysis of the (Western) “male” gaze in a socialist Chinese context with Stephanie Donald’s remarks on the “socialist-realist” gaze: “The gaze off screen is a f ixed stare out to a horizon, beyond the diegetic worlds, and apparently also beyond the world of the audience. This gaze is quintessentially anti-individual. It belongs to great leaders, and to representatives of collective action.” Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces, p. 62. 77 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” pp. 56-57, 58. 78 Ibid., pp. 55, 57. 79 Ibid., p. 55. 80 Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange.

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qing, according to Zeitlin, also represents “an invisible force,” sometimes “synonymous with life-force.”81 I refer to qing in a particular way that is largely interchangeable with what Lorde names the erotic. Even though the concept of qing does not presuppose a (lesbian) feminist stance or agency (as “the erotic” does), my take on qing highlights the potential nexus of qing and lesbianism. Though lesbian identity was mostly unavailable and lesbian behavior was barely documented in socialist China,82 the absence of formal documentation on lesbian subjects in a thoroughly nationalized public culture should not, as Tze-lan Sang cautions, “lead one naively to presume the absence of either homosexual desire or same-sex sexual behavior in Maoist China.”83 To counter the straight and narrow socialist rationale, I foreground this repressive sociopolitical practice in its historical context (detailed below), so as to rewrite lesbian subjects (as instantiated by qing, life-force and the erotic) back into history. In her groundbreaking study on women in the seventeenth-century Jiangnan region (including today’s Zhejiang province, home of Yueju), Dorothy Ko points out a “friendship-love continuum” among women connected to each other through literature and the cult of qing.84 Although Ko has reservations about the applicability of “lesbianism” in imperial China,85 what I mean by the continuum of qing between women is informed by Ko’s idea of the friendship-love continuum. I take this a step further to emphasize (potential) lesbianism at one end of this spectrum, and homosociality at the other. Put another way, while Lorde opposes the usurpation of the erotic in the “racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society” of 1970s America,86 what is at stake here is rather the appropriation of qing in women for the proletarian 81 Zeitlin, The Phantom Heroine, pp. 13, 37. 82 A few notable exceptions exist in personal memoirs and individual testimonies: see Min, Red Azalea; Nanchu, Red Sorrow; Fang, Tongxinglian zai Zhongguo (Homosexuality in China), p. 276; Li Yinhe, Nüxing de ganqing yu xing (Love and sexuality of women), pp. 246-247. 83 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, p. 164. Sang points out the term same-sex love (tongxingai) was outlawed shortly after the founding of the PRC. Even in post-Mao China, the relative sparsity of journalistic and sociological literature on lesbian subjects in comparison to gay men, Sang speculates, may result from the fact that “close relationships are so common among Chinese women that intimate behavior is simply taken for granted – by women themselves and by society. No one knows whether it counts a homosexuality; hence, there is no special need to talk about it” (p. 170). 84 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, esp. pp. 81-88, 266-274. 85 Ibid., p. 266. In Ko’s own words, “In an age when the boundaries between various forms of affection, or between ‘emotional’ and ‘physical’ love, were blurred, whether some of these liaisons can be called ‘lesbianism’ is not an appropriate question.” 86 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” p. 59.

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revolution and socialist nation-building.87 I maintain that this exploitation of qing in Chinese women – along with their ideological “interpellation” as socialist subjects – suppresses those embodiments that are tinged with homoeroticism, and which I map onto the continuum of qing (as above). In Maoist socialism, while “any individual desire is taken as shameful, dirty, and harmful to [the] absolute loyalty” to the Party-state,88 the qing between women without kinship is primarily converted to comradeship: homoeroticism supposedly plays no part in such “asexual comradely associations.”89 Where the qing between women is indeed invested with homoeroticism, lesbianism must then be either suppressed or transformed into comradeship, a form of homosociality. The crux of Two Stage Sisters is precisely this transfiguration of qing from lesbianism into comradeship, from homosexuality into a form of homosociality.90 In fact, that transformation also corresponds to a particular historical dimension of both the film’s production and Yueju’s development. Two Stage Sisters, as noted, is a work conceived and produced in the early 1960s, while its story spans the years 1935 to 1950 (one year after the founding of the People’s Republic). The visualization of the story somehow “skips” the 1950s. Yet Two Stage Sisters is a work that makes a strong appeal to the history of Yueju’s development. What, then, may the absence of the 1950s conceal or reveal in this respect? Coincidentally or not, a significant event in 1950s Yueju is actually the state-sponsored effort to mix male and female players onstage (nannü heyan). That is, even though Yueju actors had completely lost their stage to actresses by the mid-1930s, and female cross-dressing had become not only a norm in Yueju but a major attraction to the audience, 87 As exemplified by the heavily propagated slogans aimed at women in the Maoist China: “Women can uphold half of the sky,” “The times have changed; men and women are the same. Anything male comrades can do, female comrades can do too,” and “Women can outdo the men.” For an analysis of the circulation and impact of these slogans during the 1960s and 1970s, see Honig, “The Life of a Slogan.” 88 Dai, “Invisible Women,” trans. Yang, p. 263. 89 Honig, “Socialist Sex,” p. 146. 90 In his brilliant articulation of a Confucian film theory, Victor Fan perceives qing as a term that designates a range of ideas, “including affection, emotion, desire, love, amorous feelings, the sensible, human nature, or understanding.” Given that qing “informs all sensations – or in fact, the relationships among all sensible things,” Fan proposes that “the scene as a world that the spectators inhabit is made sensible by qing,” wherein “qing engenders all the actions […] and all the relationships that the film image invites the spectators to negotiate. However, such qing is always checked by li [rites or social behaviors] from being excessively expressed.” With some stretch of Fan’s formulation, li, in respect to Two Stage Sisters, may be understood as the social behaviors sanctioned by the dominant Chinese Communist Party, which effectively check and regulate the configuration of qing. Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, pp. 142-143.

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the 1950s saw an endeavor to change or “rectify” this phenomenon. Generally, the founding of the PRC had subjugated all forms of theater to state policies. With its predecessor established by the state in 1950, Shanghai Yueju Theater has been the center of Yueju activities in China, from the training of talent to stage performances. While its predecessor began to openly recruit male performers in 1954, the Shanghai Yueju Theater further institutionalized this policy when it was founded in 1955. Although actresses continued to comprise the main force of Yueju performances, a separate department – “The First Regiment” (Di yi tuan) – was launched to promote mixed-gender performances. Around 1959 a “Mixed-Gender Experimental Company” (nannü heyan shiyan jutuan) was established under the auspices of the Theater.91 Interestingly enough, as the name indicates, the mixing of male and female players on the Yueju stage was never easy, but rather “experimental” for performers and audiences alike. Because the general public had become so used to Yueju vocally and stylistically developed for female performers, the process was subject to trial and error: according to the famous Yueju actors Shi Jihua and Liu Jue, the audiences barely accepted mixed-gender performances before the 1960s. Some of their early performances in the 1950s were even greeted by derisive laughter.92 But how did this policy arise? What was the rationale behind it? Although I could not locate the official documents that directly addressed this issue, I did find in the course of my research a discourse that advanced such a policy. An article published in 1959, for instance, reads, “In my opinion, the principle set up during the early years after the Liberation – namely, men playing male characters while women play female characters – still shows us the right direction. It is compatible with both science and human nature. Males should act like men, while females like women. Isn’t it the most basic requirement of realistic acting?”93 Despite this writer did not specify how or by whom this “principle” was initiated, it was certainly officially endorsed by Zhou Enlai (1898-1976), China’s former prime minister, who was also deeply involved in the nation’s cultural activities and policies (but in private, possibly a closeted gay man).94 Shi Jihua and Liu Jue both credited their careers to Premier Zhou. As part of the first generation of Yueju actors in the People’s Republic, they were, in Shi’s words, “cultivated 91 See the official website of Shanghai Yueju Theater: www.yueju.net. 92 Shi Jihua, “Yige Yueju nan xiaoshen de zuji”; Xue Yunhuang, “Jianku molian, buduan qianjing,” p. 38. 93 Jiang Shuiping. “Tichang peiyang nan xiaosheng,” p. 5. 94 Tsoi, Zhou Enlai de mimi qinggan shijie.

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under Premier Zhou’s instruction,”95 and the school they attended was, in Liu’s account, “established due to Premier Zhou’s profuse concern for training young Yueju performers for mixed-gender performances.”96 In a 1963 article entitled “Striving to be a Revolutionary Worker in the Arts,” Zhou himself remarked, “Ten years ago [around 1954] I already said that Yueju had to first solve the problem of men and women performing together onstage.”97 Notably, Zhou’s reiterating what he had “already said” implied that the issue was not yet settled, but nonetheless worthwhile. Supporting mixed-gender performances on the Yueju stage was meant to better reflect the era (shidai xing) of the New China. As Zhou pointed out in the same article, establishing representative arts and literature was as important as issues regarding class ( jieji xing), combat (zhandou xing), and nationality and popularization (minzu xing and dazhong hua).98 Arts and literature, too, should be “revolutionary.” What cannot be overstated here is the importance of Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (1942),99 which (as Rebecca Karl notes) set out to redefine what constituted “culture.”100 Mao’s talks in effect formed the fundamental guidelines for artistic creations and performances in socialist China. Such guidelines underlined the significance of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Not only should they and revolutionary cadres comprise the audiences for works of literature and art, but “the thoughts and feelings of [socialist] writers and artists should be fused with those of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers.”101 To a large extent, Maoist socialists believed in a “realism” that was distinct from mimetic reflections of quotidian reality, instead mediated by a “politics of the masses.”102 Arts and literature with “realistic” appeal, advancing socialist politics, ought to come “out of real life” (yuanyu shenghuo), yet be simultaneously “on a higher plane […] than actual everyday life” (gaoyu shenghuo).103 When Maoist socialists used the term “modern” (xiandai), they likewise conferred upon it just such a socialist agenda. Thus “modern subject matter” (xiandai ticai) was mostly “subject matter either about 95 Shi Jihua, “Yige Yueju nan xiaoshen de zuji,” p. 17. 96 Xue Yunhuan, “Jianku muonlian, boduan qianjing,” p. 38. 97 Zhou Enlai, “Yao zuo yige geming de wenyi gongzuozhe,” Zhou Enli lun wenyi, p. 170. 98 Ibid., pp. 166-173. 99 Mao Tse-tung, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art.” 100 Karl. Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World, p. 62. 101 Ibid., pp. 206-207. 102 Ibid., p. 221. 103 Ibid., p. 117.

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contemporary socialist revolution and nation-building or the history of revolution […] basically within the confines of either the history of the CCP or China’s contemporary history after 1949.”104 In other words, Maoist socialism saw concepts of “modern,” “real,” and “history” as interrelated. In revolution rhetoric, all these phrases should be understood in terms of proletarian politics, while arts and literature were treated as quintessential “weapons” to advance socialist revolution and history. Within such a political infrastructure, Yueju – alongside other theater forms – was supposed to meet “the people’s request” by “raising and expanding the capability of the whole of theater’s artistic expressions” (to paraphrase Yuan Xuefen),105 “particularly its ability to perform modern subject matter, so that Yueju can better reflect the great struggles in reality, better serve the masses, thus further the politics of socialism” (as an editor of Shanghai Xiju magazine wrote).106 While various reforms of theatrical practices were initiated nationwide in the 1950s,107 the most significant for Yueji was the cultivation and integration of male performers. In 1960, two readers of China’s major theater magazines shared their opinions of early mixed-gender performances: one endorsed their continuation and encouraged Yueju talents to create and perform modern operas,108 while the other, under the headline “Worker Comrades Exalt Mixed-Gender Yueju Performances,” praised the performances on behalf of the workers.109 Both considered that mixed-gender performance enabled Yueju “to broaden the domain of its expressions, […] to better serve the masses, and to better reflect real life.”110 Notably, in a 1963 conference on the “reform of Yueju” hosted by Shanghai Xiju, acclaimed Yueju actresses Fan Ruijuan, Fu Quanxiang, Zhang Guifeng, and Wu Xiaolou all commented on the issue, generally in relation to “performing modern operas” and “reflecting modern life.” In Fu’s opinion, “male impersonation is surely a problem, but it is not most decisive to whether or not Yueju can put on modern dramas”; the key thing is, rather, whether the artists can “truly appreciate the life of the workers, peasants, and soldiers.” Fan Ruijuan, arguably the best-known male impersonator in Yueju history, also pointed 104 Fu Jin. Xin Zhongguo xiju shi, p. 102 (my translation). 105 Yuan, “Shinian sg [corruption?],” p. 18. 106 “The Editor’s Note,” in Shanghai Xiju 5 (1963), p. 11. Emphasis added. 107 For a historical review of the theatric reforms initiated between 1949 and 1962, see Fu Jin, Xin Zhongguo xiju shi, pp. 1-104. 108 Yan, “Dui Yueju nannü heyan de qiwang,” p. 41. 109 Cao, “Gongren tongzhi chengzan Yueju nannü heyan,” p. 32. 110 Cao, “Gongren tongzhi chengzan Yueju nannü heyan,” and Yan, “Dui Yueju nannü heyan de qiwang.”

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to the actresses’ resolve and hard work in overcoming all the difficulties they faced.111 In any case, they did not dispute the view that cross-dressing was an impediment to Yueju’s handling of modern subject matter. From another perspective, theater scholar Fu Jun also remarked on the issue of gender. In a 1962 essay, Fu pointed first to the failure of mixedgender performances of the 1950s, before analyzing and praising more recent successes.112 In another article, Fu in effect endorsed mixed-gender performances by defending Yueju’s involvement with modern subject matter.113 Here, he noted that Yueju had traditionally been characterized by qing: that is, expressing qing (shuqing) or being lyrical was the “original style” or “personality” of Yueju. While some complained that the combination of Yueju style and modern drama had attenuated Yueju’s ability to express qing and thus weakened its personality, Fu took issues with this viewpoint. He wrote, The key to this perhaps lies in how we understand a style as expressive of qing. It seems that in many people’s impression […] the idea of expressing qing has been substantially compressed and narrowed. It has been so narrowed that expressing qing has almost become synonymous with expressing the love between a man and a woman. It is as if only through love stories like Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai or Romance of the Western Chamber could Yueju really exhibit its artistic merit of expressing qing. However, expressing qing is very expansive a notion. Not only can it denote the healthy qing between a man and a woman. It should all the more express the qing in revolution, the qing in combat, as well as the qing in labor and the qing in class.114

In other words, “modern” Yueju – along with various Yueju reforms – also bespeaks a transformation of qing: from one that was primarily personal to one that showed a clear focus on class and socialist revolution. Notably, Fu Jun’s account of personal expressions of qing foreclosed the possibility of non-straight desires (which supposedly were not “healthy” in the first place). From a queer perspective, however, it must be emphasized that the Yueju reforms – particularly the integration of male and female players onstage and the efforts to replace female cross-dressers with male actors – registered a sense of hetero-normalization. Or rather, the endeavor to modernize Yueju enlisted the side effect of hetero-normalization, even 111 112 113 114

Editorial Committee, “Yueju Gaige Zuotanhui,” pp. 9-11. Fu Jun, “Peilei chukai xinyi nong.” Fu Jun, “Yueju yan xiandaiju de fungge yu ticai wenti.” Ibid., p. 12 (my translation).

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though the queerness or homoeroticism associated with cross-dressing was never overtly acknowledged. If Two Stage Sisters’ revision of Yueju history somehow skips the 1950s, the most essential years for the Yueju reforms, then what is excluded from the film’s representation is simultaneously a recognition of this hetero-normalization on a historical level.

Concluding Remarks As a political melodrama, Two Stage Sisters reorients women’s life-forces and power in service of socialist politics. Comparing the film’s narrative with the history of Yueju, however, we must realize that the film also incorporates a particular use of Yueju history. On the one hand, the film seems to suggest that the decision to omit a decade so significant to modern Yueju may not be entirely coincidental. The exclusion of the 1950s from the film, I suggest, may be read as part of the persistent sociopolitical endeavor to regulate qing, including female-female eroticism, in socialist China. This exclusion speaks to a denial of queer existence in China’s modern history, echoing the historical “cleansing” of queer elements in Yueju. On the other hand, I would like to stress that the endeavor to redirect qing is integral to both the film and Yueju. Since the latter is also the historical backdrop for the former, I contend the film text and its historical context were meant to be ideologically sutured by that sociopolitical enterprise: the doctrine of socialist revolution. Under such a doctrine, anti-revolutionary influences, including lesbianism, must be rendered unwanted, something “symptomatic”115 of socially sanctioned subjects. To be sure, while in Two Stage Sisters Chunhua eventually grows into a socialist heroine, the object of her same-sex desire, Yuehong (who fraternizes with anti-revolutionaries), is discounted as surplus to Chunhua’s socialist subjectivity. As one critic notes, Two Stage Sisters is characterized by the filmmaker’s earnest and delicate depiction of qing, wherein “the modest qing of [the repressed] class embodied in the two stage sisters” is central.116 Historically, however, the film was publicly denounced during the Cultural Revolution (in part) due to its (mis)use of qing.117 To some leftist extremists at that time, particularly the two sisters’ final reunion, which affirmed the politically 115 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 55. 116 Qiu Shi, “Wutai jiemei de yishu tese” (The artistic traits of Two Stage Sisters), p. 268. 117 This denunciation was allegedly due to the director’s close affiliation with Zhou Enlai and Xia Yan. See Xie and Berry, “Xie Jin: Six Decades of Cinematic Innovation,” p. 33.

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incorrect “reconciliation of social classes” ( jieji tiaohe)118 – Yuehong was considered an adversary to the proletarian class and therefore culpable, with the result that the film’s forgiving attitude was criticized as a bourgeois expression of qing. To Xie’s persecutors, “Sympathy or understanding for a strayed person was but a petty bourgeois sentiment, not to be tolerated by a true revolutionary.”119 It further violated the party line that dictated the characters in any type of melodramatic work to be portrayed as “either good or evil.”120 On the surface, Two Stage Sisters came under attack for its political incorrectness, marked by a sense of compromised eclecticism and in-betweenness (xiuzheng zhuyi or zhongjian luxian), along with an unhesitant personal expression of qing. Indeed, from the perspective of socialist political melodrama, Yuehong, after proving the political correctness of her stage sister, has accomplished her narrative function, and could have been dismissed as merely a “surplus” of Chunhua’s socialist subjectivity. The film nonetheless violates “the politics of disposability,” which, for Athena Athanasiou, indicates “a way of abjecting [and] a way of producing the human and its inassimilable surplus […] that can be traced in various histories of human liminality,”121 with the history of socialist revolution coming as no exception. If the final reunion of the two stage sisters can be understood as “the return of the repressed” that jeopardizes Chunhua as a socialist subject, “the repressed” here should not be understood only as that which was publicly denounced by the class-motivated socialist revolution. Through qing, the unrecognized, repressed homoeroticism is also potentially reincarnated in the guise of “sisterhood,” haunting and subverting the effort to deny and cleanse queer existence in a “modern” Chinese history mediated by the politics of socialist revolution.

118 Ibid., p. 34. Qiu Shi, “Wutai jiemei de yishu tese,” p. 268. 119 Tung, “The Work of Xie Jin,” p. 201. 120 Ibid. 121 Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, pp. 146-147.

3

Mass Camp in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema Abstract This chapter considers Hong Kong’s particular socio-historical context since the 1960s, which has been imperative to the diffusion of a local mass camp impulse characterized by a self-conscious, often parodic attitude toward the artifice of conventions, particularly those associated with art, gender behavior, and media representation. It then investigates the particular ways in which mass camp has at once informed and been informed by Hong Kong mainstream cinema from the 1970s onward. A crucial point made throughout lies in the intimate relationship between mass camp and the proliferating gender parody of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, culminating in films of the early 1990s (e.g. Swordsman  II). This process, importantly, has also been coupled with the critical articulation of camp discourse since the mid-to-late 1970s. Keywords: Hong Kong, mass camp, camp discourse, gender parody

The previous chapter zooms in on the PRC, tracing the history of Yueju through the uses of qing and film melodrama, bringing out a queer discourse on Chinese opera that, defined against the state ideology of socialism, becomes crucial to the region’s emerging mediascape. This chapter will focus on Hong Kong and it social economy, which is key to the diffusion of mass camp impulse and particularly gender parody, a characteristic of Hong Kong cinema from the 1970s onward. During the 1950s and 1960s, Cantonese-language cinema and Mandarin-language cinema existed in Hong Kong mostly as two separate systems, each constituted by different modes of production and consumption.1 While Cantonese cinema was epitomized 1 Fu Poshek, “The 1960s: Modernity, Youth Culture, and Hong Kong Cantonese Cinema,” pp. 80-81.

Chao, Shi-Yan, Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462988033_ch03

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by fast turnaround, low-budget, mostly independent productions, from the mid-1950s Mandarin cinema was generally geared toward bigger budgets and higher production values, the standards of major film studios such as Shaw Brothers (originally Shaws) and MP & GI (later renamed Cathay). While Cantonese cinema reached an annual output of over two hundred films in the early 1960s, Mandarin cinema maintained an annual average of around forty until the late 1960s, when its output conspicuously increased to over sixty (nearly one hundred by the early 1970s).2 With this rapid expansion of Mandarin cinema, however, came the drastic decline of Cantonese cinema, whose output dropped to nil in 1972. Then came the surprise hit The House of 72 Tenants (Chor Yuen, 1973), a Cantonese-language comedy produced by Shaw Brothers that signaled the integration of resources and talent from both Mandarin and Cantonese filmmaking. Freed from the relatively crude aspects of early Cantonese cinema, this integration also marked an important move in the “modernizing” process of the Hong Kong film industry, paving the way for what has become known as contemporary Hong Kong cinema. Concomitant with the modernization of Hong Kong film industry was the notably waning influence of Chinese operas on f ilm. Not only did both Cantonese opera film and huangmei opera film (with lyrics sung in Mandarin) go out of fashion in the late 1960s,3 but two other genres amply informed by opera – i.e. the martial arts film and Cantonese film comedy4 – also underwent significant transformations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While martial arts film witnessed a general transformation, from stage-bound fight choreography to more “realistic” action, from a stronger resort to fantasy to a deeper emphasis on body and physicality (as epitomized by director Zhang Che’s work5 and the international trend for fist-fighting kung fu pictures),6 Cantonese film comedy, reborn in Hong Kong’s reorganized film industry, was gradually endowed with a more modern outlook and urban sensibility. 2 Law, “Liu qishi niendai xianggang dianying gongye yu wenhua suxie” (Sketches of Hong Kong film industry and culture of the 1960s and 1970s), in Xianggang dianying dian yu xian, p. 179. 3 For a comprehensive study of huangmei opera film, see Edwin Wei-chi Chen, Wo ai huangmei diao (I love huangmei opera film). Cantonese opera retained only a decorative presence in the 1970s. Of 171 Cantonese-language films made during the 1970s, only three were Cantonese opera. See Yu Mo-wan, “Xianggang yueju dianying fazhan shihua,” p. 21. 4 On the debt to opera film, see Ng, “A Preliminary Plot Analysis of Cantonese Comedy,” p. 21; Nip and Lam, “Twenty Years of Cantonese Comedy,” p. 68. 5 Desser, “Making Movies Male.” 6 Desser, “The Kung Fu Craze.”

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Owing to these developments, Hong Kong cinema of the early 1970s saw a large-scale retreat of opera-inflected expression, including cross-dressing – both on a non-diegetic level (mostly in Cantonese opera and huangmei opera films) and otherwise (particularly in opera-inflected comedy and martial arts pictures). Even so, gender parody still sustained a presence on the big screen and in recent years has even proliferated in contemporary Hong Kong cinema. An important force behind this – besides the residual influence of Chinese opera, and the long-overdue “decriminalization of homosexuality” in 1991 (i.e. the removal of criminal penalties for homosexual acts committed in private by two consenting men older than twenty-one)7 – has been camp, or rather, as I argue below, a mass camp impulse emerging in Hong Kong society from the 1960s onward. This chapter chiefly serves as an investigation of contemporary Hong Kong cinema from the vantage point of mass camp. But what is camp, and mass camp in particular? On what grounds is mass camp relevant to the imagery of gender parody and its widespread dissemination in the mainstream media? As a phenomenon and a discourse developed in the West, should mass camp automatically be treated as a cultural entity exclusive to Western societies? If not, how exactly is mass camp relevant to Hong Kong society? And in what ways has mass camp informed contemporary Hong Kong cinema, and vice versa? To answer these questions, I will first review the meaning of camp in Anglo-American culture. By juxtaposing mass camp with gay camp, I examine the varied contexts in which the two take form and take effect differently. My appreciation of both mass camp and gay camp is admittedly facilitated by discourse analysis: an analysis of language that “looks at patterns of language across texts as well as the social and cultural contexts in which the texts occur.”8 Stressing the practice of transcultural articulation, my discursive approach (see Introduction) underpins my contention that mass camp may be regarded as a phenomenon rooted in contemporary Hong Kong, for this approach allows me to address my contention by focusing on a socio-historical context at once specific to Hong Kong and imperative to the diffusion of mass camp impulse. Simply put, this particular socio-historical context serves as the material basis of any articulations of mass camp in modern Hong Kong. A multitude 7 Petula Sik Ying Ho and A Ka Tat Tsang, Sex and Desire in Hong Kong, pp. 85-86, 109-110; Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, pp. 48-51; Wah-san Chou and Zhao Wen-zong. “Yiguei” xingshi, pp. 160-177; Collett, A Death in Hong Kong, pp. 370-371. 8 Paltridge, Discourse Analysis, p. 1.

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of social and media events constituting this basis will be examined in the second section of this chapter, while the third section will focus on the particular ways in which mass camp has at once informed, and been informed by, Hong Kong mainstream cinema since the 1970s. A crucial point I would like to emphasize throughout this last section is the intimate relationship between mass camp and the proliferation of gender parody in contemporary Hong Kong cinema.

Mass Camp and Gay Camp, A Discursive Approach In her landmark article “Notes on Camp” (1964), Susan Sontag identifies camp as a kind of sensibility and taste. Involving both cultural production and reception, camp is “one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon,” and the achievement of camp is “not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artif ice, of stylization.”9 Privileging style over content,10 camp shows the penchant for “a particular kind of style” marked by “the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.”11 The essence of camp, so to speak, is “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” and “theatricality.”12 Because temporal distance may call attention to the unnaturalness of certain behavior and the artifice of certain products, many characters or objects prized by camp are “old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé.”13 In Sontag’s formulation, camp sensibility is, moreover, “wholly aesthetic,” in which it not only diverges from the “moralistic” sensibility of high culture14 but is “disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical.”15 Importantly, camp taste celebrates playfulness and irony, turning its back on “traditional seriousness” and “the good-bad axis” of artistic judgment.16 As “a mode of enjoyment,” it thus (potentially) brings a sense of “democratic esprit” to “the age of mass culture.”17 As Andrew Ross points out, in the mid 1960s it was significant that Sontag’s essay was “in the service of pleasure and erotics, and against judgment, truth, seriousness, and interpretation; against, 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation, p. 277 (Note #1). Ibid., p. 278 (Note #5). Ibid., p. 279 (Note #8). Ibid., p. 275 and p. 288 (Note #43). Ibid., p. 285 (Note # 31). Ibid., p. 287 (Note # 37). Ibid., p. 277 (Note #2). Ibid., p. 287 (Note #36) and p. 286 (Note #34). Ibid., p. 291 (Note #55), p. 289 (Note #47) and p. 288 (Note #45).

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in short, the hermeneutics of depth with which established intellectuals […] had dictated literary taste since the war.”18 Sontag’s article proved a watershed in the mainstream dissemination of “camp.” As Fabio Cleto notes, not only did the months following the publication of “Notes” witness a multitude of major US and British periodicals giving “a significant portion of their columns to articles on the ‘new taste’ celebrated by Sontag,” but the term gained such a high “currency value” during the rest of the decade that it became a “selling” point in mainstream cultural economy.19 Considered “a ‘hip’ or ‘chic’ consumer taste,”20 camp sensibility, along with the widening circulation of the term, successfully “entered mainstream culture ready to adore the mediocre, laugh at the overconventionalized, and critique archaic [gender] roles.”21 While significantly contributing to the diffusion of camp taste in the mainstream, Sontag’s piece nonetheless downplays the affinity between camp sensibility and its origin: specifically, its origin in gay male subculture. Toward the end of her article, Sontag does evoke “a peculiar affinity and overlap” between camp taste and homosexuality, but she comments only briefly on that “peculiar” affiliation22 before denying it any necessity: “if homosexuals hadn’t more or less invented camp, someone else would.”23 D.A. Miller considers Sontag’s last remark an “unblinking embrace of counterfactuality,” which serves the author’s willful detachment of camp from gay men, and within which lies an irony: the severance puts “the claim to camp’s origination […] up for grabs – someone else could invent camp, and who better than the author of this manifestly inventive and authoritative essay?”24 What Miller sees in Sontag’s overall downplaying of camp’s gay affiliation is, in short, a “phobic de-homosexualization of camp.”25 Harsh criticism of Sontag’s “de-gaying” and “depoliticizing” of camp was echoed by several other scholars, including David Bergman and Moe Mayer, editors of two early-1990s academic anthologies on camp.26 18 Ross, “Uses of Camp,” p. 12. 19 Cleto, “Introduction,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, p. 302. 20 Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment, p. 6. 21 Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning, p. 139. 22 Sontag writes, “[camp’s] metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of certain aspect of the situation of homosexuals. (The camp insistence on not being ‘serious,’ on playing, also connects with the homosexual’s desire to remain youthful.)” See “Notes on Camp,” p. 291 (Note #53). 23 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” p. 290 (Note #51) and p. 291 (Note #53). 24 Miller, “Sontag’s Urbanity,” p. 93. 25 Ibid. 26 Bergman (ed.), Camp Grounds; Moe Meyer (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp.

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As Andy Medhurst contends, however, such criticism may be seen as motivated in part by the changing landscape of identity politics, where “new Queers” tended to prioritize camp’s political potential, while earlier “gay” writers tried to “balance their wish to correct [Sontag’s] depoliticizing impulses with their realization that camp was indeed partly the matter of taste codes she catalogued.”27 Indeed, Miller’s criticism was written in the context of his attack on Sontag’s AIDS rhetoric (which Miller perceived as ostensibly liberal yet homophobic),28 while Bergman questioned Sontag’s assumption of gay men’s desire for “integration,”29 and Meyer relegated Sontagian camp to some kind of “trace,” incapable of generating “queer social visibility.”30 Symptomatically, it was the AIDS catastrophe of the 1980s that had re-mobilized gay politics in a militant fashion, where new queer politics was no longer satisf ied with mainstream tolerance but geared toward social nonconformity and confrontational “public visibility.”31 By contrast, pioneer gay scholars from the 1970s and 1980s seemed to be less negative toward Sontag’s approach to camp. Feeling comfortable crediting Sontag’s essay,32 many writers also made crucial efforts to redirect that essay’s depoliticizing tendency, emphasizing camp’s affiliation with gay subculture. Far from ending in the “dead end” Bergman claimed,33 I would argue that this approach has generated some of the most inspiring and moving accounts regarding camp. For instance, Esther Newton’s late1960s anthropological study of female impersonation and camp (originally published in 1972 as Mother Camp),34 is arguably the first major contribution to understanding camp in a specifically gay cultural setting. Newton’s efforts were subsequently joined by voluminous writings by Jack Babuscio, Richard Dyer, Vito Russo, Mark Booth, Michael Bronski, Philip Core, Jonathan 27 Medhurst, “Camp,” p. 280. 28 Miller, “Sontag’s Urbanity,” pp. 91-101. This article was originally published as a review of Sontag’s then-new book, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989). 29 Bergman, “Introduction,” p. 9. 30 Moe Meyer, “Introduction,” p. 5. 31 Berlant and Freeman, “Queer Nationality,” p. 201. 32 For instance, Vito Russo’s article, “Camp” (1976/79), presented a gay supplement to Sontag’s essay but without questioning it. Richard Dyer and Jonathan Dollimore called Sontag’s essay “marvelous” and “brilliant,” respectively. See Russo, “Camp”; Dyer, “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” in Only Entertainment, pp. 135-147 (p. 138); Dollimore, “The Challenge of Sexuality” (quoted in Medhurst, “Camp,” p. 280.) 33 Bergman, “Introduction.” p. 8. 34 Newton, Esther. Mother Camp, especially the chapter “Role Models,” pp. 97-111.

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Dollimore, and Andy Medhurst, among many others.35 Together they created a forceful and exuberant – albeit sometimes internally discordant – discourse on camp that was unmistakably gay-oriented. For Newton and Babuscio, several key features from Sontag – including irony, theatricality, aestheticism/stylization and humor – are relevant to the homosexual experience. While irony reflects “the perception of incongruity” faced by gays in a largely straight world,36 theatricality mirrors “the notion of life-as-theater,” epitomized by the gay experience of “passing for straight.”37 Whereas aestheticism translates gay people’s desire to challenge homosexual stigma and assert their personal integrity through “defiantly different” stylization in life and art,38 camp humor represents an survival strategy for transforming pathos into laughter in a hostile environment.39 This formulation accordingly highlights the “relationship between activities, individuals, situations and gayness.”40 For Newton, camp does not take effect in the eye of an unspecified beholder (pace Sontag) but “in the eye of the homosexual beholder.”41 Babuscio further associates that homosexual beholder with the so-called “gay sensibility,” namely “a perception of the world which is colored, shaped, directed, and defined by […] one’s gayness.”42 Taken together, the experience of social alienation due to one’s gayness helps shape one’s gay sensibility, which in turn helps that gay person exhibit – or perceive in someone or something – a characteristic camp flavor typically marked by irony, theatricality, aestheticism/stylization and humor. In addition to the intimate relationship between camp and gayness, camping or camping about (as Dyer and Bronski note), has been employed by gay men as a means of communication and survival. 43 A direct linkage between camping, its naming as such, and gay sociality is documented as early as 35 The following list is by no means exhaustive: Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility”; Dyer, “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” Only Entertainment, pp. 135-147 (originally published in 1976); Dyer, “Reading Fassbinder’s Sexual Politics”; Dyer, “Judy Garland and Gay Men,” in Heavenly Bodies, pp. 141-194; Russo, “Camp”; Booth, Camp; Bronski, Culture Clash; Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth; Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, esp. pp. 55-58, 310-322. See especially Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance and Camp”; Medhurst, “That Special Thrill.” 36 Newton, “Role Models,” p. 107. 37 Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” pp. 44, 45. 38 Ibid., p. 42. 39 Newton, “Role Models,” pp. 109-110. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” pp. 47-49. 40 Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” p. 41. 41 Newton, “Role Models,” p. 106 (emphasis added). 42 Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” p. 40. 43 Dyer, “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” in Only Entertainment, p. 135; Dyer, “Judy Garland and Gay Men,” in Heavenly Bodies, p. 145; Bronski, Culture Clash, p. 43.

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the 1920s, according to historian George Chauncey. 44 Camp should thus also be taken as indelibly political. Newton’s and Babuscio’s work, I argue, presents the most insightful approach to camp from a specifically gay perspective, and I will return to certain key concepts of theirs in the next chapter. At this point, it is helpful to paraphrase previous discussions of gay versus nongay/straight use of camp – simply put, “gay camp” versus “mass camp.” Whereas gay camp designates a taste and aesthetic originating from and evolving around gay subculture, as Newton and Babuscio stress, mass camp refers to a camp taste and style stripped of its subcultural affiliation, which went mainstream in the 1960s and has since mediated the ways in which mass cultural products are produced, consumed, and recycled. Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” was pivotal here. For Dyer, however, the critical potential of gay camp is that “playing up the artifice” of arts and media prevents gay people believing too readily in what they are shown, helping them reconsider “[the normative] view of gayness, and sexuality in general.”45 Gay camp, in other words, can “demystify” or “undercut” gender roles and the dominant world-view. 46 However, as Dyer insists, when gay camp is appropriated by straights, it loses “its cutting edge,” along with “its identification with the gay experience, its distance from the straight sexual world-view.”47 Distanced from its subcultural politics and history, mainstream mass camp is instead embraced as a “new” taste, a chic aesthetic penchant for images that, self-consciously or otherwise, emphasize exaggeration, stylization, artificiality and tackiness. When inflected by pop art’s dismissal of high culture, mass camp further participates in what Andrew Ross calls the “transformations of taste” by retrieving and rediscovering images or objects “that [have] been excluded from the serious high-cultural ‘traditions’.”48 For Ross, this “massive reorganization of cultural taste” also sets mass camp apart from its gay counterpart, which Ross conceives as rooted in a “survivalist” subcultural milieu. 49 By highlighting these distinctions, I wish to draw attention to the discursive dimensions that constitute gay and mass camp, so as to conduct a more productive discussion of camp in general. I propose we understand the sort of camp phenomenon Sontag’s article inaugurated as a discourse 44 Chauncey, Gay New York, pp. 276-280, 286-291. 45 Dyer, “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” in Only Entertainment, pp. 138, 146. 46 Ibid., pp. 145, 146. 47 Ibid., p. 145. 48 Ross, “Uses of Camp,” pp. 17, 13. 49 Ibid. pp. 22, 17.

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in itself, which only comes into being in and through forms of practices and discussions. Mass camp, in other words, can be properly conceived of as discourse materializing in a performative manner. Although it is tempting to contrast mass camp as some free-floating idea (“a discourse available for all”) with gay camp as a socio-historically valorized entity (“a product of queers’ experiences and perceptions”),50 I find such a contrast too readily forecloses the consideration of gay camp as both an entity and a discourse, or rather, a discursive embodiment with a performative ramification. Indeed, gay camp, as discussed, is not a thing, but exists in the “relationship” between gayness and camp targets. I want to add that neither mass camp nor gay camp possesses a transcendental essence. They can both be taken as performative discourses that come into being through reiterative performances and articulations. What we see as the differences between gay camp and mass camp can thus also be understood as the different discursive effects that are, importantly, informed by and inseparable from their discursive contexts, in which myriad ideas and images, in a web of sociopolitical, cultural, historical and economic factors, are differently “orchestrated”51 in relation to different subject positions – in particular those coded “gay” and “straight.” Put another way, treating both mass camp and gay camp as discourses helps us focus on the particular contexts in which they take form and effect differently. This conceptual move is signif icant for a number of reasons. First, an emphasis on the discursive contexts of camp helps us account for the changes taking place along the trajectories of mass camp and particularly gay camp. To paraphrase Chuck Kleinhans, as the “conditions and contexts for Camp differ in pre-Stonewall, post-Stonewall, post-AIDS, and contemporary Queer moments,” so does our understanding of gay camp,52 alongside the particular ways in which gay camp takes form and effect. Take cross-dressing, a central embodiment of gay camp. Because the politics of being gay significantly changed in the 1970s, while camping and cross-dressing were dismissed by some as merely byproducts of pre-Stonewall “oppression, secrecy and self-hatred,”53 flamboyant drag and cross-dressing began to be deployed and recoded in Gay Pride parades: they signif ied “being ‘out’ in a visible public ritual,” and enacting “gay pride, identity, community, and history”54 in a performative fashion. In 50 51 52 53 54

Medhurst, “Camp,” p. 279. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, pp. 214-215. Kleinhans, “Taking Out the Trash,” p. 282. Silverstein and White, The Joy of Gay Sex, p. 52. Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, p. 129.

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the 1980s, with the onset of the AIDS crisis and the rise of “queer” politics, gay camp was further retooled into “a key strategy in gay activist politics aiming at asserting gay rights, and not simply gay pride,” which prompted “a more recent shift to overtly politicized camp and radical drag.”55 The latter struck a chord with Queer Nation’s “guerrilla warfare” in the early 1990s, which aimed, through a series of staged public events, “to cross borders, to occupy spaces, and to mime the privileges of normality – in short, to simulate ‘the national’ with a camp inflection.”56 By transforming national identity into “style” and flags into “transvestite ‘flagness’” in this reclamation movement, Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman argue that Queer Nation effectively translated “queerness into a camp counternationality.”57 What the above explication shows as a whole is the changing significance of gay camp in relation to its shifting sociopolitical context. While a discursive approach to gay camp or mass camp emphatically incorporates camp subjects’ changing contexts, I suggest that the distinction between gay camp from mass camp – for Dyer, the “cutting edge” – may be better understood not as an attribute “lost” in straight appropriation but rather as an issue of how gay camp retains its cutting edge in changing contexts. Second, drawing attention to the discursive contexts of gay camp and mass camp does not downplay the tension between the two. In fact, if we see mass camp as a mainstream discourse evolving from the late 1960s, the endeavors to reclaim camp’s subcultural affiliation in the 1970s and onward can be understood as constituting another discourse that not only performatively affirms camp’s gay affiliation, but functioning in part as what Michel Foucault terms a “reverse discourse,”58 countering the discursive impact of mass camp that renders homosexuality trivial, if not invisible. Meanwhile, if the gesture of gay camp reaffirming its gay affiliation is patently political, so is the act of mass camp purging of its subcultural “stigma.” I disagree with the contention that mass camp is a “depoliticized” version of camp: the politics of mass camp precisely borders on its tension with gay camp and queer politics, as well as its competition with other aesthetics such as high art and avant-garde. Third, viewing gay camp and mass camp as two juxtaposed, competing discourses also helps us reframe the premises of our investigation: rather 55 Ibid., pp. 129, 119. 56 Berlant and Freeman, “Queer Nationality,” p. 196. 57 Ibid., p. 214. 58 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 101.

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than a unilateral, appropriative relationship between mass camp (as a “derivative”) and gay camp (as the “original”), we can focus instead on the varied productions and effects of mass camp and gay camp. While the former approach inevitably assumes a somewhat essentialist view that associates only gay camp with originality and authenticity, the latter approach (admittedly informed by a poststructuralist perspective) underscores the different functions or uses of camp associated with different contexts. In this regard, I am skeptical about Moe Meyer’s purist assertion of queer-motivated camp as “the only” legitimate embodiment of camp.59 I rather share Jonathan Dollimore’s view that “there are many kinds of camp,” which, for Dollimore, explains camp’s elusive definition.60 Fourth, rethinking camp as a performative discourse, with an emphasis on its different contexts and uses, is fundamental to my subsequent investigation of camp expressions in a Chinese cultural setting. It helps counter the view that “camp” is not only from, but exclusively of the “West,” which tends to characterize any camp appreciations of non-Western texts as cultural misunderstanding or cultural colonization. Of course, an irony resides in such reasoning: by denying “non-Western” cultures legitimate access to “camp” as an aesthetic expression and analytic tool, it conversely perpetuates camp as a prerogative of “Western” culture. What is left unexamined in such a rationale, then, is the sort of cultural essentialism that postulates impermeable demarcations between “Western” and “non-Western” cultures. My rethinking of camp challenges such an epistemic stance by foregrounding the performative and discursive nature of camp from within a Western cultural context. It is worth repeating that camp, even in the West, is far from a fixed entity: it does not possess a transcendental essence, but is always in process. On these grounds, I consider camp as a discursive formation: a descriptive and analytic implement that does not belong to a particular culture, which “travels” about61 and can be adapted to different cultural settings. I locate camp impulses in Chinese societies by paying special attention to the cultural contexts that signify what these societies may identify as “camp.” More importantly, I tentatively draw the contours of a particular embodiment or usage of camp informed by Chinese gay culture. I call this version of camp “tongzhi camp” for its special inflection that is at once gay and Chinese. 59 Moe Meyer, “Introduction,” p. 5. 60 Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 310. 61 Said, “Traveling Theory.”

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The Discursive Formation of Mass Camp in Hong Kong Before I explore issues of tongzhi camp in the next chapter, I would like to examine the discursive formation of “mass camp” in modern Hong Kong. We may ask: Was there a camp discourse in Hong Kong to begin with? If there was, what does camp mean in this territory? What kinds of socio-historical factors may have facilitated such a discourse and, more broadly, the diffusion of camp sensibility in the public? And in what ways has this camp sensibility informed Hong Kong mass media and, in particular, Hong Kong cinema? To answer these questions, I will conduct a comparative analysis of the camp discourse in Hong Kong vis-à-vis Anglo-American camp theory. Going beyond Sontag, I turn now to the principal sources and features of mass camp impulse in Anglo-American mass media. In her elucidation of how camp was transformed from a subcultural, sectarian practice into a “democratized” response available to the mass audiences in the US, Barbara Klinger usefully identifies an array of key social and media developments in the 1960s and 1970s. These include pop art’s canonization of mass culture, rock music’s questioning of gender categories, and emphasis on reflexivity and parody in television and film, along with a growing egalitarian spirit in popular culture, consciousness-raising about gender and sexuality through countercultural movements, feminism and gay liberation, and expanding educational and leisure opportunities.62 All contributed to a heightened awareness of the artifice of conventions, particularly those associated with art, dress, gender behavior, and media representation. Animating “a self-conscious, often parodic attitude” toward conventions, this heightened awareness affects not only the production and consumption of contemporary media – with films and television shows like Cat Ballou (1965) and “Get Smart” (1965-70) responding to their audiences’ familiarity with established convention by overtly parodying them – but also “the manner in which audiences presently view films from the past.”63 Through the audiences’ “modern, reflexive lens,” classic Hollywood movies appear “unintentionally exaggerated and overconventionalized,” or simply as “inadvertent campy send-ups.”64 That is, a sense of anachronism is oftentimes imbricated with “mass camp sensibility,” which “emerges from a satiety with convention and thrives additionally on outdatedness.”65 Ken Feil, 62 63 64 65

Klinger, “Mass Camp,” pp. 137-139. Ibid., p 138. Ibid., pp. 133, 139. Ibid., p. 142.

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meanwhile, in his book Dying for A Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination, examines how mass camp sensibility has reconfigured the production and reception of contemporary Hollywood disaster film.66 In particular, Feil provides a cogent account of how certain mass camp inflections have become routine aesthetic choices for Hollywood filmmakers, where those mass camp inflections include excessive visual stylization, the reliance on episodic narrative structure and reflexive acting, and the resort to self-conscious intertextual pastiche or pop culture send-ups.67 Klinger’s delineation of the sources of mass camp, together with Feil’s account of its features in mainstream cinema, provide a very insightful framework for understanding mass camp in general. Although such a framework has its footing in Anglo-American popular culture, I adapt it here in order to rethink and articulate the ways in which mass camp emerges in Hong Kong popular culture. By the mid-1990s, Hong Kong’s City Magazine (Haowai zazhi, 1976-) was a crucial arbiter of local cultural tastes, introducing ideas about cultural appreciation from the West. In an early issue from December 1976, critic Deng Xiao-yu brought up the term “camp” – in English – in his commentary on local media. He associates camp with a kind of “sensibility” that highlights a “cynical,” “self-reflective” and “parodic” attitude toward forms of convention, particularly genre conventions. Deng’s key example is the popular American soap opera parody “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”68 In February 1977, City Magazine presented a special issue on camp, with features on campy local personalities and an abbreviated version of Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” reprinted in the original English.69 This special issue was followed by a reader’s letter, which basically reiterates that camp is a peculiar sensibility characterized by the penchant for exaggeration, unnaturalness, incongruity, and humor.70 These articles represented an early attempt to grasp camp in Hong Kong, and this new discourse, from the outset, was deeply informed by Sontag. In the years to come, the English term “camp” gradually gained wider currency, even though different facets of the term were often foregrounded. For instance, while Deng Xiao-yu points to camp’s ironic relationship to convention, Cheng Yu and Chen Guan-zhong, partly informed by Pauline Kael, find some redemptive value in camp’s self-conscious approach to 66 Feil, Dying for A Laugh. 67 Ibid., pp. 36-38, 162-166. 68 Deng, “Yinguang er’qian, Mary Hartman han Gan Guo-liang,” pp. 16 (back cover) and 7. 69 City Magazine Issue 6 (February 1977), pp. 11-14. 70 Li Jinya, in City Magazine Issue 7 (March 1977), pp. 2-3.

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overconventionalized and mediocre popular culture (Kael’s “trash”).71 While Li Cheuk-to, discussing John Woo’s action movies, primarily associates camp with some “excessive stylizations,”72 Li Zhao-xing and Pan Guo-ling further contrast the stylistic excess of camp with the aesthetic minimalism of “cool.”73 Wei Shao-en hints at the temporal factor contributing to the perceived excess in camp,74 while Li Zhao-xing,75 along with Su Qi and Shen Ming,76 underscores the influence of anachronism on the current camp response to Cantonese cinema from the 1950s and 1960s. Generally speaking, while these accounts and usages of camp highlight different aspects of the idea, they do not surpass the understanding of “mass camp” from Sontag, Ross, Klinger and Feil. It should also be noted that gender parody, along with its homosexual connotation, did not constitute a salient dimension of this local camp discourse at first. However, this began to change in the late 1980s. One particular event that brought together camp discourse and queerness in Hong Kong popular culture was The Eighth Happiness (Johnnie To, 1988), a local box-office smash hit in which superstar Chow Yun-fat portrays a womanizer who, in order to get closer to girls, poses as a gay man, plays up his feminine demeanor, and jokingly describes his flamboyant effeminacy as campy, or literally “camp-camp-di” with a naughty Cantonese intonation.77 Not least due to this film, gender parody and effeminacy have since emerged as key components of local camp discourse. Hong Kong people would often simply use the term “camp” to describe effeminate men perceived as homosexual.78 For instance, you might overhear members of the local audience describe the Leslie Cheung 71 Cheng Yu, “Puji wenhua zai dingyi,” p. 66; Chen Guan-zhong, “From Camp to Post-modernism.” 72 Li Cheuk-to, “Luanshi qingyi de kaoyan – ping Bullet in the Head,” in Ni guan ji, pp. 41-43. 73 Li Zhao-xing, “Wong Kar-wai ku de meixue”; Pan Guo-ling, “Dang yingxiang cheng cult”; Pan Guo-ling, “Ku meixue guan,” in Qige fengying, pp. 161-163. 74 Wei Shao-en, “Pufailu meixue,” p. 6. Discussing Ann Hui’s feature debut The Secret (1979), Wei points to the gloomy and world-weary atmosphere of the Western District of Hong Kong, a style that would become known as “Pokfield Road aesthetics.” 75 Li Zhao-xing, “Guanyu Camp, wuxia ban.” 76 Su and Ming, “Wenhua pinpan,” p. 58. 77 My first encounter with “camp-camp-di” in writing appeared in an article in City Entertainment in mid-1986, featuring Kam Kwok-leung (later known as the ‘father of camp in Hong Kong’) and his then newly-wed Carol Cheng. I speculate this particular usage started circulation around that time. See Li Zhi-chao. “Zheng Yuling han Gan Guoliang de aiqing shi chongman guangming de.” In a review of My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), the writer also used “camp-camp-di” to describe the Udo Kier character, a middle-aged effeminate businessman and a cabaret performer wannabe. See Wan-bao-lu. “Buji de Tiankong chule Keanu Reeves haiyou shemo?” 78 Chou Wah-san, Xianggang tongzhi gushi, pp. 93-105.

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character in Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993) as “So camp, so effeminate.”79 Similarly, Paul Fonoroff’s review of Oh! My Three Guys (Derek Chiu, 1994) notes that the film “presents a wide range of homosexuals from campy to ‘straight’ and even a few closet cases.”80 In other words, Hong Kong camp discourse since the late 1970s is primarily one of mass camp, subsequently joined (but not totally replaced) by another accentuated by gender bending or gender parody. Here an important question emerges: what are the socio-historical forces that might have underpinned such a discourse? In the remainder of this section I follow Klinger’s example, tentatively mapping the significant sources of mass camp impulse in Hong Kong popular culture. In so doing I examine the material foundation of this mass camp discourse, or rather, the socio-historical conditions that have enabled the cultural translation of mass camp. This section lays the groundwork for my investigation into mass camp expressions in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, which has been increasingly marked by what, for Feil, characterizes mass camp: excessive stylization, episodic format, reflexive acting, and self-conscious intertextuality. This growing sense of mass camp in Hong Kong cinema, I argue, overlaps with the increasing popularity of gender parody in the 1980s. Together they gave rise to an abundance of gender-oriented mass camp expressions in the early 1990s, exemplified by Brigitte Lin’s portrayal of the sensational androgyne “Asia the Invincible” in Ching Siu-tung/Tsui Hark’s 1991 blockbuster Swordsman II. Postwar Hong Kong underwent a series of transformations in its social economy. The structural change of the population was crucial here: according to Liu Shu-yong, Hong Kong’s population increased by 55% in the postwar decade; by 1961, the residents numbered 3.13 million and, thanks to the high birth rate, nearly 41% of the whole population was under the age of fifteen (this remarkable ratio did not fall below 30% till the mid-1970s). By the mid-1960s, moreover, those born in Hong Kong outnumbered those born outside the territory for the first time (the former only accounted for one third of the prewar population). Those statistics index the emergence of the younger demographic of the 1960s, as well as the indigenization of the Hong Kong populace from the 1960s onward.81 Importantly, this change paved the way for the consolidation of a “localized popular culture,”82 articulating 79 Ibid., p. 96. 80 Fonoroff, At the Hong Kong Movies, p. 439 (originally published in the South China Morning Post, December 9, 1994). 81 Liu Shu-yong, Jianming xianggang shi (A Brief History of Hong Kong), pp. 392-403. 82 Yao Yao, “Sheng, se, yi: huigu xianggang dazhong wenhua de fazhan” (A retrospective on the development of Hong Kong’s popular culture), pp. 17-20.

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the desires and cultural belonging of “Hong Kongers” (xianggang ren) and negotiating a multitude of transcultural influences. Rock music in particular contributed to the public awareness and proliferation of a camp aesthetic in Anglo-American culture: discussions tend to focus on certain key developments of the genre through the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Rock groups like the Velvet Underground and Alice Cooper, as Philip Core notes, responded to “the late sixties’ need for the bizarre by extending their allusions to the kinkier forms of sex or the more outrageous costume aspects of camp,”83 where feathers, sequins, makeup, high-heels, transvestism, and leather fetishes, among others, were incorporated into their image and stage performances. Klinger likewise highlights two 1970s rock trends: glam rock and punk rock.84 Stars such as the Kinks, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Lou Reed and Mick Jagger (re)fashioned their look through cross-dressing and dandyism. “The presence of camp in the pervasively popular forum of rock,” Klinger writes, “helped produce a broader-based cultural attraction to and acceptance of the phenomenon.”85 If rock’s post-1960s flamboyance and androgyny immensely facilitated camp appreciation in Anglo-American pop culture, a less obviously flamboyant 1960s band – The Beatles – arguably played a decisive role in forming camp attitudes in Hong Kong. Touring in June 1964, The Beatles’ visit to Hong Kong caused a tremendous sensation: not only were the “long-haired pop singers”86 greeted by “thousands of male and female fans, with anti-riot police standing by,”87 but so-called Beatlemania had a lasting impact on Hong Kong society. This enduring influence can be assessed through the parameters of gender and generation. The Beatles’ tour immediately initiated the trend for men growing their hair long.88 Though the Beatles’ original “mop top” does not have much shock value by today’s standards, mimicking it deviated from the clean-cut image expected of men in 1960s Hong Kong,89 and was considered socially rebellious, even morally ambiguous. This suspicion only grew as The Beatles, in later years, drifted toward a hippie style,90 with longer hair, 83 Core, Camp, p. 159. 84 Klinger, “Mass Camp,” p. 138. 85 Ibid. 86 “Wild Welcome at Kai Tak for The Beatles,” South China Morning Post (June 9, 1964), p. 1. 87 “‘Pi-tou-si’ hongdong di gang: Kai Tak airport wanren kongxiang qijing; Shu qian nannü gemi jijie, fanhai zu yanzhen jiebei,” Ming Pao (June 9, 1964), p. 1. 88 Wu and Zhang, “Yinyan” (Introduction) in Yuedu xianggang puji wenhua (Reading Hong Kong popular culture), p. 411. 89 Chen, Mei-yi. Shishang modeng, p. 280. 90 Devin McKinney, “The Unintelligible Truth.”

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beards, bell-bottom pants, tie-dyed T-shirts, and other hippie accessories.91 Notably, many hippie items, including bell-bottom jeans, were unisex.92 Trends for long hair on men and unisex bell-bottom pants also bolstered unconventional ways to be a “man.” As popular local columnist Qiu Shi-wen (1951-1998) recalled, The Beatles’ style was enormously popular among his teenage male peers at a time when they found it difficult to identify with romantic and scholarly male archetypes in Cantonese cinema and opera. These roles were “enervated” and “unstylish” (haochang), geared mostly toward older women, factory girls, and recent immigrants from China.93 Before the rise of martial arts film in the late 1960s, particularly Bruce Lee’s 1970s heyday, Western male entertainers such as The Beatles, Sean Connery, Elvis Presley, Clint Eastwood, and Alan Delon were the most important style icons for young men like Qiu.94 If long hair and bell-bottoms were not their style of nonconformist masculinity, men could also attain, for instance, the unconventional “sexy” quality of a Tom Jones by undoing some shirt buttons, or even become “macho” like a young Marlon Brando, by building and showcasing their physiques.95 Beatlemania was also crucial to the development of local youth culture. As Zhang Yue-ai and Zhang Jia-wen point out, the concept of “teenager” or “young adult” did not even exist in Hong Kong before the 1960s, when its population consisted of three major categories: children, adults and seniors.96 However, this changed in 1964: with The Beatles’ tour a “new sensibility” emerged among those growing up in postwar Hong Kong (which, again, accounted for two fifths of the whole population). A new generation and a new epoch were born.97 On one level, this new sensibility, as Yao Yao contends, reworked various Western pop culture elements as a specific 91 Chen Mei-yi, Shishang modeng, pp. 284-285. 92 Pendergast et al., Fashion, Costume, and Culture, p. 903. 93 Qiu Shi-wen, Kan yan nan wang (Unforgettable with one look), pp. 234-236. 94 Ibid., p. 237. 95 Chi Jing-yi. “Macho xinggan jiangshi xingrong nanxing de.” 96 Sociologist Lui Tai-lok identifies four main generations of Hong Kong people: those born before 1946, between 1946-1965, between 1966-1975, and 1976-1990. The postwar “baby-boomer” generation, for Lui, is characterized by its tremendous size, its members’ experience of growing up through fierce competition for limited resources (and entering a society with increasing opportunities), and their ambiguous relationship to their parents’ generation. Lui, Si dai Xianggang ren (Four generations of Hong Kong people), pp. 15, 27-36. See also Chen Guan-zhong, Xia yige shinian: Xianggang de guangrong niandai? (The next decade: Hong Kong’s golden age?), pp. 35-37. 97 Zhang and Zhang, “Toshi xianggang nienqingren de xiaofe wenhua” (Looking through the consumer culture of Hong Kong’s young people), p. 21.

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expression of romanticism, hedonism, individualism, and rebellion, which reverberated with certain aspects of the hippie or “beatnik” ethos developing in the West.98 A “correlation” was soon posited between this new generation’s rebellious and “depraved” attitudes, their enthusiasm for idiosyncratic styles, and the increasing crime rate: as researchers like Lu Zhi-wei, Lui Tai-lok and Chen Guan-zhong put it, “moral panic.”99 This sense was reflected in The Beatles’ two Chinese names: whereas the phonetic translation, “Pi-tou-si,” exaggerated their “messy longhair,” the name “kuangren yuetuan” stressed the band’s “intractable wildness,” echoing the perceived link between nonconformist styles and social disorder. The general public labeled the rebellious, “trouble-making” teenagers “Ah Fei” – a term derived from the Chinese title of Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and revived after The Beatles’ visit to Hong Kong.100 As Yiu-wai Chu notes, “this first wave of band music in Hong Kong allowed the younger generation to rebel without a cause.”101 However, a good number of this generation also found inspiration in the countercultural, antiestablishment movements unfolding in the West. They became a cardinal force in social activism from the late 1960s into the 1970s. Klinger explains that countercultural movements, particularly feminism and gay liberation, were crucial to the dissemination of camp attitudes in Anglo-American popular culture, in that they created “an awareness of gender roles and their adherence to constraining social norms,” and foregrounded “the expression of feminine and masculine identity in the media” in public discussion.102 In Hong Kong, however, feminism and gay liberation did not surface as key agendas for local activism during the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, social activism focused on the political confrontation between the pro-Nationalist and pro-Communist groups (i.e. the “Chinese 98 Yao Yao, “Sheng, se, yi: huigu xianggang dazhong wenhua de fazhan” (A retrospective on the development of Hong Kong’s popular culture), pp. 13-14. 99 Lu Zhi-wei, “Xiandai xing, shehui kongzhi yu qingshaonien wenti 1945-1979” (Modernity, social control and Hong Kong’s teenager problems 1945-1979); Lui, Si dai Xianggang ren, p. 29. Chen Guan-zhong. Xia yige shinian, pp. 34-35. 100 Major local newspaper Ming Pao’s report on the Beatles’ arrival sketched the audacious look and demeanor of the “fei zai fei nu” (rebellious young men and women) among the fans, asking “what their parents would think about them,” while the anti-riot squads were “standing by with tremendous caution.” “‘Pi-tou-si’ hongdong di gang,” Ming Pao (June 9, 1964), p. 1. 101 Yiu-wai Chu, Hong Kong Cantopop, p. 31. On the “ah fei” lifestyle and the popular band culture, see Qiu Shi-wen, “Chongshi bengang feizai shenghuo pianduan” (Recollecting pieces of the past about Hong Kong rebellious young men), in Zai Xianggang zhangda (Growing up in Hong Kong), pp. 52-69. 102 Klinger, “Mass Camp,” p. 138.

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politics”) on Hong Kong soil, and were increasingly mobilized by local issues, albeit often framed by an anti-colonial or anti-capitalist agenda.103 The younger generation emerged as decisive actors in social unrest and activist movements during the late 1960s. For instance, among the 905 people who were arrested and charged of involvement in the 1966 Kowloon disturbances – an incident sparked by a protest against a fare hike by the Star Ferry – about 49% were aged between sixteen and twenty.104 According to Lui Tai-lok and Stephen Chiu, the Kowloon disturbances signaled “the arrival of a new generation,” ready to express their hopes and protest against situations their parents tacitly accepted.105 In May 1967, an industrial dispute turned into widespread city riots led by local leftists who responded to China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and claimed an anti-colonial agenda. The riots lasted seven months and claimed fifty-one lives,106 with fifteen killed in bomb attacks.107 While the escalating violence, ironically, helped the colonial administration win public support of its rule and reform,108 the riots, as David Faure recalls, also gave many young people “the first taste of an open action directed against the established government.”109 In the following years, “a local antiestablishment counterculture” gradually took shape as various pressure and protest groups formed,110 in which young people, despite their different political persuasions, were the most significant actors.111 Among the most memorable movements staged by these young people in the early 1970s was the citywide demonstration protesting off icial discrimination against the Chinese language. With Chinese becoming an official language in 1974, this movement, in film scholar Law Kar’s words, “once again signaled the collective assertion of a strong anticolonial, prolocal identity.”112 Hong Kong’s youthful counterculture, in terms of its political conviction, was deeply shaped by the struggle for an indigenous identity amid the web of British colonial legacy, Chinese political influences, and the global cultural economy. Unlike its Western counterpart (which 103 Lui and Chiu, “Social Movements and Public Discourse on Politics.” 104 Steve Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong, p. 188. Lu Zhi-wei, “Xiandai xing, shehui kongzhi yu qingshaonien wenti 1945-1979,” p. 428. 105 Lui and Chiu, “Social Movements and Public Discourse on Politics,” p. 104. 106 Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, pp. 150-160. 107 Gary Ka-wai Cheung, Hong Kong’s Watershed: The 1967 Riots, p. 3. 108 Ibid., pp. 131-142. 109 Faure, Colonialism and the Hong Kong Mentality, pp. 75-76. 110 Law, “Overview of Hong Kong’s New Wave Cinema,” p. 32. 111 Lui and Chiu, “Social Movements and Public Discourse on Politics,” pp. 106-109. 112 Law, “Overview of Hon Kong’s New Wave Cinema,” p. 32.

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tended to focus on more general issues regarding race, gender, war, and environmental protection), in Hong Kong counterculture was profoundly concerned with specific and locally oriented issues – from public housing to official corruption and industrial disputes. Of course, social activism was not the whole picture. Hong Kong counterculture also fostered more personal, spontaneous cultural activities, such as interest in music (e.g. the “intractable” rock’n’roll) and film (e.g. “artsy” European cinema). The “critical community” was also newly emerging with cine clubs – like College Student Cine Club (1966-1970), Film Guard Association (1970-), and Phoenix Cine Club (1973-),113 cultural publications (such as Chinese Student Weekly and The Seventies), and independent/experimental filmmaking.114 These activities nourished a critical view of mainstream media, including gender representations. In the same vein, restrictive gender roles started to be challenged,115 for instance through essays on women’s issues116 and the adoption of unconventional dress codes.117 All in all, awareness of convention was integral to the camp attitudes developing in Hong Kong’s counterculture, general public, and mass media from the 1970s onward. Another important factor here was local television. Although Hong Kong’s first television station, Rediffusion Television (RTV), was launched in 1957, the new medium really took off when Television Broadcasting Ltd (TVB) arrived in 1967, marking the transition from a paid cable system to a free wireless service. In 1971, TVB again took the initiative by introducing color television.118 While only 12.3% of local households owned television sets in 1967, the figure doubled within a year, and more than three quarters of 113 Esther M. K. Cheung, Xunzhao Xianggang dianying de duli jingguan (In pursuit of independent visions in Hong Kong cinema), p. 19. Wei-ying-hui/Film Guard Association, “Shiyan dianying laza tan” (A casual conversation over experimental filmmaking); Lau Shing-hon, “Zhanwang shiyan dianying zhan 77” (Outlook on experimental film festival ’77). 114 Wen Jing-ying, “Xianggang shiyan dianying yu luxiang gaikuang” (An overview of Hong Kong experimental film and video); Law, “Overview of Hong Kong’s New Wave Cinema,” pp. 32-33, 36, 38-40; Fung, Zizhu shidai (i-generations), p. 5. 115 See Tsang Gar-yin, “The Women’s Movement at the Crossroads,” p. 280. 116 The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a growing number of essays by individual writers that dealt with women’s issues, particularly how women were (mis-)represented in mass media. See, for instance, Lu Jia-ru, “Du funü zazhi, kan funü xingxiang” (Reading women’s magazines, examining women’s images), and Liang Kuan, “Funü jiefang yungdong yu funü xingxiang” (Women’s liberation and women’s imagery). Both these articles were originally published in Mingpao Monthly (December 1980), and are reprinted in Wu and Zhang (eds.), Yuedu xianggang puji wenhua (Reading Hong Kong popular culture), pp. 584-588 and pp. 589-596, respectively. 117 Li, Jian-hui,“The Age of New Androgyny.” 118 RTV introduced color in December 1973.

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families had televisions by 1972.119 By the time Hong Kong’s third commercial broadcaster, Commercial Television (CTV), launched in 1975, the figure was nearly 90%.120 This high penetration of television broadcasting, coupled with the public’s avid enthusiasm for television viewing, led to a “golden age” of local television in the 1970s and early 1980s, when some primetime programs could attract 60% of the viewing public.121 Television was pivotal to Hong Kong popular culture, through which conflicting ideologies122 and a distinctive local identity (“Hong Konger”) were simultaneously negotiated.123 Television also, as James Kung and Zhang Yue-ai suggest, introduced a “new sensibility” into Hong Kong society.124 Television news, with its “immediate visual impact” and “an assumed neutrality,” was especially important, replacing newspapers as the new “authority” on current affairs and reconfiguring the public perception of realism and violence (unlike the violence depicted in martial arts films), facilitating the rise of crime films, underworld dramas, and police thrillers in mid-1970s cinema.125 Another crucial aspect of television’s “new sensibility,” I suggest, is mass camp.126 Local television stations provided three categories of programs: those produced by local broadcasters, shows imported from the US, Japan and Taiwan, and broadcasts of old Cantonese or Mandarin movies. 127 Among locally produced programs, we may take the martial arts genre as an example. The mid-1970s saw a resurgence of swordplay pictures, led by Chor Yuen’s series of films based on the martial arts novels of Gu Long, including Killer Clans and The Magic Blade (both 1976).128 At around the 119 Zhong Bao-xian, Xianggang yingshiye bainian (A hundred years of Hong Kong’s film and TV industry), p. 247. 120 Ibid. 121 Chou Wah-shan, Dianshi yi si (Television is already dead), p 31. 122 Shu Gua, “Dianshi buzai shenmi” (Television is no longer mysterious); Liang Kuan, “Xiao xiangzi de gushi” (The story of the small box [TV set]). 123 Joseph Man Chan, “Mass Media and Socio-Political Formation in Hong Kong, 1949-1992”; Eric Kit-wai Ma, Culture, Politics, and Television in Hong Kong. 124 Kung and Zhang, “Hong Kong Cinema and Television in the 1970s.” 125 Ibid., pp. 14, 16. See also Li Cheuk-to, “Postscript,” in Qishi niandai xianggang dianying yanjiu (A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies), p. 128. 126 In the magazine New Sensibility, camp was indeed introduced as a critical subject. See Su Qi and Shen Ming, “Wenhua pinpan,” p. 58. 127 Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema, p. 33. See also Zhong Baoxian, Xianggang yingshiye bainian, pp. 242-243, 245, 247. 128 Sixteen of Chor Yuen’s directorial works were adapted from Gu Long’s serialized novels. While thirteen of them were made between 1976 and 1979, the last one, Chuliuxiang zhi youling shanzhuan, was released in 1982. For a complete filmography of Chor, see Guo et al, Chor Yuen, pp. 86-110.

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same time, CTV produced Hong Kong’ first swordplay television series, The Brave Archer, based on a novel by Jin Yong (a.k.a. Louis Cha, 1924-2018). High ratings immediately prompted TVB to produce a similar series, Romance of Book and Sword (1976), also adapted from Jin Yong’s novel. The next few years saw about twenty martial arts series,129 most based on the work of either Jin Yong or Gu Long, several of which were also adapted as films.130 CTV’s Killer Clans (1978), for instance, drew on the same source material as Chor Yuen’s 1976 film classic; The Brave Archer was adapted for the screen in 1977, with a sequel in 1978 (both directed by Chang Cheh), as well as a new TVB television series in 1983. The television series also borrowed a variety of techniques from established martial arts filmmaking, such as camerawork, editing, f ight choreography, and makeup. What emerged through this overlap and appropriation of narrative and stylistic conventions, however, was far from a smooth assimilation of the two different media. Rather, to quote Klinger, “the mimicry of successful cinematic generic formulae by television genre shows [e.g. martial arts sagas] […] helped to familiarize the viewers with the narrative and formal lingo [of specific genres].”131 A demystification of cinematic representation, I suggest, was simultaneously evoked by transferring various filmic conventions from big to small screens, from the immersive experience of the movie theater to the more fractured television watching experience at home (interrupted by TV commercials and domestic activities, for example). Arguably, this accelerated saturation of generic conventions in film and television, together with the audiences’ incongruous perception of familiar formulae in different media, played a significant part in the increased consciousness of representational conventions and the diffusion of camp responses.132 The second category of programs consisted of shows imported from the US and Japan. Though their influence ebbed with the rise of local productions,133 American and Japanese television series nevertheless enjoyed 129 See the chart in Zhong Bao-xian, Xianggang yingshiye bainian, p. 319. 130 On Jin Yong’s popular film and TV adaptations, see Feng Ruo-zhi, “Wei xing yi dai dianshi lishi zuo zhuan” (To write the history for TV’s new generation). 131 Klinger, “Mass Camp,” p. 138. 132 Various articles at the time addressed the specificities of television and film as two different media. For instance, Anqi’er, “Dianshi dianying: yijiao gaoxia” (TV, Movie: A Comparison); Li Ying, “Dianying meijie de texing” (Specificity of film medium). 133 Between 1967 and 1973, American television series dominated Hong Kong’s primetime programming; however, an “indigenizing” process between 1973 and 1978 saw locally produced programs eventually take over completely. See Chen Qi-xiang, “Xianggang bentu wenhua de jianli he dianshi de jiaose” (The establishment of a localized culture in Hong Kong and the role of television), pp. 83-84.

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great popularity. Of American series alone, dozens were broadcast in Hong Kong before the mid-1970s, such as The Saint (RTV), Bonanza (TVB), The Lucy Show (TVB), Batman (RTV), The Addams Family (TVB), Tarzan (TVB), Green Hornet (TVB), Star Trek (RTV), among others.134 On one level, this brief list includes titles renowned for exaggerated stylization and an ironic attitude toward generic conventions, such as The Addams Family, Star Trek, and particularly Batman, which, in Robert Ray’s account, “provided most Americans with their first introduction to unadulterated camp.”135 These shows, with their extended reruns, certainly contributed to the bourgeoning camp sensibility in Hong Kong.136 On another level, I would like to draw attention to a cross-cultural dimension of local television: the fact that imported television shows were dubbed in Cantonese. Beginning with RTV’s Chinese-language channel, launched in 1963, dubbing has since become the norm for all foreign television series on local Chinese-language channels.137 Imagine all the non-Chinese people onscreen speaking standard Cantonese with their mouths out of sync with the spoken words. More interestingly, the viewers might even be aware of the local performers voicing the characters: some still vividly remember who “vocally” played whom in The Addams Family.138 Through the “bifurcation” between sound and image, as well as the “doubled” acting imposed upon the characters, I suggest that dubbing unwittingly fostered an ironic relationship between viewers and texts, which was essential to camp appreciation. The third main category of Hong Kong’s early television programming comprised older, mostly Cantonese movies. Cantonese dialect cinema emerged in 1933, with comedies, opera films, martial arts pictures, and melodramas becoming the standard genres. In its heyday in the 1950s 134 Other American series broadcast in Hong Kong during the 1960s and 1970s include The Untouchables, The Fugitive, Mod Squad, Mission Impossible, Planet of the Apes, Wagon Train, Dr. Kildare, Lassie, Family Affairs, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Kung Fu, Ironside, I Spy, It Takes A Thief, The Flying Nun, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Charlie’s Angles, and Wonder Woman. 135 Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, p. 257. For detailed analyses of Batman see, for instance, Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance and Camp”; Sasha Torres, “The Caped Crusader of Camp.” 136 A reviewer on the film The Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991) remarks on the “cult” status of the original TV series and the “camp humor” in its characterizations. Evi, “Zhongren xintou ai” (Everybody’s love). 137 Ng Ho, Xianggang dianshi shihua (Remarks on Hong Kong television history), pp. 5, 28. 138 For instance, Gomez Addams’s voice was dubbed by Jiang Zhong-ping, Morticia Frump Addams’s was by Shangguan Yunhui, and Uncle Fester Frump’s by Mei Xin. See the discussion about The Addams Family on Muzikland, a Hong Kong-based fan website on popular culture. http://roodo.com/muzikland/archives/3683863.html (retrieved October 29, 2008).

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and early 1960s, more than two thousand films were made annually.139 This vast archive became a ready-made, relatively inexpensive option for television programming. From the late 1960s, RTV and TVB both presented at least one Cantonese movie every day. Such intensive broadcasting, however, inevitably drew attention to the narrative and formal style of early Cantonese cinema. The time lapse between production and television broadcast, for example, often rendered certain features obsolete and somewhat hyperbolic. The restricted gender relations and heavy didacticism of early social melodramas could appear outmoded and overblown to viewers with a more modern sensibility. Cantonese martial arts films, characterized by “primitive mechanical gadgetry” and “fight scenes borrowed from Cantonese opera stage fights,”140 stood in stark contrast with their later Mandarin counterparts, which used more sophisticated gadgetry and comparatively “realist” action choreography. These “excessive,” “primitive,” and “unnatural” Cantonese cinematic formulas might also be seen as camp among television viewers. Meanwhile, Robert Ray maintains that, by “indiscriminately reviving old movies (including many clearly intended as disposable),” television also exposed the mechanisms and ideology of Classic Hollywood cinema, spawning camp appreciation.141 I f ind Ray’s contention equally true of Cantonese cinema on Hong Kong television, where quantity overwhelmed quality. Though an array of memorable pictures were released during the 1950s and 1960s, early Cantonese cinema in general “never got over the image of being a ‘fast-food’ cinema: cheap, mass-produced, easily consumed and discarded.”142 Local television’s intensive and indiscriminate broadcasting was consequently uneven in quality. Thus, Cantonese film classics were programmed alongside their inferior offshoots or spin-offs within days – even on the same day on the same channel – inevitably calling attention to the formulaic quality and general ideology of early Cantonese cinema. Other significant factors in the diffusion of mass camp may plausibly include widening access to educational and leisure opportunities, the introduction of the auteur theory into the critical community, and the success of the James Bond movies. In terms of education and leisure, such 139 Between 1950 and 1959, 1519 Cantonese films were released; 211 were released in 1961, 200 in 1962, and 203 in 1963. See Yu, “Xianggang yueju dianying fazhan shihua,” p. 18; Law and Bren, Hong Kong Cinema, p. 320. 140 Law and Frank, Hong Kong Cinema, p. 174. 141 Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, p. 265. 142 Teo, “Hong Kong Cinema,” p. 552.

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opportunities had much to do with the rapid economic growth since the 1960s,143 alongside the emergence and expansion of Hong Kong’s middle class, combined with a steady increase and a more equal distribution of the colony’s educational resources.144 With better access to education and leisure, middle-class youth thereby gained “the background and opportunity to recognize and relish savvy plays with convention.”145 As for the auteur theory, it helped members of the critical community have “fun with the selfconsciousness of the filmmaking process.”146 Not unlike general recognition of genre patterns, “the appreciation of recurring auteur structures [also] increased interest in, and production of, parodies”147 key to the mass camp impulse. (I will return to the influence of auteur theory in my subsequent discussion of the Hong Kong New Wave vis-à-vis mass camp in Hong Kong cinema). Regarding the Bond films, as Wes Gehring points out, they were themselves very close to parodies, “walking a thin line between action adventure and spy spoof.”148 For Gehring, this line grew “progressively thinner” when Roger Moore replaced Sean Connery as Bond.149 More broadly, James Chapman considers “all” the Bond films camp, at least in their excessively theatrical and ostentatious formulae.150 The “increasingly campy” franchise151 also spawned a tidal wave of spin-offs and send-ups, including (in the US) The Pink Panther series (1964-), What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (Woody Allen, 1966), Casino Royale (John Huston et al., 1967), popular television show “Get Smart” (1965-1970), and the more recent Austin Powers series (1997-2002). In Hong Kong, Shaw Brothers were inspired to produce a Mandarin-language series of “spy action films” (Jiandie dadou pian), beginning with The Golden Buddha (Lo Wei, 1966), followed by such popular works as Angel with the Iron Fists 143 The colony’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average of 10% every year from the 1960s through the 1970s. See Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong, p. 163. 144 In 1971, six years of primary schooling were provided free for every child aged six to twelve. This was then extended to nine years in 1978. Moreover, although there was only one university in Hong Kong before the 1950s, Hong Kong University was to be joined by several others by the 1970s. See Liu Shu-yong, Jianming xianggang shi, pp. 459-466. For an extended discussion of the role of the government in Hong Kong’s education system, particularly how it has affected the territory’s educational quality and social mobility, see Chan Ho-mun and Joan Y.H. Leung, “Education.” 145 Klinger, “Mass Camp,” p. 139. 146 Gehring, Parody as Film Genre, p. 18. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., p. 22. 149 Ibid. 150 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, pp. 123-148 (p. 132). 151 Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, p. 257.

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(Lo Wei, 1967), Black Falcon (Tai Kao Mei, 1967), and Angel Strikes Again (Lo Wei, 1968).152 Dozens of Bond-inspired Cantonese films were likewise made in the later 1960s, starting with two hits, The Black Rose (Chor Yuen, 1965) and Girl Spy 001 (Huang Cho-han, 1965).153 While the Mandarin-language films are generally high-budget productions, transnational in outlook,154 their Cantonese counterparts are mostly B-movies with a local sensibility (albeit often mixed with a longing for a middle-class, “Western” lifestyle).155 Whereas the Mandarin series features both male and female special agents onscreen,156 the Cantonese series mostly features actresses, particularly Chan Po-chu and Josephine Siao. As one of Chan’s star vehicles is indeed entitled Lady Bond (Mok Hong-si, 1966), film scholar Sam Ho has wittily dubbed this Cantonese corpus the “Jane Bond” films.157 Even the Mandarin films, generally straight imitations of the Bond films, have a tendency toward camp with their off-the-wall plots, gadgets, and sexy women, but the most open to camp appreciation are the Cantonese Jane Bond films. On top of the overblown plots and the “pure glee” of their gadgets,158 the Jane Bond heroines always and effortlessly outwit and defeat men, attired, like a Batman or Cat-woman, in black tights and balaclavas when they strike. Through the years, the series’ relatively crude effects technology, too, has increasingly attracted camp appreciation, while a cult following has gradually emerged around Jane Bond classics like The Black Rose, Lady Bond, and The Maiden Thief (Chor Yuen, 1967). As Stephen Teo observes, “The Black Rose is the kind of cult film that stimulates caricatures and parodies.”159 I will discuss some of these parodies later in the chapter. 152 Ng Ho (ed.), Disan leixing dianying (The Alternative Cult Films), pp. 1-32. 153 Sam Ho, “Licensed to Kick Men: The Jane Bond Films,” p. 40. 154 This Mandarin-language series usually includes international characters and settings, and their stories evolve around transnational criminal plots. It should also be noted that this series by Shaw Brothers was usually shot in three versions. Other than in Chinese, it was also adapted into Filipino and Malaysian versions, substituting the lead stars with the locals while maintaining the rest of the cast and crew of the Chinese version. See Ng, Di san leixing dianying, pp. 1-4. 155 Ho, “Licensed to Kick Men,” p. 43. 156 Among the actors known for their Bond-type leading roles include Paul Chang (Zhang Chong), Tang Ching, Wang Hsia, and Jimmy Wang (Wang Yu). Among the most popular actresses for such roles include Lily Ho, Fanny Fan (Fan Lai), Tina Chin (Chin Fei), and Cheng Pei-pei. 157 Ho, “Licensed to Kick Men,” pp. 40-46. 158 Ibid., p. 43. 159 Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, p. 56.

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Mass Camp Impulse160 in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema Having traced a history of mass camp sensibility in modern Hong Kong, in this next section I would like to examine the way mass camp sensibility has at once informed, and been informed by Hong Kong mainstream cinema. My examination here is not exhaustive, but rather highlights a number of mass camp trends in contemporary Hong Kong cinema. In particular, I analyze the quintessential Hui Brothers comedy, kung fu comedy and Hong Kong New Wave, and finally the Hong Kong nostalgia film of the 1980s and 1990s. Importantly, I will highlight the expanding presence of gender parody, which, despite the waning influence of Chinese opera and operatic gender reversals since the late 1960s, has become part and parcel of the deepening mass camp impulse in contemporary Hong Kong cinema. a) Hui Brothers Comedy and Mass Camp Impulse The central figure of the Hui Brothers comedies is Michael Hui. His career began in 1968, as host of a popular game show on TVB. In 1971 Hui teamed up with his younger brother, Sam, for a new program, Hui Brothers Show (1971-1973).161 Modeled after American sketch comedy Laugh-In (a.k.a. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, 1968-1973, NBC), Hui Brothers Show featured comedy gags, punch-lines, and songs from Sam.162 The show became tremendously popular. Michael Hui’s performance also caught the attention of film director Li Han-hsiang, who invited him to star in four films for Shaw Brothers, before the Huis founded their own production company in 1974 – Hui Brothers Company – and signed a co-production deal with Golden Harvest, Shaw Brothers’ chief competitor at the time. Starting with Games Gamblers Play (1974), Michael Hui wrote and directed a series of films starring himself, Sam, and oftentimes their third brother, Ricky.163 All were 160 My use of the word of “impulse” here echoes the “documentary impulse” (as coined by Yomi Braester and Augusta Palmer) and the “realist impulse” (identified by Jason McGrath) in the context of Chinese cinema, as well as Kathryn Hume’s seminal discussion of fantasy and mimesis as two principal impulses of Western literature. See Braester, “Tracing the City’s Scars”; Palmer, “Scaling the Skyscraper”; McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke”; Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis. 161 For short biographies of Michael Hui and Sam Hui, see Po and Lau (eds.), Golden Harvest, pp. 173-176. 162 Liu Tian-ci, Tifang dianshi (Beware of television), p. 72; Zhong Bao-xian, Xianggang yingshiye bainian, p. 249. 163 In fact, there are four Hui brothers. Michael is the eldest, Sam the youngest; the second eldest brother (Xu Guan-wu in pinyin) was once a cinematographer, but later became a businessman.

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shot in the Cantonese language, following the record-breaking 1973 success of a Cantonese-language film comedy, The House of 72 Tenants. Unlike The House, the Hui Brothers comedies have modern settings and present satires of contemporary Hong Kong. According to Pak Tong Cheuk, the Hui Brothers comedies had a defining impact on the development of “compacted comedies” from the 1970s.164 As Sek Kai points out, however, they are also inevitably blemished by their reliance on trivial antics and funny dialogues, as opposed to cinematic style.165 Although The Private Eyes (1976) marks the brothers’ effort to “add a more physical nature” to their work (to enhance its international appeal),166 a large portion of the humor remains “verbal and situational.”167 Compared with the classic narrative formula, which highlights character motivation and the resolution of conflict, a Hui Brothers comedy may also appear to lack a clear narrative leading to a tight closure. The quintessential Hui Brothers comedy reflects the artists’ early experience in television, particularly their affinities with the sketch comedy.168 Structurally, the films rely on sketches, comic gestures, and verbal jousting, even at the expense of narrative structure. Take Games Gamblers Play, for example. The film opens on Michael Hui, playing incarcerated con man Wen, gambling with green peas in soup and tricking his inmate out of his lunch. The opening credits show cartoon poultry gambling, accompanied by the theme song (written and performed by Sam Hui).169 The action then moves to a casino, where Jie (Sam Hui) suffers bad luck at the roulette table and slot machines. Worse, he is caught red-handed stealing the bets previously stolen by a dealer, and ends up sharing a cell with Wen. The two gamblers strike up a friendship, and on their release, they hustle, trick, and cheat their way into big money. They eventually become involved in a gambling scam that ignites the wrath of a bookie, who sends his henchmen after Wen; the film culminates in a climactic chase through a casino. The titular “games” range from betting on food or cigarettes in jail, to casino gambling, to mahjong or cards, to horse or dog races. We follow Wen and Jie as they meander through these various games, meeting other characters such as Wen’s wife (Luo Lan), his extramarital love interest (Ding Pei), and his younger sister (Lu You-hui), with whom Jie develops a relationship. Not 164 Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema, p. 45. 165 Sek Kai, Sek Kai ying hua ji 6, pp. 168, 174 (originally published August 10, 1978 and February 3, 1981, respectively). 166 Michael Hui, “Meiyou qianyu queyou qian le changyue de ganjue,” p. 176. 167 Logan, Hong Kong Action Cinema, p. 143. 168 Earnest Chan, “Mischievous Urban Fantasia,” p. 56. 169 Wu Jun-xiong, Ci shi ci chu: Xu Guanjie (Here and now: Sam Hui), pp. 67-71.

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every episode is vital to the film’s narrative progress (a five-minute Ricky Hui cameo showing a card-game-turned-fight is a case in point). Moreover, other than being inveterate gamblers who love money (as most people do), the protagonists have little clear motivation, and there is little early conflict. The film therefore appears to be loosely structured, even fragmented – it is no exaggeration to describe Games as mostly “a succession of skits,”170 or as Stephen Teo succinctly puts it, “episodic, like a TV sitcom.”171 Interestingly, about halfway into the film there is a sequence satirizing the television quiz show. “Up and Down,” hosted by Huang Bu-wen (James Wong/Huang Zhan), features a device that elevates contestants giving correct answers and lowers those who are incorrect into a water tank containing (toothless) crocodiles. Wen is one of the three contestants, while Jie, in the audience, attempts to pass him signals. Nevertheless, things are not going well until the host asks questions about gambling. Notably, this episode is a nod to both Michael Hui’s own experience as a game show host and television’s influence on the Hui Brothers comedy. It also exposes the artifice of television, particularly the conditioning of the audiences’ seemingly spontaneous reactions, and also demystifies the television apparatus itself. A shot showing a sign flashing “Please Applaud” becomes a running joke. When an unattractive female presenter announces the equally unappealing awards for the show’s losers, the audience can barely hide their disappointment, but nonetheless applaud, as instructed by the flashing sign. At the commercial break (with more enthusiastic applause requested), a woman in the audience waves and gesticulates at the camera, while her pal reminds her, “Stop that, the camera is shooting us.” The woman replies, “I know. I want to notify my family that I won’t have dinner with them.” As the camera zooms out, the image of the waving woman is now framed through a TV set. We thus see a filmic image that is at once mediated by television and marked by a direct address to its film/television audiences; it also shows Michael Hui’s heightened self-awareness in handling this cross-fertilization of different media. This self-awareness likewise plays out in its casting. As a character actor, Michael Hui is best known for his deadpan comic delivery of the Hong Kong Everyman, while Sam Hui – a sleek pop singer since the 1960s172 – always 170 See Dannen and Long, Hong Kong Babylon, p. 285. 171 Teo, Hong Kong Cinema, p. 141. 172 Li Xin-jia, “Track 3: Sam Hui@The Lotus,” in Gangshi xiyang feng (Hong Kong-style western music), pp. 76-87. For an account of Sam Hui’s singing career in the 1970s and its legacy, see Huang Zhi-hua, Qingmi yueyu ge (Mesmerizing Cantonese songs), pp. 127-140.

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embodies youth and stamina.173 In Games, “Wen” even shares the second character of Michael Hui’s given name in Chinese, Guan-wen. Likewise, “Jie” echoes Sam Hui (whose f irst name in Chinese is Guan-jie), Wen’s extramarital paramour “Peipei” is portrayed by Ding Pei, and quiz show host “Huang Bu-wen” virtually shares actor James Wong’s family name. Thus, local audiences are highly aware of watching the actors performing, as opposed to gaining deeper empathy with the characters: the film unapologetically cashes in on its personalities, whose talent or expertise is acknowledged not only in cinema but in other media as well. Michael Hui represents the crossover phenomena par excellence, while Lu You-hui, who plays Wen’s sister, originally trained for television acting and rose to stardom in TVB’s romantic dramas. James Wong had been nicknamed “TV Prince” for his award-winning hosting, and by the mid-1970s had already been a successful commercial pitchman, songwriter, and columnist. His character’s first name – “Bu-wen” – was even borrowed from his (in)famous column “Bu-wen” (literally “indecency”) in Ming Po Weekly.174 Sam Hui was renowned not only for Hui Brothers Show but as a popular singer in his own right, and his vocals also became a trademark of Hui Brothers comedies (until Sam left the team in 1982). For years Sam Hui’s Canto-pop albums and Hui Brothers comedies even shared the same titles, supporting each other’s prodigious commercial success. Hui Brothers comedies, in short, represented the convergence of film, television, and pop music. Openly capitalizing on this media integration, they comprised the bedrock of the emerging Canto-pop culture in 1970s Hong Kong.175 b) Gender Parody in Mass Camp Alongside Hui comedies, other camp expressions played with gender and sexuality. However, these gender-oriented camp expressions in mass media, 173 Ricky Hui (1946-2011) usually plays the one suffering from bad luck, and not only in Hui Brothers comedies. In Hong Kong’s top box-office hit of 1977, Money Crazy (John Woo), his star status was confirmed playing one of two hapless hustlers (alongside Richard Ng) who try to help a young woman (Zhao Yazhi) and her aging uncle recover some diamonds from a dirty businessman. 174 Starting from 1973, the column featured witty, cynical and often “indecent” remarks on aspects of human relationships and Hong Kong society. A collection of these short essays, titled Bu-Wen Ji (Collection of indecent essays), had enjoyed over sixty prints over two decades since 1983. 175 For an account of the rise of Cantopop music and its cultural significance in the wake of its perceived disappearance by the new millennium, see Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet, Sonic Multiplicities. A detailed, chronological account is provided by Yiu-wai Chu in Hong Kong Cantopop.

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I contend, are rarely aligned with political progressiveness. More often, they are entangled in a web of ambiguous – if not tangibly conservative – valences, whose ultimate purposes are generally laughter, consumerism, and entertainment. Three episodes from Games Gamblers Play epitomize this attitude toward homosexuality, androgyny, and gender-bending imagery. In the opening sequence, for instance, while betting on lunch, Wen distracts his rival from his cheating by gossiping about two other inmates’ homosexual behavior. The more effeminate is pejoratively labeled a “bottom” – a homophobic joke. Later, when Wen and Jie make a fortune through fraudulent gambling, an Italian dressmaker visits Wen’s wife, while Wen’s younger sister and Jie shop for ready-to-wear. Wen’s wife chooses to show her increased wealth and social status by wearing tailor-made European-style attire, while the young couple returns with typical 1970s accessories: glossy white platform shoes, tight bell bottom jeans, studded vests, and so on. The couple de facto wears identical accoutrements: as Wen’s sister enthusiastically explains, they wear “unisex” clothes. There is a gender-bending aspect to their appearance, while a sense of gender-oriented camp humor reverberates through Wen’s accompanying protest. Notably, though the previous episode associates a gender-bending image with blatant homophobia, this androgynous “unisex” imagery is perceived not so much as a threat to the establishment as something enjoyable and profitable: it is chic, a product of popular culture and the fashion industry. Another camp episode involves the aforementioned quiz show. The female presenter moves her mouth in an exaggerated manner, exposing a missing front tooth, her imperfect image inviting mockery. Her image also toys with gender binaries by juxtaposing her feminine appearance with a dubbed, echoing male bass voice. This gag is facilitated by – if not directly inspired by – the dubbing technique that fostered local television viewers’ camp appreciation. These three episodes from Games represent three archetypal scenarios: the homophobic jest combined with gender-bending imagery, the androgynous image associated with the “unisex” trope, and gender-bending for mass entertainment. Although these scenarios sometimes overlap, they reflect different principles: mockery, consumerism, and entertainment, respectively. The laughter evoked through the first scenario is generally marked by derision, while that of the third scenario appears less acerbic (though no less susceptible to patriarchal and homophobic ideologies, as in the larger entertainment industry). Whereas jests at gay people’s expense continued into the 1980s and onward, the androgynous scenario underwent changes during the same period (see below). While the first

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scenario usually takes the form of brief skits or jokes, the third scenario proves rather more malleable as an expressive format: it appears as isolated acts or fully-developed characters, partially or fully integrated into the storyline. We can discern the evolution of gender-bending for entertainment value in later Hui comedies. In The Last Message (1975), for example, a janitor (Michael Hui) and a nurse (Sam Hui) in a mental institution hear a dying patient’s “last message” about an enigmatic “princess” and deduce the existence of an abundant treasure. Searching for the “princess,” they encounter a string of people, one of whom is a male cross-dresser. Supposedly an erotic escort, this soft-spoken transvestite claims that although he enjoys being a “princess,” he can also be a “prince” on demand. In The Contract (1978), Michael Hui portrays a neglected contract performer at a television station. He sees his long-awaited opportunity at another station, but is not allowed out of his current contract. Determined, therefore, to steal the document, he sneaks into the company building, disguised as a woman to conceal his identity. Wearing a green dress and high heels, plus a wig and a silk scarf, Michael Hui’s unfeminine figure, voice and body language produce a sense of affected uneasiness that paradoxically erodes the gender divide. This sense of campy awkwardness is only magnified when Michael Hui, as a physically imposing “woman,” is incongruously paired with a shorter and seemingly debilitated Ricky Hui. Michael Hui delivers another gender-bending performance in Happy Ding Dong (1986), inspired by Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959). Like the Tony Curtis character in the latter, Michael Hui plays a musician who, having witnessed a gangland shooting, must elude the gangsters. Disguised as a woman, he joins a girls’ band that tours Southeast Asia. In Thailand, while “she” is courted by a millionaire (Bill Tung), the protagonist also impersonates that millionaire, pursuing the band’s beautiful lead singer (Cherie Chung/Zhong Chuhong). The last two thirds of Happy combines the gangsters’ chase and the protagonist switching between different genders and classes. As in Contract, Michael Hui’s female impersonation here is easily recognizable and easily reads as camp, as does the odd coupling of this tall woman and her short stocky suitor. While the gender-bending expression in Games Gamblers Play occupies only a memorable yet brief moment (the incongruous dubbing), this trope expands into a whole scene in The Last Message and a protracted sequence in The Contract. While Games features the more delicate device of the gendered sound-image discrepancy, the gender-bending expression in Last Message takes the form of in-your-face drag performances. Additionally,

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while the drag performer in Last Message is an unidentified character, in Contract the protagonist in drag is Michael Hui himself. In Happy Ding Dong in particular, not only is the cross-dressing extended to a lengthy performance from the lead actor, but it is strategically integrated into the narrative, as Hui’s drag performance corresponds to one deployed in the opening robbery sequence. Cross-dressing, in other words, emerges as a main theme and a major attraction of Happy Ding Dong, the high-point of gender-oriented camp expression in Hui comedies. From Games Gamblers Play to Happy Ding Dong, the expansion of gender-bending expression in Hui-styled comedy, I argue, also designates the re-emergence and growth of gender parody in Hong Kong’s reorganized film industry, where the receding influence of Chinese opera was supplemented with the waxing puissance of mass camp impulse. It is worth mentioning that as the Michael Hui character in Happy tries to merge himself into a girls’ band, his female impersonation must be simultaneously configured to match the socio-economic class of the troupe. It is not only his scarcely feminine build, voice, and body language that marks his femininity as “unnatural” and his looks as campy, but his sartorial style. The character tends to overdress his female double: a sense of class-sanctioned pretentiousness and exaggeration underscores the artifice and performative nature of this “woman,” adding a camp flavor to her image. One of Hui’s subsequent drag performance shows yet another dimension: a parodic take on ethnicity. In Chicken and Duck Talk (Clifton Ko, 1988), Hui is the owner of an old-fashioned eatery that specializes in Cantonese-style roast duck, whose business has recently been affected by a nearby fast food restaurant selling fried chicken. Attempting to pry into the business secrets of his opponent, the restaurateur masquerades as a middle-aged woman of Indian descent. Wearing a green sari, Hui tints his skin dark, adopts and accent, and even – diegetically at least – adds a peculiar “odor” to his impersonation. Here the stereotypical attributes of Indian women code Michael Hui’s performance as exotic and excessive, fortifying the incongruity of Hui’s gender-bending. This outrageous double play on gender and ethnicity is used to great effect to solicit camp appreciation from the mass audience. Meanwhile, the androgynous or unisex concept, in retrospect, had a peculiar impact on Hong Kong women both on and off screen176 (androgyny for men was more confined to stage personae, as exemplified by three 176 Xuan Pei-pei, “Shizhuang yu Xianggang xin nüxing xingxiang” (Fashion and the new images of Hong Kong women); Li Jian-hui, “The Age of New Androgyny.”

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gay-identifying Canto-pop performers: Roman Tam from the late 1970s,177 and Anthony Wong 178 and Leslie Cheung from the mid-to-late 1980s).179 With gender-neutral apparel becoming a staple of women’s clothing in the 1970s,180 consumerism was inflected with certain feminist overtones by way of what Judith Halberstam calls “tomboyism.”181 Halberstam refers to tomboyism as a culture from the 1970s and 1980s that grew out of feminism, gay liberation, and the punk culture, which contributed to the expansion of the tomboy film and the popularity of tomboyish attire among women. By donning tomboyish or gender-neutral apparel, many young women, whether or not they identified as lesbians, meant to avoid the “strictures of femininity that bound girlhood to […] domesticity.”182 Likewise, through unconventional styles of dress, some young women in Hong Kong also empowered themselves amid the antiestablishment counterculture that tended to marginalize gender/sexuality issues in various social activisms. To some degree, the tension between individual women and societal mores informed the creation of “Lin Ya-zhen,” an androgynous female character who has become iconic in Hong Kong’s mass media since the late 1970s. Among Lin Ya-zhen’s various media incarnations are a 13-episode 177 Roman Tam (1945-2002) was known for his audacious experiments in music, fashion, and stage performance, once dressing as Grace Jones for a 1979 photo shoot. See Bi Di, “Zhongjian luxian de Luo Wen” (In-between-ness of Roman Tam). On Tam as a pioneer of the “concept album” in Hong Kong, see Huang Xia-bo, Manyou bashi niandai (Roaming the 1980s). On his androgynous style and legacy, see Edward Lam, Dengdai Xianggang (Waiting for Hong Kong), pp. 6-10, 199. 178 Anthony Wong was part of the Cantopop duo “Tat Ming Pair” (Da-Ming Yipai), influenced by the Pet Shop Boys. In the 1980s Wong, “appearing often with his signature long hair and being soft-spoken in a way that can be read as feminine masculinity,” challenged the public music scene with his experimental performance and “a queer sensibility.” Tang, “An Unruly Death,” p. 600. Wong off icially came out as gay in April 2012 and has since participated in various political movements, including the Umbrella Movement in late 2014. Anthony Wong and outspoken lesbian pop icon Denise Ho comprise an important narrative in Evans Chan’s documentary Raise the Umbrellas (2017). On the tension between the Umbrella Movement and local tongzhi activism, see Cho, Kam, and Lai, “Qianxinian hou de Xianggang tongzhi yundong tuxiang” (Picturing tongzhi movement in Hong Kong in the new millennium), pp. 127-129. 179 See Luo Feng. Jinse de hudie (Butterfly of forbidden colors). For critic Pan Guo-ling, Anthony Wong, and Leslie Cheung are in the “pantheon” of camp personalities, while George Lam and Jay Chou represent a cool aesthetic at the other end of the spectrum. See Pan, Qige fengying (Seven seals), p. 163. 180 Previously, Marilyn Palmer had been popular on the local pop scene, known for her genderneutral image throughout the 1960s. Li Xin-jia “Track 18: Marilyn Palmer,” in Gangshi xiyang feng, pp. 182-185. 181 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, pp. 5-9. 182 Halberstam, “Oh Bondage Up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tomboy,” p. 154.

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television series It’s Not So Simple (TVB, 1977), and a number of feature films, including Plain Jane to the Rescue (John Woo, 1982). Performed and partially conceived by renowned actress Josephine Siao (Xiao Fang-fang), Lin Ya-zhen is, on the one hand, characterized by clumsy behavior and androgynous looks. Wearing a bowl-cut hairstyle, rounded eyeglasses with thick Coke-bottle lenses, an oversized button-down plaid shirt and “unisex” bell-bottom jeans, Lin is at once desexualized and de-feminized. At the same time, with her doctoral degree in mathematics from America, she is equipped with intelligence and a strong social consciousness. Somewhat paradoxically, her androgynous and desexualized looks, while inviting mockery, also confer on Lin a certain distance from the general public, allowing her “to be a disinterested observer and critic of the society” and “the right to utilize her knowledge,” to quote Luo Feng.183 Furthermore, as Luo notes, a dialectic factor was discernable in this Siao/Lin conglomeration from early on.184 When a girlish Siao (reflecting her previous screen persona) was edited to appear alongside a tomboyish Lin, for instance, the two served to comment on each other’s authenticity and gender-oriented performativity. Not least because of this enhanced self-consciousness, Lin Ya-zhen’s gender ambivalence, I suggest, is not so much the butt of the joke as a strategic invitation to the audience to laugh. As self-parody, it satirizes the polarized gender binaries now colliding in this comic figure. While there is a feminist undertone in this reflexive play on gender conventions, a sense of camp humor also stems from this discordant blending of gender codes. Although Lin Ya-zhen’s campy androgyny invokes the unisex concept, it notably redirects the consumerist fashion proclivity toward the mass entertainment function that characterizes the third trend of gender-oriented mass camp expressions. This line of camp expression was later a feature of the popular Her Fatal Ways series (Alfred Cheung, 1990-1994), featuring actress Carol Cheng (Zheng Yu-ling) providing a comic rendition of Chinese “cousin” Zheng Shuo-nan,185 a Mainland public security officer working with Hong Kong’s police force. As the name suggests, “Zheng Shuo-nan” is partly animated by a reflexive play on Carol Cheng’s prior screen persona (characterized by her urbane delicacy) and reinforced by the shared surname; the given name Shuo-nan – literally, “burly man” – is a vivid evocation of the character’s 183 Luo Feng, “Cong yunu dao Tomboy,” Youli se’xiang, pp. 165, 171. 184 Ibid., p. 178. 185 In the 1980s and 1990s “cousin” was a term commonly used in Hong Kong to refer to those from Mainland China.

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gender-bending. However, what marks Zheng Shuo-nan’s femininity as “off” and her looks as camp in contemporary Hong Kong is not so much a discordant blending of gender codes newly opened up for reinterpretation (as in “Lin Ya-zhen”) as an ironic juxtaposition of gender norms developed from disparate social systems. That is, Zheng Shuo-nan’s “de-feminized” looks, recalling an earlier socialist China, are hackneyed and quaintly facetious in modern capitalist Hong Kong. Despite her unflattering campy looks, Zheng Shuo-nan, like Lin Ya-zhen, has intelligence and courage, and she echoes Lin Ya-zhen as well in her relative distance from consumerist fashion, as opposed to mass entertainment. However, while Lin Ya-zhen’s androgynous image has a certain feminist ramification along with its mass entertainment function, Zheng Shou-nan’s campy, entertaining characterization is primarily negotiating a somewhat contradictory yet amply amicable allegory for Hong Kong’s political situation, overshadowed by the recent 1989 Tiananmen Square incident and the looming 1997 Handover. The zenith of gender-oriented mass camp in Hong Kong cinema arguably arrived with “Asia the Invincible,” the central character of martial arts blockbuster Swordsman II (Ching Siu-tung, 1992), produced by Tsui Hark and loosely based upon Jin Yong’s novel.186 The story takes place hundreds of years ago in a world populated by an assortment of martial arts characters. Asia (Brigitte Lin) was previously a male martial artist of the Sun-Moon Sect of the Miao tribe, who castrated himself in order to master the “invincible” skills contained in the sacred Sunflower Scripture. Now an androgyne on her way to a full sex change, Asia instigates the Miaos, whose chief she has imprisoned, and recruits Japanese mercenaries in an attempt to overthrow the Chinese emperor and, eventually, dominate the world. However, the daughter of the incarcerated Miao chief, Ren Ying-ying (Rosamund Kwan), mobilizes loyalists to rescue her father. Along comes the hero Linghu Chong (Jet Li), who is seduced by Asia’s beauty during a lakeside encounter. Not knowing Asia’s real identity, Linghu is even fooled by a stand-in – Asia’s female lover – into believing that he is making love to Asia. In the climactic battle, Asia reveals her love for Linghu by holding back from the fatal stroke; she is also severely injured. While Asia falls off a cliff to her death, Linghu survives, perplexed and brokenhearted. As Michael Lam points out in his cover story on Brigitte Lin for Film Biweekly,187 the role of Asia is “character186 In Jin Yong’s serialized novel, Asia the Invincible only appears in the last chapter and is soon killed off. 187 Yuxian Youzi (a.k.a. Michael Lam), “Nushen jieban ren Lin Qingxia” (Goddess successor Brigitte Lin).

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ized by melancholic romanticism and Camp, which is a tailor-made dress for a Goddess. As a man who doesn’t look like a man but loves men, he is a woman on vacation in a straight world.”188 Such a mesmerizing, androgynous character, as Lam notes, immediately won Lin “a gay following” and helped her ascend to the throne of “Goddess.” In terms of androgynous imagery, both “Asia the Invincible” and Linghu’s female fellow disciple, Kiddo (Michelle Ruis), deserve our attention. Posing as Linghu’s sidekick, Kiddo dresses as a boy, traversing the world of martial arts (“jianghu”: see Chapter 1 for its intersection with queer diaspora). For female martial artists, however, cross-dressing is primarily for the convenience of travel and action in a world dominated by male martial artists and men in general. It is a convention of the martial arts genre,189 as we see with Cheng Pei-pei in Come Drink with Me (1966), Shangguan Lingfeng in Dragon Gate Inn (1967), and Xu Feng in A Touch of Zen (1971). More recently, Zhang Ziyi’s transvestism in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2001) and House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, 2004) pays tribute to this tradition.190 In Swordsman II, while Kiddo continues the convention, Asia takes a step away from it. Unlike Kiddo, who is undoubtedly a woman in a man’s guise, for the most part Asia is literally an androgyne undergoing a transformation from male to female. Notably, this physical transformation is also represented through dubbing: during the first two thirds of the film Asia is assigned a male voice, which subsequently gives way to Brigitte Lin’s original voice. Watching Brigitte Lin playing Asia therefore involves an intricate mode of spectatorship. On the diegetic level, a dubbed male voice seems to properly indicate Asia’s gender status, which remains predominantly male. On the non-diegetic level, however, the audiences must simultaneously reconcile the somewhat divergent perceptions regarding Asia’s gender identity mediated by Lin’s eminent femininity, Asia’s androgynous looks, and the film’s imposed male voice.191 To a large degree, it is through these androgynous and gender-bending attributes that the audiences’ camp responses to Asia’s image emerge.192 188 Ibid., p. 38. 189 Chao, Shi-Yan. “Xiong tu jiao pushuo, ci tu yan mili: chutan huayu dianying zhong de banzhuang wenhua” (A preliminary study of cross-dressing culture in Chinese cinema). 190 For a discussion of the “martial heroine” subgenre in Shanghai in the 1920s and early 1930s, see Zhang Zhen, “Bodies in the Air,” pp. 43-60, esp. pp. 52-55. 191 For Helen Leung, the casting of Brigitte Lin as Asia “actually honors certain aspects of transsexual subjectivity because the audience’s non-diegetic recognition of Lin as a beautiful woman […] matches the diegetic ambition of the character.” See Helen Hok-sze Leung, “Trans on Screen,” p. 188. 192 For a seminal study of Brigitte Lin’s star persona and gay following, see Tony Williams, “Brigitte Lin Ching Hsia.”

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c) Mass Camp and Hong Kong New Wave On the other hand, the camp effect of Asia’s image should be assessed along with the hyperbolic narrative and spectacular stylistics of the whole film. There is a sense of exaggeration in the adroit mixture of generic elements from martial arts, romance, comedy, horror, suspense, and manga (Japanese comic strips), accompanied by elaborate choreography, wire-enhanced action, intricate camerawork, a fast and kinetic style of editing, and dazzling special effects. Of course, this stylistic exuberance would not be possible without the upgraded professionalism and greater technologies brought to the Hong Kong film industry by the New Wave filmmakers,193 among whom Tsui Hark proved to be the most influential. From the late 1970s into the 1980s, New Wave filmmakers struck a new path for Hong Kong cinema which, as Augusta Palmer puts it, was characterized by its “technical innovation, artistic experimentation, reinvention of popular stories and genres, engagement with contemporary social issues, and exploration of Hong Kong culture (both contemporary and historical).”194 Hector Rodriguez sees the connections between this New Wave cinema and the discursive formation of a local “film culture field” taking shape during the 1960s and 1970s.195 This emerging critical community equipped New Wave filmmakers with, among other things, the “ethical conception of authorship.”196 A principal challenge for many new directors, then, was to adapt existing commercial genres to serve their individual concerns of originality and seriousness.197 Meanwhile, this genre reinvention, along with the innovative cinematic techniques of the New Wave, allowed directors to pursue a novel and cosmopolitan look in their works. With a heightened consciousness of form and a higher standard of cinematic techniques, New Wave directors therefore contributed to the ironic attitude and stylistic exuberance that resonated with the camp impulses emerging in Hong Kong popular culture. Interestingly enough, the genre reinvention in the early New Wave cinema also spawned gender-oriented camp expressions. For instance, in his second feature We Are Going to Eat You (1980), Tsui Hark blends the comedy and horror of Hollywood’s zombie and slasher movies into “an otherwise ‘typical’ 193 Teo, Hong Kong Cinema, p. 149. 194 Palmer, “Border Crossing,” p. 52. 195 Rodriguez, “The Emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave.” 196 Ibid., p. 63. 197 Ibid., p. 64.

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kung fu plot that was, in fact, Tsui’s metaphorical projection of the Cultural Revolution.”198 In this cannibalistic kung fu thriller, an unusually tall man199 impersonates an ingénue who wears very heavy makeup and behaves like an innocent “little” girl. The outlandishness of this camp figure informs the sequence where the valiant male protagonist (Tsui Siu-keung) has a narrow escape from being “raped” by this cross-dressed giant little girl. In Ann Hui’s The Secret (1979), an experimental thriller with multiple viewpoints, Tsui Siu-keung playing a mentally unstable person is first seen by police while wearing red women’s clothing. In her second feature, The Spooky Bunch (1980), Hui deftly integrates comedy into a ghost story unfolding around an opera troupe. The director acknowledges that the ghosts “ended up looking camp anyway,”200 but some gender-inflected camp moments also arise when a mischievous female ghost possesses the troupe’s lead actor. The actor’s voice and behavior transform into those of a woman, the scene’s camp humor stemming from the ironic juxtaposition of masculinity and femininity, evoking the transsexual trope “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” This leads to a homoerotic moment when the “possessed” actor kisses the cheek of the leading lady (Josephine Siao), so that a girl’s agency is behind a man’s kiss of another girl. Taking New Wave beyond camp moments and camp figures, Kirk Wong and Alex Cheung came up with Health Warning (a.k.a. Flash Future Kung Fu, 1983) and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (1983), both of which epitomize mass camp in an even more comprehensive manner. A dystopian sci-fi/kung fu hybrid set in the future, Kirk Wong’s Health Warning is highly stylized and, as Evans Chan notes, characterized by “exaggeration, absurdity, and promiscuity,” possibly influenced by Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), and Pink Floyd: The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982). Infused with an atmosphere of fascist dystopia and punk aestheticism, the film also does not lack gender nonconformist characters: it is, for Chan, a “formal debut on local screens of camp taste through MTV style.”201 It is worth noting that Chan’s review of Health Warning was partly informed by Susan Sontag’s article “Fascinating Fascism,” which hints at a connection between camp and fascism, and that Chan’s review actually ran 198 Law, “An Overview of Hong Kong’s New Wave Cinema,” p. 47. 199 The actor is named Xiao Jin, as mentioned by Sek Kai in his review of this film. In Sek Kai, Xianggang dianying xin langchou, p. 103 (originally published in Mingbao wanbao, April 4, 1980). 200 Ann Hui, interviewed by John Shum Kin-fung. “Xu An-hua han Hao Wei tan Zhuangdao Zheng ji qita” (Ann Hui talks to City Magazine about Spooky Bunch and others), p. 64. 201 Evans Yiu Shing Chan, “Camp Taste hua leitai.”

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alongside his Chinese translation of Sontag’s piece,202 with the effect that in the following months it influenced several other critics.203 Around the same time, Alex Cheung, having injected the gangster film with moral ambiguity to virtually reinvent the genre in his first two features, released Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, a hyperbolic sci-fi spoof that represents mass camp in an organic manner. The plot revolves around disaffected detective Eden (Yi Lei), who takes one last case, helping beautiful Li Tianzhen (Cherie Chung) untangle the mystery of an alien abduction that has resulted in Li’s defloration and sabotaged her marriage into a wealthy family. Throughout the film Li’s character overtly plays on the dumb blonde stereotype (à la Marilyn Monroe), while Eden’s inept assistant parodies the astute lieutenant from popular television series Columbo.204 Drawing on Close Encounter of the Third Kind (1977), Star Wars (1977) and E.T. (1982), this sci-fi spoof also interweaves its detective narrative with stylistic features from diverse genres, including musical, horror (along with the motifs of gothic castle, mad scientist, and werewolf), slapstick comedy, romance, martial arts (including both wuxia swordplay and fist-fighting kung fu), car stunts, music videos, TV news, TV commercials, animation, comic strips, and Chinese revolutionary drama. The film’s intertextual references also include the billowing-skirt scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955), the fast-motion wideangle rape scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971), the hysterical woman facing a break-in from The Shining (1980), the half-naked protagonist’s gunplay in Taxi Driver (1976), the chaotic wedding from The Graduate (1967), pastiches of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jiang Qing, and Leonid Brezhnev, references to Sherlock Holmes, Sophia Loren, Barbra Streisand, and Charlie’s Angels, and a curious cameo from Tsui Hark in his trademark sunglasses. Not least because of such genre blending and intertextual send-ups, Twinkle’s narrative is, moreover, characterized by an episodic structure, reinforced by such spectacular, show-stopping vignettes as UFO encounters, song-and-dance 202 Evans Chan, “Miren faxisi” (Fascinating Fascism). 203 For instance, Law Kar and Li Cheuk-to both resorted to the term “camp” in their subsequent discussions of Health Warning, even though they disagreed upon the issue of camp aesthetic vis-à-vis the filmmaker’s social positioning. See Mai Ke (Michael Lam), “83 dianying huigu” (An overview of films from 1983), p. 16. Around the same time, Stephen Teo and Chen Hui-yang used the term “camp” in their writings on early Chinese cinema. See Stephen Teo, “Zaoqi Zhongguo dianying yinxiang ji” (Impression on early Chinese cinema), pp. 23, 24. Chen Hui-yang, “Maxu Weibang zuopin xuanping” (Remarks on selected works by Maxu Weibang), p. 29. Meanwhile, Evans Chan himself used the term “camp” in yet another piece to address James Dean’s genderambivalent screen persona. See Chan, “Huanmiu chengzhang” (Absurd coming-of-age), p. 37. 204 Lt. Columbo was played by Peter Falk. The show was originally aired on NBC during 1971 and 1978.

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numbers, and car crashes. Especially outrageous is the sequence where Eden and Columbo, fully committing to their investigation, both cross-dress as women to wait at the location of the alleged alien abduction. A rounded, gigantic spaceship indeed appears. When Eden is forcefully sucked into the capsule, he is notified that he has been chosen for alien reproduction. With “her” body examination passed and “virginity” verified, Eden then encounters “Darth Vader.” Mistaking the latter for a real “E.T.” (as he calls it), Eden – still in drag – pulls out his pistol and shoots. In the duel that follows, “lightsabers” are the primary weapons. When Eden’s lightsaber breaks in half, he uses it the way Bruce Lee uses nunchucks. When Eden finally loses his weapon and is cornered, he strips off all his feminine accessories, fighting back in a desperate manner recalling Jackie Chan in the finale of The Young Master (1980). Eventually, “Darth Vader” is defeated and unmasked as a lusty mad scientist. Through this highly entertaining climactic segment, gender parody merges with genre blending, underlining the film’s hyperbole, intertextuality, pastiche, and spoof – in short, its nature as quintessential mass camp. While early Hong Kong New Wave was closely affiliated with independent filmmaking,205 Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, a high-budget extravaganza produced by Shaw Brothers, marked Alex Cheung’s passage to mainstream filmmaking, and All the Wrong Clues (1981), a Cinema City production, launched Tsui Hark both as director and producer of a series of commercial hits. Whereas Twinkle can be labeled a sci-fi spoof, All the Wrong Clues has been identified as a “slapstick-filled spoof of the American gangster film of the 1940s.”206 Tsui’s second Cinema City production, Aces Go Places III: Our Man from Bond Street (1984), is likewise a spoof, a “James Bond send-up”207 complete with two Bond villains recreated by the original actors Richard Kiel and Harold Sakata,208 and Peter Graves of Mission Impossible (1967-73) thrown in for good measure. This is the third installment of the Aces Go Places series,209 Hong Kong’s tremendously popular heist-action-comedies, featuring spectacular stunts and centering on a highly skilled thief (Sam 205 As Cheuk Pak Tong points out, New Wave directors’ maiden f ilms were all produced by independent production companies, except for Patrick Tam’s The Sword (1980) and Allen Fong’s Father and Son (1981). See Cheuk, Hong Kong New Wave Cinema, p. 239. 206 Barry Long, in Dannen and Long, Hong Kong Babylon, p. 184. 207 Fredric Dannen, in Dannen and Long, Hong Kong Babylon, p. 41. 208 Kiel played “Jaws” in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979), while Sakata played “Oddjob” in Goldfinger (1964). 209 Also known as the “Mad Mission” series in English, the five installments are Aces Go Places (Eric Tsang, 1982), Aces Go Places II (Eric Tsang, 1983), Aces Go Places III: Our Man from Bond Street (Tsui Hark, 1984), Aces Go Places IV (Ringo Lam, 1986), and Aces Go Places V: The Terracotta Hit (Lau Kar-leung, 1989).

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Hui), a somewhat guileless detective (Karl Maka), and a tough female police officer (Sylvia Chang).210 It opens with Hui being attacked by Kiel and Sakata on the Eiffel Tower. During his narrow escape, Hui dives into a “jaw”-shaped submarine, where he meets special agent “Sean Connery” and is given a secret mission by Queen Elizabeth II: steal back the priceless diamond missing from her crown. The mission is further complicated when the real man from Bond Street (Peter Graves) appears, and both “Sean Connery” and the “Queen” are revealed to be counterfeit lookalikes. Reacting against the antagonist conspiracy, Maka and Chang team up with their colleagues in an elaborate set-piece, masquerading as the potential Arabian buyers of the crown jewels. Notably, this sequence also features Ricky Hui cross-dressing as an Arabian female retainer. Once again, gender parody is integral to the increasingly ironic attitude towards forms and images in mass media, as articulated through the showy pastiche/spoof and genre blending/reinvention underpinning New Wave directors’ essentially “ambiguous” relationship to the commercial film industry.211 While Tusi Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986) – a delicate mixture of opera, drama, farce, and splendid stunt work – includes an androgynous or “mannish” female revolutionary,212 played by Brigitte Lin, A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, produced by Tsui and directed by Ching Siu-tung)213 brilliantly integrates romance, martial arts, and spectacular special effects. It also showcases a gender-bending tree demon whose frightening voice shifts back and forth between male and female, and whose elongating, rolling tongue is at once “horror and high camp, kung fu and special-effects fantasy.”214 In terms of special effects, A Chinese Ghost Story finally achieved what Tsui aspired to for years.215 The dazzling special effects of A Chinese Ghost Story trilogy (1987/1990/1991), together with the androgyny and gender bending of Peking Opera Blues, paved the way for the sensational “Asia the Invincible” in Swordsman II.216 Swordsman itself (1990) was an updated version of King Hu’s poetic swordplay 210 Teo, Stephen. “The Aces Go Places Series as the 1980s Paradigm of Hong Kong Comedy Action.” 211 Rodriguez, “The Emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave,” pp. 61, 64. 212 Barry Long, in Dannen and Long, Hong Kong Babylon, p. 280. 213 For an insightful interpretation of A Chinese Ghost Story that revisits horror film theory through the film’s postcolonial perspective, see John Zou, “A Chinese Ghost Story: Ghostly Council and Innocent Man.” 214 Teo, Hong Kong Cinema, p. 228. 215 Law, “Tsui Hark,” p. 48. 216 On the development of the character “Asia the Invincible” from the original literary portrayal, particularly how Asia represents a “gender transgression” that is “never fully captured by the sign of sex,” see Petrus Liu, Stateless Subjects, pp. 179-183 (p. 181).

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picture,217 while in Swordsman II (1992) and its sequel East Is Red (1993), Brigitte Lin’s portrayal of Asia championed an over-the-top, gender-oriented camp dimension integral to developing filmmaking trends in the 1980s. These trends gravitated toward excessive stylization, hyperbolic genre blending, and self-conscious intertextuality, characteristic of mass camp in general and exemplified in Tsui Hark’s work in the wake of Hong Kong New Wave. d) Mass Camp in Kung Fu Comedy No discussion of mass camp in Hong Kong cinema would be complete without mentioning the comic turn of kung fu pictures. Before the rise of the New Wave, but after the Hui comedies appeared in 1974, the late 1970s saw the emergence of kung fu comedy, in part as a response to the waning appeal of the kung fu genre once championed by Bruce Lee (1940-1973). Weaving kung fu, folklore, and a comic storyline, The Spiritual Boxer (1975), the directorial debut of martial arts choreographer Lau Kar-leung (1934-2013), is arguably the harbinger of kung fu comedy. Lau’s second feature, Challenge of the Masters (1976) revisits the legend of kung fu master Wong Fei-hung (1847-1924), replacing the popular portrayal of Wong as a revered master218 with an awkward and mischievous teenage version.219 To a certain degree, the critical and commercial success of Lau’s films paved the way for other martial arts actors or choreographers to become directors themselves. Between 1977 and 1979, Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo-ping, and Jackie Chan all directed their first features – The Iron-Fisted Monk (1977), Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978) and The Fearless Hyena (1979), respectively. Interestingly enough, all are kung fu comedies. As Sek Kei notes, 1978 was the year kung fu comedy gained momentum: Enter the Fat Dragon (Sammo Hung), Dirty 217 Allegedly, due to Hu’s “health problems,” Tsui Hark, Raymond Lee and Ching Siu-tung replaced him as “acting directors” of this Tsui Hark/Film Studio production soon after shooting started. Of course, the final version is distinct from Hu’s original vision. Though credited as the director, Hu publicly disowned this work. 218 Released in two parts in 1949, The (True) Story of Wong Fei-hung (Wu Pang) kicked off a film series that became a staple of Hong Kong cinema: in 1956 alone, twenty-five Wong Fei-hung films were released. Between 1949 and 1979, eighty-five films and thirteen television episodes featuring the adventures of Wong were produced and released in Hong Kong. See Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong, p. 204; Yu Mo-wan, “The Prodigious Cinema of Huang Fei-hong [Wong Fei-hung],” p. 79. One of the most extensive English studies is Hector Rodriguez’s article, “Hong Kong Popular Culture as an Interpretive Arena.” For a more recent bilingual anthology, see Po Fung and Lau Yam (eds.), Zhu shan wei shi (Mastering Virtue). 219 Richard Allen highlights Lau’s “paradoxical” position vis-à-vis the kung fu legacy and cinematic tradition. Allen, “The Paradoxes of Tradition.”

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Tiger, Crazy Frog (Karl Maka), Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, and Drunken Master (both Yuen Woo-ping) all became box office hits.220 The latter two even made Jackie Chan the best-known kung fu comedian. Like Lau Kar-leung’s Challenge of the Masters, Drunken Master also portrays a young Wong Fei-hung. In Drunken Master, however, director Yuen Woo-ping and star Jackie Chan push Lau’s “awkward young man” trope into outright comedy.221 The film recasts the relationship between Wong and his master Beggar Su (Yuen Xiaotien, a famous fight instructor and Yuen Woo-ping’s father) in a comic and irreverent manner. In a broader sense, kung fu comedies, as Leon Hunt writes, “grew out of rather than making a clean break from some of the classic kung fu film’s narrative/thematic tropes. Most of them are about Master/Pupil relationships, but with an irreverent or cynical flavor.”222 This ironic relation to tradition and entrenched generic formulae comes to characterize Jackie Chan’s screen personality. In particular, Chan’s openness to camp appreciation, I suggest, has much to do with the fact that his persona is predicated on a martial arts film tradition dominated by uptight and righteous heroes. While Chan’s hyperactive and clownish persona properly serves as an immediate and parodic comment on that straight canon, the fact that most of Chan’s screen characters adopt one or both parts of his professional Chinese name (Cheng Long in pinyin, Sing Lung in Cantonese) also makes the audience increasingly aware of watching a “Jackie Chan”: like a running commentary, this awareness is not bound to but overarches individual film texts.223 Moreover, as genre conventions loosen, the gender codes for male protagonists relax. In traditional martial arts pictures, an emasculated male character is almost always morally flawed and antagonistic, but such is not the case in kung fu comedy. In Drunken Master, for instance, Wong Fei-hung learns from Beggar Su the techniques of drunken kung fu, fashioned after the Eight Immortals. Through a comprehensive application of all the drunken styles, especially the feminine one modeled after a goddess, Wong eventually defeats the chief villain. In The Fearless Hyena (1979), writer-director Jackie Chan plays a high-spirited youth who is ordered by 220 Sek Kai. Sek Kai yinghua ji 8, p. 197 (originally published August 13, 1981). 221 Jeff Yang, Once Upon A Time in China, p. 41. 222 Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters, p. 103. 223 As a self-conscious camp icon, Jackie Chan defines himself as the counterpoint of Bruce Lee: “Instead of kicking high like Bruce, I kick low. He plays the invincible hero, I’m the underdog. His movies are intense, mine are light” (quoted in Witterstaetter, Dying for Action, p. 20). For Leo Lee, “in all his roles Jackie Chan constantly maintains two levels of acting – he is both serious and comic, often at the same time,” and his “double-layered acting” helped “[popularize] the style of self-parody in Hong Kong filmmaking.” See Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Two Films from Hong Kong,” p. 203.

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his grandfather not to fight, so as not to be recognized by those pursuing the grandfather’s revolutionary clan. Desperate for money, however, Chan at one point takes up a shady offer from a martial arts school, where he must fend off challengers while averting detection. In one scene, this involves dressing up as a woman – an effective strategy for fighting off a macho challenger smitten with Chan in full drag. This sequence also incorporates references to Cantonese opera (modern classic Princess Chang Ping in particular), a baseball pitcher, cartoonish acts, and Chaplinesque facial expressions. The sense of excessive referentiality and patent anachronism here is, in fact, not only characteristic of Fearless Hyena, but part and parcel of numerous kung fu comedies. As Chan Ting-ching points out, kung fu comedies frequently borrow from popular culture: as well as “an almost indiscriminate use of catchphrases from well-known commercials and television programs,” the characters are “often modeled heavily on well-known contemporary media figures.”224 Whereas Li Cheuk-to stresses the structural influence of the “gag pattern” introduced by Hui Brothers Show,225 for Chan Ting-ching, seminal kung fu comedy Knockabout (Sammo Hung, 1979) is basically a “hybrid work” that shows “present-day people thinly disguised in an early Republican setting,” which exploits its calculated gag pattern to achieve “the television format.”226 Interestingly enough, it is also from Knockabout that character actor Karl Maka imported his celebrated “baldheaded detective” (guangtou shentan) in the aforementioned Aces Go Places series (1982-1989), lending yet another intertextual component to popular mass camp. Amid the public craze for kung fu comedies, Jackie Chan’s second directorial outing, The Young Master (1980), became the first local film production to break the $10 million box-office record. Like many other kung fu comedies, Young Master is a hybrid work with a mass camp appeal. Though set in turn-of-the-century China, the film’s plot and action are fraught with modern and Western elements, ranging from a soundtrack that rejects traditional Chinese orchestration to the extensive use of contemporary catchphrases and ideas (e.g. the “Miranda rights” widely cited in modern U.S. police dramas). Young Master also adroitly integrates Western elements into its fight choreography. The final duel, for example, is an eighteen-minute hand-to-hand sequence that flirts with boxing “choreography” while giving a parodic nod to Rocky (1976). In another brilliant fight sequence, protagonist 224 Chan Ting-ching, “The ‘Knockabout’ Comic Kung-fu Films of Samo [Sammo] Hung,” p. 149. 225 Li Cheuk-to, “Postscript,” in Qishi niandai xianggang dianying yanjiu (A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies), p. 128. 226 Chan Ting-ching. “The ‘Knockabout’ Comic Kung-fu Films of Samo [Sammo] Hung,” p. 147.

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Ah Lung (Jackie Chan) fights some rascals while disguised as a grizzled homeless guy (à la Beggar Su from Drunken Master) and at one point performs a facetious balance-beam routine to a mischievous modern Chinese tune. This sequence wraps up with a parodic take on bullfighting, with a typical Spanish paso doble soundtrack. Here, taking the idea of skirt waving from a girl, Ah Lung picks up a square of red fabric, employing it in a dance-like fighting style. Accompanied by paso doble music, his skirt dance then segues into bullfight-like moves. The curious juxtaposition of the “masculinity” of a male matador and the perceived “femininity” of a skirt dance thus once again produces gender-oriented camp humor from kung fu comedy’s take on mass camp idiom.227 While The Young Master set a new box-office record for Hong Kong’s domestic film market in 1980, that same year also saw a new trend in kung fu comedy, namely the further integration of horror or the supernatural into this particular genre. Although Lau Kar-leung’s The Shadow Boxing (1979) was arguably the forerunner here, with its folkloric hopping cadavers, New Wave filmmaker Ann Hui’s The Spooky Bunch, released a year later with a more restrained dose of action, is usually credited as “popularizing” this formula.228 Around the end of 1980, Sammo Hung’s Encounter of the Spooky Kind became such a smash hit that it effectively spawned an entire genre, which can be properly labeled supernatural kung fu comedy. Some best-known examples of this highly hybrid genre include Miracle Fighters (Yuen Woo-ping, 1982), The Dead and the Deadly (Wu Ma, 1983), Hocus Pocus (Chien Yue Sang, 1984), as well as the Mr. Vampire series (Ricky Lau, 1985-1988 and 1992). Amid its various sequels and spin-offs, this genre inevitably developed an increased sense of self-consciousness and campness on top of the genre’s already hyperbolic configuration, interlaced with gender-oriented camp humor. Such humor is seen, for instance, in the female impersonations (on both diegetic and non-diegetic levels) in Miracle Fighters, or when the Sammo Hung character finds himself wearing a red camisole while embroiled in a supernatural battle against zombies, snake people, and kung fu cadavers in the finale of Encounter of the Spooky Kind. Whereas supernatural kung fu comedy’s appeal was waning by the late 1980s, the aforementioned A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) represented a variation where comedy largely (but not completely) gives way 227 In another sequence, Ah Lung faces a sword-wielding attacker, whose sword at one point falls at Ah Lung’s feet, chopping off the backs of his sandals. Ah Lung thus has to go on tiptoe. This episode refers parodicically to the old technique of cai qiao in Peking opera, where female impersonators wore qiao to imitate women in bound feet. 228 Sek Kai, “Hung jiaban de guixi” (The ghost dramas by the [Sammo] Hung clan), in Sek Kai yinghua ji 8, p. 14 (originally published November 7, 1985).

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to romance, while fist-fighting kung fu is largely replaced by a wuxia formula underpinned by upgraded, spectacular special effects. e) Mass Camp and Hong Kong Nostalgia Film While traces of nostalgia had gained critical attention in the local community by 1980, alongside acclaimed TV series No Biz Like Show Biz (1980, TVB) by Gan Guo-liang (Kam Kwok-leung),229 the growing nostalgic influence in film really emerged during the second half of the 1980s. According to Li Cheuk-to and Leung Ping-kwan, Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987), which contrasts the lifestyles of Hong Kong in the glamorous 1930s and the rationalized 1980s, initially set in motion the nostalgic trend in local film production.230 Some best-known examples of this trend include A Fishy Story (Anthony Chan, 1989), Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai, 1991), Center Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1992), He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father (Peter Chan, 1993), C’est la vie, mon cheri (Derek Yee, 1993), works by Clifton Ko including I Have a Date With Spring (1994) and The Umbrella Story (1995),231 as well as a cycle of gangster biopics best exemplified by To Be Number One (Johnny Mak, 1991) and Lee Rock (Lawrence Ah Mon, 1992).232 229 See the special issue on “nostalgia” in Film Biweekly No. 36, which also features Gan Guo-liang discussing No Biz Like Show Biz in relation to Cantonese cinematic past: Xiao Ang, “Ganxing Gan Guo-liang” (Sensitive Kam Kwok-leung). For another discussion of nostalgic influence on contemporary TV culture, see John Shum, “Dianshi huaijiu juji taolun hui” (Discussion of nostalgic TV series). Gan Guo-liang’s contributions to camp discourse should also be noted. Known as the “father of camp” locally, Gan was writer-director of Silver 2000 (Yingguang er’qian, 1976, TVB), a Superman-like TV series that Deng Xiao-yu called an “unintentionally failed parody” of Batman, replete with naive “camp” humor, in Hong Kong’s first article on camp. Many of Gan’s TV productions, including No Biz Like Show Biz and Wushuang Po (1981), and film productions like Wonder Women (1987), are regarded high camp. For instance, Chen Guan-zhong suggested camp as a “reading strategy” for Gan’s Wushuang Po; Lin Da-da discusses Wonder Women vis-à-vis (self-)parody. Yau Ching also sees Gan’s writings as patently “kitsch and camp.” According to Edward Lam, Gan’s acting with Adam Cheng in Renjian shiwai (1976, written by Gan) further represents the f irst “gay couple” on local TV screens. See Deng Xiao-yu, “Yinguang er’qian, Mary Hartman han Gan Guo-liang” (Silver 2000, Mary Hartman and Kam Kwok-leung); Chen Guan-zhong, “From Camp to Post-modernism”; Lin Da-da, “Hua shenqi wei fuxiu”; Yau Ching, Youdong de ying, p. 326; Edward Lam, Shi Lunliu Zhuan bushi Lunliu Zhuan, p. 169. 230 Li Cheuk-to, Ni guan ji, p. 3; Leung Ping-kwan, Xianggang wenhua, p. 40. 231 For an excellent analysis of He Aint’ Heavy, He’s My Father, C’est la vie, mon cheri, and Clifton Ko’s works, see Linda Lai Chiu-han, “Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering,” pp. 234-239. See also Augusta Palmer’s doctoral dissertation for a meticulous discussion of Center Stage, Rouge, The Umbrella Story, and Days of Being Wild. Palmer, “Crossroads,” pp. 124-134, 181-201. 232 For a brilliant discussion of this gangster bio-pic (xiaoxiong pian) cycle, see Li Cheuk-to’s article “91~92 Xiaoxiong pian zonghen tan,” in Guan ni ji, pp. 3-11.

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Although some of these works hark back to the 1930s in either Hong Kong (e.g. Rouge) or Shanghai (e.g. Center Stage), the majority of Hong Kong nostalgia films prefer Hong Kong of the 1950s and 1960s. This preference, as Natalia Chan posits, arises from the fact that this period is generally considered the beginning of the history of Hong Kong as a modern city.233 Governed by “a policy of noninterference and self-determination,” and characterized by “freedom of speech and economic prosperity,” this period is also regarded “the golden age of the colonial time.”234 From the mid-1980s onward, the public’s yearning for this epoch and their fascination with local history in general were only deepened by the fast-approaching 1997 Handover. As Ackbar Abbas writes, the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre conf irmed a lot of people’s fears that “the Hong Kong way of life with its mixture of colonialist and democratic trappings was in imminent danger of disappearing.”235 Against this widespread anxiety, an endeavor to revisit local history – hitherto much absent from the colony’s middle-school textbooks236 – was expressed in Hong Kong nostalgia films of the mid-1980s.237 A Fishy Story, for instance, breaks the cinematic taboo on the 1967 riots,238 which become the setting for a romance between two working-class characters (played by Maggie Cheung and Kenny Bee). Precisely because an earnest recognition of local history generally underlies Hong Kong nostalgia films, they differ from their American counterparts, as discussed by Fredric Jameson in a postmodern context.239 While American nostalgia film is characterized by a postmodern use of pastiche that “displaces ‘real’ history” through a “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past,”240 Luo Feng and Stephen Teo contend that Hong Kong nostalgia f ilm, with its “genuine attempt to explore history”241 through pastiche and intertextuality, des233 Natalia (Sui Hung) Chan, “Rewriting History,” pp. 244-245. 234 Ibid., p. 265. 235 Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 7. 236 Luo Feng. “Lishi de jiyi yu shiyi” (Remembrance and amnesia of the history), in Shijimo chengshi (The decadent city), p. 65. 237 Rey Chow likewise comments on the relationship between Hong Kong nostalgia and the social identity crisis, arguing that the impetus behind it animates “an alternative temporality for fantasizing a ‘community’ amid the identity-in-crisis of contemporary Hong Kong.” See Chow, Ethics after Idealism, pp. 133-148. 238 Two recent films that directly deal with the 1967 riots are the documentary Vanished Archives (Connie Lo Yan-wai, 2017) and No. 1 Chung Ying Street (Chiu Sung Kee, 2018). 239 Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism, pp. 1-54. 240 Ibid., pp. 20, 18. 241 Teo, Hong Kong Cinema, p. 250.

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ignates not so much “a loss of historicity”242 as “a search for the history” of the colony.243 In the meantime, an offshoot of the nostalgia film accentuated outright parody following the release of 92 Legendary La Rose Noire (Jeff Lau, 1992). A surprise hit that soon developed a cult following among local audiences and critics alike, 92 Legendary La Rose Noire concerns two girlfriends Butterfly (Maggie Siu) and Kuen (Teresa Mo) who witness a triad assassination. Fearful of being implicated in the gangland slaying, the two try to deflect attention by leaving a note signed “the Black Rose,” the female “Robin Hood” character from an early James Bond-inspired Cantonese movie series beginning with The Black Rose (Chor Yuen, 1965). Surprisingly, there really is a Black Rose, and her two disciples, Piu-hung (Fung Bo-bo) and Yim-fan (Wong Wen-si), are not happy with the idea of their master being framed for murder. When the gangsters abduct Kuen, the Black Rose’s disciples incarcerate Butterfly; police detective Lui Kee (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who holds a torch for Butterfly, comes to her rescue – until he is mistaken by Yim-fan for her bygone lover. In the second half of the film, Yim-fan attempts to force a marriage on Lui Kee, Piu-hung suffers escalating amnesia and believes Yim-fan is her mother (as opposed to her romantic rival), and Lui Kee and Butterfly attempt to escape, culminating in a climactic battle between the Black Rose’s disciples and the triad members pursuing Butterfly and the escaped Kuen. Overall, 92 Legendary La Rose Noire is a jokey but not unkind pastiche of 1960s Cantonese cinema, replete with references to period musicals, melodramas, comedies, and action films.244 Aside from the parodic Black Rose figure, “Lui Kee” is modeled after Lui Kee, one of the leading stars of 1960s Cantonese romantic comedies. His beloved, Butterfly, likewise resembles Chan Po-chu, as Chan and Lui were a hugely popular screen couple. More interestingly, the amnesiac Piu-hung, who is so convinced she is Yim-fan’s daughter that she even dresses and behaves like a little girl, also parodies the image of actress Fung Bo-bo. Born in 1954, Fung was the Shirley Temple of early Cantonese cinema (between 1960 and 1962 alone, she appeared in about ninety movies). Additionally, two popular Cantonese old songs – “Dreamlike Old Lover” and “You Return to Me” – are covered with new vocals, accompanied by outrageous visuals and karaoke-style subtitles. For 242 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. x. 243 Luo Feng, “Lishi de jiyi yu shiyi,” pp. 64-65. 244 The filmmaker tried to out-“camp” Cantonese film classics. Li Da-zhi, “92 Hei Meigui Dui Hei Meigui: yueyu pian jingdian zaixian, gaitou huanmian youyou shemo huazhao” (92 Legendary La Rose Noire: Cantonese film classics re-presented, and the tricks behind such an appropriation), p. 46.

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critic Li Cheuk-to, such an incongruous yet funny juxtaposition of nostalgic songs and modern karaoke represents something quintessentially “camp.”245 92 Legendary La Rose Noire even started a trend of employing old songs in films with contemporary settings.246 Even Mountains Meet (Lawrence Ah Mon, 1993), for instance, includes a number of famous tunes from classic Cantonese operas by Tong Tik-sang (1917-1959) alongside Cantonese oldies; Rose Rose I Love You (Jacky Pang, 1993), the sequel to 92 Legendary La Rose Noire, pastiches Mandarin pop songs from the 1960s. The Eagle Shooting Heroes (Jeff Lau, 1993) is another key example of this variant of the nostalgia film, emphatically parodying Cantonese cinema from the 1950s and 1960s. Produced by Wong Kar-wai and shot back to back with Wong’s Ashes of Time (1994), Eagle Shooting Heroes shares the same source material and most of its cast with the former film, but takes them in an utterly different direction. Essentially a martial-arts parody, the film’s heroes try to save a princess (Brigitte Lin) from a wicked usurper (Tony Leung Chiu-wai). However, when we look past the over-the-top chaos, “goofy martial arts,”247 and “outrageous […] campy costumes,”248 a distinct homoerotic theme emerges. Male homoeroticism is played out in different ways between three sets of characters: an overt homosexual connection between a cross-dressed Carina Lau and his fellow disciple (Kenny Bee), and latent homosexual or homosocial relationships between Tony Leung Chiuwai and Jacky Cheung (through their extended fighting and companionship), and between a male Buddhist devotee (Tony Leung Ka-fai) and the Leslie Cheung character who, to attain Nirvana, has to say “I love you” to him three times. Especially hilarious are the two musical numbers where Tony Leung Ka-fai, to allure Leslie Cheung, impersonates a girl in gaudy costumes and outrageous hairdos, singing and dancing to old-fashioned songs.249 Once again, gender-oriented camp expressions emerge through mass camp and join a nostalgic influence that likewise underlines intertextuality, pastiche and parody. Eagle Shooting Heroes comments on two genres in Cantonese cinema that merit particular attention: the fantastic martial arts picture (shenguai wuxia pian) and the fanciful Cantonese opera film (shenguai yueyu xiqu pian). The former genre exhibits a strong appeal to magical gadgetry, special effects, 245 Li Cheuk-to, Guan ni ji, p. 166. 246 Luo Feng, “Lishi de jiyi yu shiyi,” p. 71. 247 Barry Long, in Dannen and Long, Hong Kong Babylon, p. 220. 248 Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong, pp. 158-159. 249 These two songs are old tunes with new lyrics by James Wong and Leslie Cheung respectively, and were sung by James Wong.

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whimsical plots, and fanciful characterizations, as in such 1960s works as The Secret Book series (a.k.a. Mythical Crane, Magic Needle, 1961-1963) and the Buddha’s Palm series (1964-1965).250 The latter indicates opera movies that incorporate a variety of shenguai elements, ranging from the bizarre and the supernatural – as epitomized by “The Headless Queen” series (1957-1963)251 – to the exotic and magical, as seen in the settings, costumes, and props in Arabian Nights-themed productions like My Kingdom for a Husband (Tso Kea, 1957)252 and Prince of Thieves (Lu Bang, 1958). In Eagle Shooting Heroes, while the hilarious flying-head episode represents an ingenious parody of “The Headless Queen” series, the Middle-Eastern palace and costumes, and such fantastic objects as the crystal ball and the flying boots (which function like a flying carpet), are clearly send-ups of such opera films. Along with certain special effects commonly employed in the fanciful martial arts pictures of the 1960s (e.g. fast motion, reverse motion, composite printing, explosions), Eagle Shooting Heroes also borrows various plots from this genre. In particular, the mind-controlling centipedes – plus crabs, Cantonese style (dazha xie) – the rubber-suited talking monsters (including a human-sized dinosaur), and the secret martial-arts technique written on ancient vessels (ding) all parody Buddha’s Palm. It should be clear that a basic knowledge of early Cantonese cinema is key to appreciating the pastiches or parodies in Hong Kong nostalgia comedies. Without such knowledge, those pastiches and parodies lose their reference points, and may seem little more than outrageous, nonsensical farce. However, to those familiar with the local popular culture from an earlier period, they strike a chord. A certain historicity is evoked through what Linda Lai terms “enigmatization,” namely “the selection and reorganization of existing images from popular culture in order to distinctly select the local audience as a privileged hermeneutic community, thus facilitating a state of internal dialogue, distinguishing those within from the ‘outsiders’ 250 Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, pp. 86-90; Law, “Lue tan shenguai wuxia yueyu pian – bing pingjie Rulai shenzhang [Buddha’s Palm], Shenghuo xiongfeng [Secret Fire, Heroic Wind],” pp. 10-14; Law, “Chen Lieping [Chan Lit-bun] he xinpai wuxia yueyu pian,” pp. 15-19. 251 Cantonese opera/cinema actress Yu Li-zhen (1923-2004) was famous for her parts as headless/ flying-head queens, and her outrageous performance style indeed earned her a camp cult following. See Deng Xiao-yu, Chi Luosong can de rizi, p. 191; Edward Lam, Dengdai Xianggang, pp. 32-34. On Yu Li-zhen’s versatile persona and artistic achievements, see Chan Siu-ting, Wutou, shenguai, zhajiao. On “The Headless Queen” series, see Ng Ho, “Some Primitive Reminiscences”; Liu Damu, “Observations on ‘The Headless Queen’ series.” 252 For a detailed account of the intricate historical connections of My Kingdom for a Husband, see Yung Sai-shing’s article, “From The Love Parade to My Kingdom for a Husband.” On director Tso Kea see Li Cheuk-to’s essay, “A Look at MP & GI Cantonese Films.”

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by marking who partakes a shared history of popular culture.”253 In other words, this is not so much official history as a shared experience of the past, belonging to a distinct local populace and their culture. An essential dimension of this culture is tsaan pin, a Cantonese term referring to dissipated movies from the 1950s and 1960s, composed of mostly Cantonese opera films, martial arts films, melodramas, comedies, and some Mandarin soaps, musicals and historical epics.254 These movies, as mentioned above, comprised one of the three major categories of early local television programming. Watching late-night revivals of tsaan pin had become a distinct and indispensable experience for many living in Hong Kong. Indeed, in his review of Eagle Shooting Heroes, Shek Kei stresses the significance of “growing up watching Cantonese tsaan pin on television” for appreciating the film.255 Stephen Teo, in his discussion of the fantastic martial arts picture in Cantonese cinema, also notes that “a cult […] has grown around constant revivals on late-night television” of the Buddha’s Palm series,256 which in turn inspired Eagle Shooting Heroes. Elsewhere in his discussion of veteran director Chor Yuen’s work, Shek Kei likewise points out the “cult” status certain of Chor’s films have achieved through television revivals, particularly his Black Rose and Young, Pregnant, and Unmarried (1968).257 While the latter has moderately informed Dummy, Mommy, Without a Baby (Joe Ma, 2001), the former has principally inspired 92 Legendary La Rose Noire, Rose Rose I Love You, as well as Black Rose II (Corey Yuen & Jeff Lau, 1998) and Protégé de la Rose Noire (Donnie Yen, 2003). In other words, television, so pivotal to the diffusion of camp sensibility, also provides an archive of cultural expressions through which public memories and local identities are articulated, and mass camp sensibility is given vivid expression.

Concluding Remarks Into the new millennium, films like Fantasia (Wai Ka-fai, 2004), Gallants (Clement Tze-kit Cheng and Kwok Chi-kin, 2010), and the I Love Hong Kong series (2011-2013), continue to merge local nostalgia with mass camp impulse. 253 Linda Lai, “Film and Enigmatization,” p. 232. 254 Zhang Che (or Chang Cheh), Hueigu xianggang dianying sanshi nien, pp. 4-5; Teo, Hong Kong Cinema. p. 245; Teo, “The 1970s: Movement and Transition,” p. 105. 255 Sek Kai, “Shediao yingxiong zhuan zhi dong cheng xi jiu,” Shek Kei yinghua ji 4, p. 287 (originally published in Ming Pao, February 6, 1993). 256 Teo, Chinese Martial Arts Cinema, p. 90. 257 Sek Kai, “Chor Yuen,” p. 61.

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Writer-director Wai Ka-fai’s Fantasia exploits its episodic structure to showcase send-ups of 1970s popular culture (as opposed to earlier nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s). It pastiches the quiz show in Games Gamblers Play, the famous movie theater holdup and kitchen tournament in The Private Eyes, and models its three private detectives on the Hui brothers in Security Unlimited (1981). It also features a guileless wizard resembling the androgynous “Lin Ya-zhen,” along with an erudite yet mentally ill “Lin Ya-zhen” who looks like 1970s bombshell Tina Ti (a.k.a. Di Na, 1945-2010),258 a volatile gang leader resembling character actor Shek Kin (widely known as “Bad Guy Kin”),259 and so on: the ensemble cast must deliver self-conscious, double-layered performances.260 Fantasia represents a mass camp update of the Hong Kong nostalgia film, through which the cultural history of a younger generation is celebrated, and mass camp finds “new” (or newly recycled) expressions in early Canto-pop culture. This chapter has examined the social and historical context of the emergence of mass camp in Hong Kong. It has also investigated the crossfertilization of mass camp impulse and Hong Kong cinema since the 1970s. This latter investigation is in no way conclusive: I have not mentioned, for instance, comedian Stephen Chow’s 1990s “nonsensical comedy.” Again, this phenomenon was characterized by episodic structure, self-conscious, even self-parodic acting, and a plethora of pop culture send-ups. Gender-bending is another characteristic of Chow’s nonsensical comedy: he dons drag in Justice, My Foot! (Johnnie To, 1992), parodies “Asia the Invincible” in Royal Tramp (Wong Jing, 1992), and introduces us to the (in)famous character “Yu Fa” – male actor Lee Kin-yan, cross-dressed as a burly, unattractive woman with a finger up her nose.261 Chow’s debt to mass camp is crystal clear. While his nonsensical comedy is beyond the scope of this research,262 any study of Stephen Chow, I suggest, may do well to take into account the influence of mass camp in contemporary Hong Kong culture. In my view, not only does Chow’s comedy respond to mass camp impulse, but its tremendous popularity has generated further mass camp appreciation among audiences. 258 For an excellent analysis of Tina Ti’s star image, see Man Kit-wah, “Qi nuzi Di Na.” 259 Veteran actor Shek Kin (1913-2009) is best known for having played the villain in the majority of the Cantonese-language Wong Fei-hung series, and was frequently cast as a villain after the series ended. 260 The ensemble includes Lau Ching Wan (as “Michael Hui”), Louis Koo (“Sam Hui”), Jordan Chan (“Ricky Hui”), Christy Chung (“Tina Ti”), Francis Ng (“Shek Kin”), among others. 261 Jiu Gu’niang, “Shijie diyi meinu ‘Yu Fa’.” 262 For a recent study on Stephen Chow and The Mermaid (2016) in the era of Hong Kong-China co-production, see Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Shi-Yan Chao, “Policy and Creative Strategies.”

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Throughout my investigation, I have highlighted the proliferation of gender parody in film: I argue that mass camp has become a vital force behind this trend in contemporary Hong Kong cinema since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when operatic expressions, including cross-dressing on a non-diegetic level and otherwise, began to decline. The Hui Brothers comedies – the cornerstone of Canto-pop culture – exemplify this re-emergence of gender parody through mass camp. I also identify three scenarios of gender-oriented mass camp expressions, which have inevitably undergone certain transfigurations over the years. Despite its early affinity with unisex, consumerist fashion, androgyny has been geared toward mass entertainment as gender-bending representations have undergone conspicuous expansion. Notably, while there has been no shortage of homophobic jokes and negative depictions of same-sex behavior on the local big screens, gender-bending imagery does not necessarily serve the same blatantly homophobic agenda. Most of the gender-bending episodes touched on in this chapter, in fact, support this view. Various other examples from the early 1990s also support this understanding.263 On the other hand, as discussed earlier, the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1991 played a key role in the burst of queer imagery and gender parody in 1990s Hong Kong cinema.264 According to Helen Leung, however, “[the public response to this minimal legal gesture was [so] fiercely oppositional [that it] resulted in an intense outburst of homophobia.”265 Consequently, alongside the sudden increase of queer visibility in local media came a score of film productions infamously combining genderbending imagery with explicit homophobic messages. In Tom, Dick, and Hairy (Peter Chan/Lee Chi-ngai, 1993), for instance, Lawrence Cheng becomes increasingly effeminate, but cuts off his “ambiguous” relationship with a gay man, resumes his “masculinity,” and is eventually rewarded with a female dream-lover. In He Is a Woman, She Is a Man (Peter Chan, 1994), Leslie Cheung panics over his feeling for another man, but rather than overcoming his homophobia, the film provides a solution in the revelation that the other man is “really” a woman (Anita Yuen). In He and She (Lawrence Cheng, 1994), effeminate gay tailor Tony Leung Ka-fai turns straight after kissing 263 For instance, Ng Man-tat in All for the Winner (Corey Yuen and Jeff Lau, 1990), Stephen Chow in All’s Well, Ends Well (Clifton Ko, 1992), Bill Tung in Supercop (Stanley Tong, 1992), Josephine Siao in Fong Sai Yuk (Corey Yuen, 1993), Ricky Hui, Leslie Cheung, Ng Man-tat and Rosamund Kwan in All’s Well, Ends Well Too (Clifton Ko, 1993), Raymond Wong in It’s A Wonderful Life (Clifton Ko, 1994). 264 Travis Kong, “Queering Masculinity in Hong Kong Movies,” pp. 64-65. 265 Helen Hok-sze Leung, “Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema,” p. 426.

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the “right” girl (Anita Yuen). In Oh! My Three Guys, the out and “campy” Eric Kok suffers from AIDS and eventually commits suicide, while the closeted, straight-acting Lau Ching-wan “turns heterosexual” for the right woman. Similarly, the tomboyish Rosamund Kwan in Gigolo and Whore II (Andy Chin, 1992), the butch lesbian Sandra Ng in Modern Romance (Andrew Lau et al., 1994), and the butch-femme lesbian duo Christine Ng and Christy Chung in I Wanna Be Your Man! (Cheung Chi-sing, 1994) all “become” heterosexual.266 All these mainstream movies, in short, apply blatant homophobic ideology to gender-bending images that have become part and parcel of the mass camp impulse. In Hong Kong, the first features to consciously incorporate “positivist” LGBT messages beyond the mass camp impulse were arguably Shu Kei’s Hu-Du-Men (1996) and A Queer Story (1997), Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), Jacob Cheung’s Intimates (1997), Stanley Kwan’s Hold You Tight (1998) and Yonfan’s Bishonen (1998).267 To find a use of camp that simultaneously affirms tongzh/queer experience and subjectivity, then, I will move in the following chapter from mainstream mass camp to tongzhi camp.

266 For an insightful analysis of this cycle of homosexual-turned-into-straight movies from the early 1990s, particularly The Days of Being Dumb (Blacky Ko, 1992), He and She, and I Wanna Be Your Man!, see Yau Ching, “Luan bian zhi haishi zhi bian luan,” in Xing/bie guangying, pp. 111-118. 267 This earliest cohort would be joined by, among others, Simon Chung’s First Love and Other Pains (1999), Vincent Chui’s Leaving in Sorrow (2001), Yau Ching’s Ho Yuk: Let’s Love Hong Kong (2002), Evans Chan’s The Map of Sex and Love (2002), Mak Yan Yan’s Butterfly (2004), Kit Hung’s Soundless Wind Chime (2009), Ann Hui’s All About Love (2010), Jun Li’s Tracey (2018), and Ray Yeung’s Suk Suk (2019). All these Hong Kong independent features deal with LGBTQ politics from a positivist perspective. On these individual works, see for instance, Song Hwee Lim, “Traveling Sexualities,” in Celluloid Comrades, pp. 99-125; Marchetti, “Between Comrade and Queer.” I have written on Yonfan and Bishonen in “Performing Authorship in a Queer Time and Place.” See also Denise Tang’s chapter on Ho Yuk in Conditional Spaces, pp. 127-140; Kenneth Chan, “‘Absurd Connections’”; Bachner, “Queer Affiliations.” For the making of Soundless Wind Chime, see Kit Hung et al, “Hong Rong-jie han ta de Wusheng fengling.” For an interview with Simon Chung and discussion on Chung’s End of Love (2008), see Enoch Tam et al., Xianggang duli dianying tujing, pp. 40-48, 50-56.

4

Toward an Aesthetic of Tongzhi Camp Abstract This chapter investigates the significance and articulation of tongzhi camp. It first unpacks the nebulous concept of “gay sensibility” by supplementing it with a structure of feeling mediated by gay shame and gay melancholy, alongside their particular ramifications in a Chinese cultural setting. It then examines how such a queer structure of feeling is potentially transformed into camp expressions in Corner’s (2001) and Splendid Float (2004), directed by lesbian-identifying filmmaker Zero Chou. This chapter finally analyzes the way camp is adapted by Tsai Ming-liang in The Hole (1998) into a powerful implement that negotiates heteronormativity by playing on the mechanism of the homosexual closet: homosexual presence thus becomes imbricated in the audio-visual expressions that characterize the film’s patent tongzhi camp style. Keywords: tongzhi camp, gay shame, gay melancholy, Zero Chou, The Hole

In the previous chapter I mapped out the dissemination of mass camp impulse in Hong Kong from the 1960s, and its discursive formation from the late 1970s. I pointed out that while camp in Hong Kong has been mainly understood as a penchant for excessive stylizations and the overly conventionalized, denotations of gender parody – alongside their homosexual connotations – somehow did not constitute a salient dimension of that local camp discourse in its early stage. A notable change, however, took place during the second half of the 1980s, when Chow Yun-fat’s star vehicle The Eighth Happiness (1988) played a crucial part in bringing into public awareness a camp appreciation accentuated by gender bending and gender parody. Since the late 1980s, Hong Kong people would often simply use the English word “camp” to describe effeminate men with strong homosexual overtones. Responding to this tendency to equate sissies and gay men through camp, Xiaomingxiong (a.k.a. Samshasha, 1954-2006), a Hong Kong-based

Chao, Shi-Yan, Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462988033_ch04

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cultural critic and pioneering gay historian, published four essays in late 1988 in his column on gay film culture (“xiong ying ji”) in the popular Film Biweekly (Dianying shuang zhoukan). His essays compounded the issue of camp in a number of ways. First, he discussed the historical figure Qu Yuan (338-278 BC), a revered official and poet best known for his Li sao (Encountering Sorrow), an epic written before his suicide that exhorts the king to distance himself from those maneuvering deviously in his court. While Li sao has been widely referred to as a prime example of “literary transvestism,”1 since Qu compares himself with feminine symbols such as fragrant grasses (xiangcao) and the beauty (meiren) seeking the king’s favor, Xiaomingxiong, following historian Sun Cizhou, foregrounds the polemic that reads Qu’s self-comparison as virtually homosexuality – indicating Qu’s past relationship to the king.2 If we understand gay men effecting an effeminate demeanor as camp, Qu Yuan, Xiaomingxiong claims, is quintessentially camp, and Li sao represents some kind of “‘ji’ sao,” where ji means “gay” in Cantonese and sao indicates the simmering eroticism involved.3 Because Qu Yuan in Chinese societies is widely known for his patriotism, Xiaomingxiong’s camp reading challenges the heterosexist paradigm that renders homosexuality invisible in history and national politics. Secondly, Xiaomingxiong’s writings draw special attention to the gender politics of doing drag to solicit camp humor in mainstream cinema. That is, sissies and male cross-dressers are perceived as laughing stocks because they, as males, are socially “degraded,” closer to women, while tomboys and male impersonators can hardly evoke laughter because they are socially “upgraded” and closer to men. The kernel of such camp humor resides in patent “sexism.”4 Thirdly, Xiaomingxiong criticizes the stereotypical treatment of gay men as sissies, now in the name of camp. He argues that such an understanding of camp, “strictly speaking, has nothing to do with camp.” He stresses the relationship between camp and gay people’s “feeling,” “social situation,” and “their particular interactions with each other.” For him, camp is first and foremost “the product of homosexual feeling,” but mainstream cinema, as a form of “mass entertainment,” rarely touches upon it while they freely cash in on the flamboyant campy stereotype. As a result, camp is appropriated and transformed from some kind of subcultural expression 1 Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades, p. 71. 2 See also Xiaomingxiong, Zhongguo tongxing’ai shilu (History of Chinese homosexuality), pp. 48-50. 3 Xiaomingxiong, “Lisao yu ‘ji’ sao.” 4 Ibid. See also Xiaomingxiong, “Yingyang bianzou.”

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into a social “stigma.” Camp, Xiaomingxiong maintains, is different from drag or male cross-dressing: classic literature such as Li sao may be approached from a camp perspective.5 In sum, Xiaomingxiong negotiated the increasingly constricted meaning of camp in Hong Kong popular culture by supplementing it with a politicized understanding that draws on historical imagination, gender politics, and gay ramifications. While stressing the gender politics arguably broadens the idea’s appeal to the general public, his camp reading of Qu Yuan, while challenging the heterosexism in official historiography, provides a temporal dimension particular to our rethinking of camp through a queer lens. Importantly, although Xiaomingxiong does not directly employ the phrases “gay camp” and “mass camp,” his attempt to differentiate varied “uses” and “effects” of camp, particularly in gay and non-gay contexts, is evident in his writings. Emphasizing gay people’s feeling and social situation in relation to gay use of camp in effect calls for a further investigation of camp (or rather, “gay camp”) that is marginalized in public discourse, and that characteristically gravitates to the experience and feeling of being gay. In recent years, thanks to the strengthening of the local tongzhi/queer community, in tandem with the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1991,6 the term “camp,” despite its patronizing usage in the mainstream, has been adopted by various critics in a self-affirmative manner in particular gay or queer contexts. For instance, the famous gay critic and theater personality Edward Lam, in his write-up of the third Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, praises lesbian filmmaker Sadie Benning’s whimsical collage of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich – both gay icons – as “high camp.”7 Whereas Lin Ke-huan, in his book-length study on Hong Kong theater, considers Edward Lam’s work “camp-inflected gay theatre,”8 gay criticfilmmaker Shu Kei keenly observes the intriguing association between the “homoeroticism” of gay director Zhang Che’s (1924-2002) martial arts films of the mid-1960s and the “camp taste” of Zhang’s early screenplay for musical-comedy It’s Always Spring (Yi Wen, 1962).9 While Natalia Chan (or Luo Feng) examines the peculiar “homosexual aestheticism” of Canto-pop 5 Xiaomingxiong, “‘Ji sao’ zhengzhi – shoudao zhongshi.” 6 Kang and Liu, “Danqiu ‘zhangsheng pingdeng’, bingfei ‘gao ren yideng’” (Only ‘equality’, not ‘privilege’); Kong, Nan nan zhengzhuan (An official account of male-male relationships), pp. 30-40; Petula Sik Ying Ho and A Ka Tat Tsang, Sex and Desire in Hong Kong, pp. 85-86, 109-110; Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, pp. 48-51; Chou and Zhao, “Yiguei” xingshi, pp. 160-177. 7 Edward Lam, “Wo men bu yao zuo yu gay!” (We don’t wanna be silly gay!). 8 Lin ke-huan, “Fenza de linglei juchang,” Xiju xianggang, xianggang xiju, p. 122. 9 Shu Kei. “Notes on MP & GI,” p. 193.

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superstar Leslie Cheung (1956-2003), embodied through his “modern dandyism,” androgynous persona, and camp sensibility,10 Liang Wei-yi, Rao Xin-ling, and Luo Feng employ “camp” to describe the everchanging, androgynous star persona of Hong Kong queer icon Anita Mui (1963-2003).11 Admittedly, these writers (and others) have contributed to an appreciation of camp in Hong Kong that is characterized by a particular gay/queer perspective, one that significantly differs from both the pejorative usage of the term and, more broadly, so-called mass camp. Still, I find some writers employ the term only in passing or as a given; what they explain is sometimes no more than what they confound. Furthermore, theoretically engaged analyses (such as Chan/Lou’s and Liang/Rao’s) usually refer to Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” as a conceptual origin,12 while writings specifically on “gay camp” somehow go largely unaddressed. In other words, what is neglected in this gay-inflected camp appreciation is a fuller theoretical engagement with the significance of the experience of being gay in relation to camp, as alluded to by Xiaomingxiong. The term “camp” started to gain notable circulation in Taiwan during the 1990s.13 Like the newly inaugurated tongzhi movement, camp was characteristically informed by contemporary gender and gay/queer studies, which were increasingly popular on university campuses and among various intellectuals. The camp discourse that developed converges with queer ramifications and politics: camp here means not so much “mass” camp as “gay” camp. For instance, Sang Tze-lan’s “queer reading” of Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993) sees in Leslie Cheung’s character the potential 10 Natalia Sui-hung Chan, “Queering Body and Sexuality,” pp. 133-49, esp. 138-143. See also Luo Feng (Natalia Chan), “Nansheng nuxiang, cixiong tong ti,” pp. 160-179, esp. 162-166. 11 Liang and Rao, “‘Baibian’ ‘yaonu’ de biaoyan zhengzhi,” pp. 139-159, esp. 147-148; Luo Feng, Youli se’xiang (Ambiguous sexualities), pp. 222-225. 12 Chen Guan-zhong’s article “Camp, Trash, Kitsch” is arguably the most comprehensive study of camp among Hong Kong writers. Intersecting “camp” in mass culture with Pauline Kael’s polemic view on cinema as “trash,” as well as the evolution of “kitsch”, it is insightful and engaging; however, Chen’s understanding of camp is (almost) exclusively based on Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” and his view on the relationship between camp and gay (sub)culture does not go beyond Sontag’s. While Chen does mention queer scholar Moe Meyer’s critique of Sontag, he virtually neutralizes Meyer’s position. Chen was one of the founders of City Magazine, which formally introduced “camp” into Hong Kong in the late 1970s. “Camp, Trash, Kitsch” first appeared in China’s Wanxiang magazine (2004), and was reprinted in Taiwan’s newspaper China Times (August 2-11, 2005). See also Chen’s anthology, Wo zhe yi dai Xianggang ren, pp. 99-134. 13 For mentions of “camp” before the 1990s, see for instance Cai Yuan-huang, “Cong wenxue dao wenhua,” pp. 134-136; Peggy Chiao, “Xiandai wenhua migong de zhibiao.” Cai and Chiao both sketch Sontag’s view on camp, while Chiao’s review of Stanley Kwan’s Rough (1987) also uses the term to describe the delicate decadency of the film (Lianhe Daily on December 14, 1987).

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of queer agency, negotiated via the film’s particular historical setting by means of female impersonation: for Sang, the female impersonation is to some extent comparable to the quintessential drag performance detailed by anthropologist Esther Newton in Mother Camp.14 Responding to debates over his use of “camp,” Taiwan’s leading queer scholar and novelist, Chi Ta-wei, cites Jack Babuscio’s classic article “Camp and the Gay Sensibility” to stress that camp, instead of being a thing or person per se, lies in the ironic relationship between things, individuals, and their perceived “canons.” More importantly, Chi urges a departure from Sontag’s paradigmatic approach to camp, directing attention to criticisms of Sontag – including her covert homophobia – articulated by such “queer” scholars as D.A. Miller and David Bergman (see Chapter 3 for further discussions of their works).15 Professors Liou Liang-ya and Chang Hsiao-hung similarly played crucial roles in the discursive association of camp and queerness in 1990s Taiwan. While Liou’s various writings call attention to the repressed male homoeroticism underlying camp expressions in literature,16 in a seminal article, Chang investigates the convergences and divergences between theories of cross-identification, particularly Luce Irigaray’s gender mimicry, Homi K. Bhabha’s colonial mimicry, and Judith Butler’s gender parody as a prime embodiment of “queer camp.”17 Both Chang and Liou translate the English word “camp” as “jiaxian,”18 which resonates with both the queer experience of “passing” and the manifestation of “the lie that tells the truth” (from Philip Core).19 Chi Ta-wei wittily translates camp into “lu yin,” a queering of the official word for campground – “luying” – with an added sense of naughty exhibitionism;20 Yeh De-hsuan, in his brilliant analysis of gay novelist Pai Hsien-yung’s work (see Chapter 1) from a revisionist camp perspective, translates the word into “gan pu,”21 which sounds like the word “camp” but 14 Sang, “Cheng Dieyi.” 15 Chi Ta-wei, “Haiyao huigue Susan Sontag ma? – lun CAMP,” Wan’an babilun (Sexually Dissident Notes from Babylon), pp. 266-269. This originally appeared in Zhongyang Daily in 1996 (specific date unavailable). 16 See, for instance, Liou’s article, “Oumei xiandai zhuyi xiaoshuo li de nan tongxing yuwang,” originally published in Lianhe wenxue (February 1997), pp. 51-55. Reprinted in Liou Liang-ya, Yuwang gengyi shi (Engendering Dissident Desires), pp. 155-164. 17 Chang Hsiao-hung, “Yuejie rentong: nifang/xueshe/jiaxian de lunshu weiji,” Yuwang xin ditu (Queer Desire), pp. 158-200. 18 This translation is adopted by Evans Chan in the Taiwanese edition of Sontag’s selected writings. See Susan Sontag wenxuan (Selected writings by Susan Sontag), pp. 11, 52-53. 19 Core, Camp. 20 Chi Ta-wei (ed.), Ku’er qishilu (Queer Archipelago), pp. 60-61. 21 Yeh De-hsuan, “Liang zhong ‘lu ying/yin’ de fangfa” (Go Camping).

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conveys a sense of the emboldened queer politics of the 1990s.22 The latter reverberated through the work of contemporary gay activist-documentarist Mickey Chen (1967-2018), who self-fashioned his public persona as feminine and literally “campy/lu yin” (to confront “heterosexual patriarchy”).23 His celebrated Boys for Beauty (1999), a participatory documentary featuring three young gay men, was likewise imbued with a sense of camp humor informed by positivist queer politics.24 Yeh De-hsuan’s revisionist camp approach to Pai Hsien-yung’s modern(ist) literature and Xiaomingxiong’s camp interpretation of historical figure Qu Yuan both reverberate, to some extent, with the emerging queer discourse surrounding “Lady White Snake” (Baishe zhuan) in Chinese popular culture and folk literature. With its myriad variations and adaptations through the centuries, “Lady White Snake” basically tells the story of a snake fairy who passes as a woman (Lady White/Bai niangzi) and falls in love with a man (Xu Xian), but the couple’s union is eventually compromised by a zealous abbot (Fa Hai), who insists that fairies and humans be kept apart. Traditionally, this story is considered an embodiment of the deep-seated conflict between affection (qing) and the Law ( fa: reminiscent of the abbot’s name). More recently, the sexuality of Lady White’s young maid Green (a green snake in disguise) has attracted critical attention – particularly regarding her potentially homoerotic relationship with Lady White25 – while Lady White has been reclaimed by the tongzhi/queer community as a quintessential trope of queer desire and queer experience surrounding passing. Theater artists Lin Hwai-min and Tian Qi-yuan (1964-1996),26 film critics Li You-xin 22 “Gan pu” has become the most popular translation of “camp” in Taiwan and was used in the official literature for Taiwan LGBT Pride (October 2016); it was also the main theme for the fourth Taiwan International Queer Film Festival (2017). See also scholarly articles such as Luo Jing-yao, “‘Fu Muo’ guohou laidian ‘Yongbao’”; Ivy Chang, Xingbie yuejie yu qu’er biaoyan, p. 184; Shih Ming-huai, “‘Chuan’ zhu zuihou yi xiao”. For an account of the 2017 TIQFF with a camp main theme, see Lin Xing-hong and Bo’ang Cici, “Ku’er gan-pu, qunyao chugui”. 23 Liu Xiang-yin and Mickey Chun-chi Chen,“‘Maili huai nuren’ Chen Chun-chi:” (‘Pretty wicked woman’ Mickey Chen: I enjoy crashing rigid heterosexual patriarchy). 24 This seemingly joyful version of tongzhi camp is, nonetheless, inseparable from underlying negative feelings associated with being tongzhi/queer in mainstream Chinese societies. In his bestselling autobiography, Mickey Chen recounted his traumatic experience of being exiled from his family for being gay; Zhan Hong-zhi, in the preface, likens this to the theme of Nezha (see Chapter 1). Zhan, quoted in Mickey Chen, Taipei baba, New York mama, p. 5. 25 See for instance, Li You-xin, “Cong Xingxing, Yueliang, Taiyang yu Baishe zhuan kan dianying zhong de nüxing zhuyi yu nu tongxinglian” (Feminism and female homoeroticism in Sun, Moon and Star and The White Snake). 26 Highly acclaimed theater artist Tian Qi-yuan founded the troupe, “Linjie dian” (Critical Point). In 1993 he adapted “Lady White Snake” as “Bai shui” (White Water), an all-men performance that

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and Wen Tien-hsiang,27 literature scholars Lucifer Hung (with Chi Ta-wei) and Chang Chih-wei,28 novelists Li Bihua and Yan Geling,29 and filmmakers Tsui Hark and Hung Hung30 have all been significant contributors to the queer reading and rewriting of “Lady White Snake.” Taiwan’s pioneering gay film critic Li You-xin,31 for example, considers this an allegory of gay men falling for straight men, while noted (gay) film critic Wen Tien-hsiang highlights the incongruity between identity and desire in Lady White (a snake falling for a non-snake: fei wo zu lei), aided by passing behaviors. Alongside Lucifer Hung and Chang Chih-wei, Sinophone queer scholar Alvin Wong, analyzing the Taiwan TV adaptation New Legend of Madame White Snake (1992), likewise regards the text as fertile ground for imagining perverse sexuality and transgender subjectivity.32 Even when they do not challenged the usual heteronormative version of the story. In 1995, Tian again adapted the story as “Shui you,” an all-women outdoor performance, for the first Gay and Lesbian Awakening Day (GLAD) at National Taiwan University on June 1. Tian died of AIDS at the age of 32. For a brief account of the two plays, see Tsai Yu-chen, “Xingbie shi renle zui gulao de biaoyan” (Gender is the oldest human performance), p. 65. 27 Li, You-xin. “Cong nan tongxinglian yu ‘Bai she zhuan’ [Lady White Snake] dao Bao ren [Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)],” pp. 150-153 (reprinted in Li You-xin, Nan tongxinglian dianying, pp. 376-379); Wen Tien-hsiang, “She pi xia de yuwang,” Yingmi cangbaotu, pp. 273-283. 28 Chi Ta-wei, and Lucifer Hung Ling, “Shenti xiang yige yaoxiu de zongzi” (reprinted in Chi Ta-wei, ed., Ku’er qishilu, pp. 71-76). See also Chang Chih-wei, “Bai she/she zhuan: biantai de qingyu yuyan” (M. White Snake’s Queer Discourse of Desire), pp. 31-46. 29 Li Bihua, Qing she; Yan Geling, “Bai she,” Bai she. 30 Tsui Hark’s Green Snake (1993) is based on Li Bihua’s novel Qing she. Hung Hung’s independent production The Human Comedy (2001) incorporates Tian Qi-yuan’s all-male stage version of “Lady White Snake” in the middle part of the film’s three sections. 31 Li You-xin, now renamed Alphonse Perroquet Quail Youth-Leigh, is such a legendary figure in Taiwan’s film culture that Tsai Ming-liang gave him cameo appearances in both What Time Is It There? (2001) and Goodbye Dragon Inn (2004). In What Time, Li You-xin is shown looking for an oldie, Sun, Moon and Star (Yi Wen, 1961) at “Qiu-Hai-Tang,” a resourceful art and classic cinema vendor widely known among local cinephiles. While the audiences get a frontal image of Li in What Time, in Goodbye Li is only shown from behind, sitting next to Tsai Ming-liang watching King Hu’s martial arts classic Dragon Gate Inn (1967). We see his famous puffy gray long hair, contrasting with Tsai’s bald head. Li appreciates the framing in these two films, as Tsai was “generous enough to use two films to present me […] in a supplementary way that depicts me as a whole by covering my front and back respectively. [When watching Goodbye] I was very shocked, and then realized the deep concern and love involving [Tsai’s] decision only to shoot my back [for Goodbye]” (my translation). See Li You-xin, Wo shenai de Resnais, Fellini ji qita (My beloved Resnais, Fellini…), p. 381. For Yun Hao Liu, the portrait of Tsai shoulder-to-shoulder with Li in Goodbye functions as a corporeal signature: “the signature of their bodies.” Yung Hao Liu, “‘I Thought of the Times We Were in Front of the Flowers’,” p. 181. With Li You-xin’s cameo, Ying Cheng-ru’s experimental narrative short, The Life of Silence (2015), is also dedicated to Li. 32 Alvin Ka Hin Wong, “Transgenderism as a Heuristic Device”.

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use the word “camp,” these insights on “Lady White Snake,” in my view, nevertheless reflect certain basics of gay camp. I consider the queer discourse surrounding “Lady White Snake” a partial contemporary materialization of gay-oriented camp sensibility that has found its expression, albeit unnamed, in the Chinese cultural scene. These various articulations about camp from Taiwan and Hong Kong comprise the platform for my exploration of gay camp in a Chinese cultural setting. This exploration is, so to speak, a “cultural translation”33 of gay camp in a Chinese context: by “gay camp” I mean the particular camp discourse epitomized by Newton and Babuscio (whose writings have also informed articles by Sang, Chi, and Yeh). According to this formulation, camp features irony/incongruity, theatricality, aestheticism/stylization, and humor, and all these features are of peculiar relevance to homosexual experience. While irony reflects “the perception of incongruity” faced by gays in a largely straight world,34 theatricality mirrors “the notion of life-as-theater,” epitomized by the gay experience of “passing for straight.”35 Whereas aestheticism translates gay people’s desire to challenge homosexual stigma and assert their self-integrity by means of “def iantly different” stylization in life and art,36 camp humor represents a strategy of survival through which gay people transform pathos into laughter in a hostile environment.37 What is underlined here is the “relationship between activities, individuals, situations and gayness.”38 For Newton, camp does not figure in the eye of any unspecified beholder (cf. Sontag) but “in the eye of the homosexual beholder.”39 Babuscio unequivocally weds that homosexual beholder to the so-called “gay sensibility”: “a perception of the world which is colored, shaped, directed, and defined by the fact of one’s gayness.”40 Taken together, the experience of social alienation due to one’s gayness helps shape one’s gay sensibility, which in turn helps that gay individual to potentially exhibit – or perceive in someone or something – a camp flavor as characterized above. Given that gay sensibility primarily designates “a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling that spring from the fact of social 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Young, “Cultural Translation as Hybridisation.” Newton, “Role Models,” p. 107. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” pp. 44, 45. Ibid., p. 42. Newton, “Role Models,” pp. 109-110. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” pp. 47-49. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” p. 41 (original emphasis). Newton, “Role Models,” p. 106 (emphasis added). Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” p. 40.

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oppression,”41 it is plausible to suggest that the way social oppression affects gay people also affects the very formation of gay sensibility in accordance with cultural situation. An anatomy of the idea of “gay sensibility” vis-à-vis social oppression in a Chinese cultural milieu thus underpins my translation of gay camp into tongzhi camp. The following discussion first unpacks “gay sensibility,” which is supplemented, I contend, by a structure of feeling mediated by gay shame and gay melancholy, both of which carry a particular Chinese inflection. The second section then examines this queer structure of feeling in the work of lesbian filmmaker Zero Mai-ling Chou, particularly her documentary Corner’s (2001), which reflects the subtle transformation of that queer feeling into camp expression. Chou’s sensitivity to camp also informs her subsequent feature Splendid Float (2004), which deploys a camp aesthetic with a distinct local flavor. Finally, the chapter analyzes Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole (1998), where tongzhi camp combines with the musical genre to subvert the homosexual closet.

Queer Structures of Feeling: Gay Shame and Gay Melancholy, Chinese Style Let me first unpack the somewhat nebulous notion of “gay sensibility” by supplementing it with Raymond Williams’s idea of “structures of feeling,” as well as studies on human affect in general. In Marxism and Literature, Williams diagnoses a problem with most social analysis: the “habitual past tense” underpinning such analysis necessarily entails a set of “finished products.”42 This procedure, while fixing the social forms in which we participate, inevitably misses the lived, affective, unfixed, and half-articulated way most of us, most of the time, experience our lives. It reinforces the separation of the social – “the known relationships, institutions, formations, positions” – from “the personal: this, here, now, alive, active, ‘subjective’.”43 To reintroduce the personal and the empirical into forms of social analysis, Williams proposes the term “structures of feeling,” wherein: “feeling” is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of “world-view” or “ideology.” […] [We] must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs […] [We] are concerned with meanings and values 41 Ibid. 42 Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature, p. 128. 43 Ibid.

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as they are actively lived and felt, and [with] the relations between […] formal or systematic beliefs […] and acted and justified experiences […] We are talking about […] specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. 44

Williams’s rethinking of thought through feeling (and vice versa) thus provides a crucial link between not only the social and the personal, but the cognitive and the affective. He further urges readers to conceive of feeling in relation to “structure”: We are then defining these [affective] elements as a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension […] [W]e are defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis […] has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics. 45

In other words, the concept of a structure of feeling, while emphasizing the sociality of affect, calls attention to those structures mediating between the social and the personal that are “more ephemeral and transitory than set ideologies and institutions.”46 Given that “set” ideologies and institutions are predominantly heteronormative, the connotation of the “ephemeral and transitory” potentially emanates a particular queer appeal. Indeed, José Esteban Muñoz considers the notion of “ephemera” vital to reading queerness and to claiming “evidence” of queer existence in a heteronormative society.47 Ephemera, in Muñoz’s view, are “the remains that are often embedded in queer acts” and, by extension, queer artworks. 48 Though not easy to reveal amid the “regimes of the visible and the tactile,” queer ephemera nevertheless demonstrate a kind of substance, a structuring “materiality” inseparable from “emotions, queer memories, and structures of feeling that haunt [queer subjects].”49 If queer existence in a heteronormative society is often marked by an ephemeral quality, how then can we approach a queer 44 Ibid., p. 132. 45 Ibid. (original emphasis). 46 Flatley, Affective Mapping, p. 25. 47 Muñoz, “Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling,” in Cruising Utopia, p. 65. 48 Ibid. 49 Muñoz, “Ghosts of Public Sex,” in Cruising Utopia, p. 41.

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structure of feeling, with its tangible yet transitory materiality? In addition to diagnosing certain queer gestures and artworks (as Muñoz does), I suggest that expanding research on human affect also identifies an important means of understanding queer experiences and queer structures of feeling. a) Gay Shame Arguably, queer structures of feeling are inevitably mediated by two particular kinds of affect: shame and melancholia. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has posited that experiencing shame has a foundational role in queer subjectformation. In her influential article “Queer Performativity” she argues: “Shame is a bad feeling attached to what one is: one therefore is something, in experiencing shame. The place of identity, the structure of ‘identity’ […] may be established and naturalized in the first instance through shame.”50 Meanwhile, Sedgwick associates susceptibility to shame with the “terrifying powerlessness of gender-dissonant or otherwise stigmatized childhood,” in which she notably sees the political potential for queer activism: “queer is a politically potent term […] because, far from being capable of being detached from the childhood scene of shame, it cleaves to that scene as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy.”51 Along with other critics and activists, Sedgwick has contributed tremendously to the position that transforms the feeling of shame into something of particular attraction, something functioning as a basis for alternative models of politics. Michael Warner, for instance, considers shame the basis for a “special kind of sociality” in queer culture, through which “the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality.”52 Drawing on Sedgwick and Warner, Douglas Crimp likewise foregrounds the capacity of shame for “articulating collectivities of the shamed.”53 This general optimism about the possibilities of shame that underlies much critical and activist work, however, is overshadowed by certain criticisms. In the wake of the 2003 “Gay Shame” conference in Michigan, Judith Halberstam, for example, poignantly demonstrates that the current “romanticization” of gay shame has unwittingly perpetuated “the limited scope of white gay 50 Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity,” p. 12 (original emphasis). 51 Ibid., p. 4. 52 Warner, The Trouble with Normal, p. 36. 53 Crimp, “Mario Montez, For Shame,” p. 66.

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male concerns and interests,” whereas shame for women and shame for people of color “plays out in different ways and creates different modes of abjection, marginalization, and self-abnegation.”54 In their discussions of shame, Hiram Perez, Elspeth Probyn, and Jennifer Moon foreground issues of race, gender, and butch lesbianism respectively, while Sally Munt, in her seminal monograph on the “cultural politics” of shame, urges for a more historicized understanding of gay shame.55 These and other revisionist writings on shame rally against the tendency that “universalizes” the subject of shame,56 converging at George Chauncey’s call for studies on shame that simultaneously attend to “[the concept’s] historicity and cultural specificity in any particular context.”57 By emphasizing the “operations” of shame and their differentiating “effects” on male homosexual subjects in 1950s New York,58 Chauncey’s analysis also exemplifies a discursive approach, which (in line with my previous “translation” of mass camp in a transcultural framework) is key to my current reformulation of such notions as shame, gay sensibility, and ultimately gay camp through the lens of a Chinese cultural setting. My intervention in the discourse of shame vis-à-vis Chinese queer subjects stands between a generalization of shame and a specification of shame. On the one hand, we all experience shame sometimes – be it about our sexual preferences, genders, ethnicities, classes, bodies, or otherwise. And because shame is often woven into the most personal and important parts of ourselves, experiences of shame, particularly childhood experiences, are constitutive of our subject formations. On the other hand, current discussions on shame in Anglo-American scholarship tend to focus on its influence on individuals, and how it helps individuals engender certain group identifications against the normative and the socially privileged. In the context of Chinese societies, however, families were – and largely still are – the focal, fundamental units upon which the larger society is established. Family also governs social ethics – such as filiality (xiao) and loyalty (zhong), which reinforce the nexus between individual and familystate ( jia-guo)59 – and social networks, as epitomized by guanxi,60 based on 54 Halberstam, “Shame and White Gay Masculinity,” pp. 221, 231, 223. 55 Perez, “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!”; Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame; Moon, “Gay Shame and the Politics of Identity”; Munt, Queer Attachments. 56 Halperin and Traub, “Beyond Gay Pride,” p. 34. 57 Chauncey, “The Trouble with Shame,” p. 279. 58 Ibid., pp. 277-282. 59 See Chapter 1 for details. 60 He You-hui, Peng Si-qing, and Zhao Zhi-yu, Shidao renxin (The way of the world and the way of the heart), pp. 241-257; Kipnis, Producing Guanxi; Yan Yunxiang, The Flow of Gifts; Mayfair

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familial kinship61 and mediated by reciprocal “human feelings” (renqing).62 Family units, accordingly, are no less important than individual selves with respect to subject formation. In such a social context, shame not only exercises its influence on individuals, but also affects individuals through families, wherein the whole family usually has to share the humiliation imposed on one of its members. Thus, in more conventional scenarios,63 when an individual’s family finds out he or she is gay, they press the individual to pass as straight and enter a heterosexual marriage, while the other family members all end up in the “closet” together. Gay shame is treated as a “family shame” ( jia chou), while the act of keeping that family shame from the public ( jia chou buke wai yang), from the vantage point of hetero-patriarchy, in effect saves the “face” (lian and mianzi) of both the gay individual and his or her entire family.64 As I will stress in the following, tongzhi camp can be properly understood as symptomatic of a queer structure of feeling marked by shame as well as a deep tension involving tongzhi’s blood families; both these factors, however, are further conditioned by two important social mechanisms: Chinese familialism and the “face” discourse. Mei-hui Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets; Hwang Kwang-kuo, “Face and Favor: The Chinese Power Game.” 61 Mayfair Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets. pp. 111-115. 62 Yan Yunxiang. Private Life Under Socialism, pp. 38-41. See also Yan, The Flow of Gifts, pp. 122-146. 63 It should be noted that in Taiwan, gay-identifying subjects have gained greater autonomy regarding their marital status in the new millennium, partly because remaining single or remaining childless in marriage have become less unusual even among the straight demographic. Same-sex marriage has also become a viable choice in Taiwan since mid-2019. However, these are very recent developments that could hardly have been imagined before the 2000s. In Mainland China, however, there is little change in sight: forced marriages still take place, while fake or “contract” marriages between gay men and lesbians have become increasingly common since the mid-to-late 2000s. For two brilliant analyses of Taiwan’s changing familial culture, see Hu Yu-ying, “Cong ‘xiansheng’ dao ‘guanxi’”; Brainer, “New Identities or New Intimacies?” 64 In the Teddy Bear-winning documentary Small Talk (Huang Hui-chen, 2017), the director films her mother, a butch lesbian (or “T” for tomboy) who was coerced into a heterosexual marriage in 1977, aged 21. While enduring frequent domestic violence, she earned bread for the family by performing rituals as a priestess, before eventually escaping with her two young daughters, hiding from her husband until he passed away. The director, after having her own daughter in 2012, revisited her family history, at one point confronting her two uncles and grandmother about whether they had known her mom’s sexual identity (the fact that “she likes women”). The family’s performative denial on camera indicates the “truth” (or rather, unacknowledgeable truth) about the tension between a butch lesbian, her family, and the larger societal and religious system at that historical moment. For the director’s own account of her family saga, see Huang Hui-chen, Wo han wo de T mama (The Priestess Walks Alone).

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The “face” discourse designates the boundary that articulates the self in social life. In a 1944 essay, anthropologist Hu Hsien Chin points out that there are two words for face in Chinese: lian, “the respect of the group for a man with a good moral reputation,” and mianzi, “a reputation achieved through getting on in life: through success and ostentation.”65 While lian is more related to one’s moral reputation, mianzi is more associated with one’s social status and social capital.66 As Angela Zito nicely puts it, lian is the more fundamental layer; it is that claim to dignity that all human beings share. Thus to “tear one’s face” (polian) is very serious and results in shame. Mianzi, on the other hand, is additional, accruing upon one’s lian as one grows in social influence and power. Both layers of interfacing self depend for their construction upon interaction with others. In other words, in creating “face” a surface meets a gaze.67

Here the words “lian,” “shame,” “surface,” and “gaze” (or “visibility,” as Andrew Kipnis would say)68 warrant attention. For a gay subject to have his or her identity exposed as homosexual is, in many cases, “to lose face (lian), to have one’s claim on a social position radically destabilized.”69 To save one’s lian and to avoid shame, then, means that the gay subject often has to subjugate him/herself to the heteronormative public gaze by passing, or symbolically putting on a straight mask.70 Aided by techniques of shaming and dissimulation, the Chinese concept of lian helps foster the queer sensibility gravitating toward the surface, role-playing, and theatricality of 65 Hu Hsien Chin, “The Chinese Concept of ‘Face’,” p. 45. 66 Hu also points out that mianzi differs greatly from lian, in that “it can be borrowed, struggled for, added to, padded – all terms indicating a gradual increase in volume.” “The Chinese Concept of ‘Face’,” p. 61. On the intricate dynamics between mianzi and favor (renqing) in the Chinese power game, see Hwang, “Face and Favor: The Chinese Power Game.” 67 Zito, “Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries,” p. 119. 68 Kipnis, “‘Face’: An Adaptable Discourse of Social Surfaces.” Kipnis contends that while lian is directly visible in social interaction, mianzi involves a “second-order visibility” in order to function, always involving “at least three people” and “a looking at” (p. 126). 69 Martin, Situating Sexualities, p. 219. 70 For some local accounts of the way the discourse of lian functions in respect to Taiwan’s (female) tongzhi subjects, see Cheng Mei-li, Nu’er quan, Chapter 2 (esp. pp. 67-72); Jian Jia-xin, “Huanchu nu tongzhi,” Chapter 4 (esp. pp. 69-71); Chang Chuan-fen, Jiemei xiqiang, Chapter 2 (esp. 68-69). For some accounts of the “face” discourse vis-à-vis Hong Kong gay and lesbian subjects, see Travis Kong, “Queer at Your Own Risk”; Dang, Conditional Spaces, pp. 33-39. In the context of Chinese lesbian community, see Lucetta Kam, Shanghai Lalas, pp. 69, 91; Ana Huang, “On the Surface: ‘T’ and Transgender Identity in Chinese Lesbian Culture,” pp. 115-117. As for Chinese gay men, see Travis Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, pp. 160-173.

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camp aesthetic.71 It potentially helps facilitate a sense of camp appreciation in many tongzhi/queer subjects. Earlier I suggested that discussions of “Lady White Snake” reflect on gay camp in their appeal to the incongruity between desire and identity and the queer experience of passing. This gay-oriented camp sensibility is transfigured from the tragic, fatalistic embodiment of the serpent into a humorous, defiant strategy in Notes of a Crocodile (1994; 2017 in English),72 an instant classic by lesbian novelist Qiu Miaojin (1969-1995). The novel deploys a dual narrative: one focused on the turbulent life and love affairs of a young lesbian nicknamed Lazi, the other on a cartoonish, genderless crocodile who wears a “human suit” (ren zhuang) to avoid undue attention in contemporary Taipei. Fran Martin suggests the crocodile can be read as “a textual ‘substitute’ for Lazi herself,” its disguised identity standing for Lazi “as closeted – or ‘masked’ – lesbian.”73 Importantly, by dramatizing the media’s voyeurism regarding the crocodile, the novel (to paraphrase Martin) simultaneously criticizes the “homophobic gaze” of the general public who, in their attempts to unmask and identify the “faces” of tongzhi individuals, mean to inflict “shame” and harm on those tongzhi subjects.74 While I share Chi Ta-wei’s opinion that the crocodile’s constant masquerade is “a play on camp,”75 I also want to call attention to the intricate interplay between gaze, face/lian, and shame associated with this masquerade and queer passing (also addressed by Zito and Martin). b) Gay Melancholy The other kind of affect that I suggest is also constitutive of queer structures of feeling is melancholia, which Sigmund Freud famously defines in contrast with mourning in “Mourning and Melancholia.”76 According to Freud, mourning is a process of grief in face of loss, the loss of “a loved person, or […] some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” Whereas the libido in mourning is eventually transferred from the lost object to elsewhere, melancholia – an 71 Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” p. 45. 72 Qiu Miaojin. Eryu shouji (Notes of a Crocodile). Translated by Bonnie Huie, its English version was published by New York Review Books in 2017. For a brilliant analysis of the novel, see Liou Liang-ya, Yuwang gengyi shi, pp. 84-91, 111-152. 73 Martin, Situating Sexualities, p. 226. 74 Ibid., pp. 215-35. 75 Chi Ta-wei, Wan’an babilun, p. 145. 76 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy,” pp. 584-589.

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unresolved grief, continuously engaging with loss and its remains – is a pathological mourning without end. In The Ego and the Id, Freud elaborates on the role of melancholia in ego-formation: the ego, like a melancholic in denial of their loss, regularly “incorporates” attributes of lost objects and hence sustains these lost objects in its very structure, through imitation and identification.77 The ego is therefore “constituted through the remains of [lost or] abandoned object-cathexes.”78 Douglas Crimp and Ann Cvetkovich have written about Freudian melancholia in relation to AIDS activism,79 while David Eng, Paul Gilroy, Anne Cheng and Liu Wen, among others, have drawn on this theory to elucidate race and postcolonial politics.80Among the most influential interventions in 1990s gender and queer studies came with Judith Butler’s work on gender through performativity and melancholia. Butler perceives “a melancholic structure” in gender identification”:81 feminine gender is formed “through the incorporative fantasy by which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love, an exclusion never grieved, but ‘preserved’ through the heightening of feminine identification itself.”82 The formation of gendered identities for Butler thus involves the foreclosure and loss of homosexual attachments, combined with a refusal to grieve that loss while incorporating it into the ego; the subject thereby experiences a strengthened identification with and impulse to reiteratively perform either masculinity or femininity, both of which nonetheless are symptomatic of “the traces of an ungrieved and ungrievable [homosexual] love.”83 Butler terms the consolidation of masculinity and femininity in heterosexuality predicated on the repudiation of homosexuality heterosexual melancholy.84 77 Freud, The Ego and the Id. 78 Eng and Kazanjian (eds.), “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, p. 4. 79 Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy”; Crimp, “Melancholia and Moralism,” in Melancholia and Moralism, pp. 1-26; Cvetkovich, “Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism,” in An Archive of Feelings, pp. 205-238. 80 Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia”; Eng, The Feeling of Kinship (see especially Chapter 3 on transnational adoption, particularly the influence of racial melancholia on Asian transnational adoptees); Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. See also Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race; Liu Wen, “Narrating Against Assimilation and the Empire”; Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora; Muñoz, Disidentifications. 81 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 57-72. The term “melancholic structure” appears on pp. 68 and 69. 82 Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 235. 83 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 140. 84 Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 235-236. Elsewhere Butler succinctly defines a “heterosexual melancholia” as “a refusal of homosexual attachment that emerge within heterosexuality as the consolidation of gender norms (“I am a woman, therefore I do not want one”).” See Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 199. See also Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. pp. 146-147.

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Is there a gay version of Butler’s melancholy? Like Crimp, she points out a “gay melancholia” marked by a kind of loss that is, however, not so much a psychic one as the actual loss of people who have died from AIDS and who remain largely ungrieved in a heterosexist, anti-gay culture.85 Butler also asserts that homosexual identities may be founded on a repudiation of heterosexual cathexis, which gives rise to a “specifically gay melancholia” analogous to heterosexual melancholia.86 However, elsewhere Butler concedes the validity of accounts of homosexuality that do not have repudiation as their basis, and that do not presuppose a rigorous binary associated with that repudiation.87 On top of this, I find Butler’s explication of homosexual identities, together with her idea of gay melancholia, overemphasizes the choice of sexual object while unwittingly downplaying the social consequence of that choice. Yet this social consequence is vitally important to our understanding of gay melancholy, particularly in a Chinese cultural setting. In what follows I echo Didier Eribon in shifting our approach from one that over-relies on psychoanalytic schema to his general sociological method. From a sociological perspective, gay melancholy is arguably configured by the rejection of heteronormativity. For gay subjects, the mourning for “ways of life and forms of relations to others that have been set aside or done without, willingly or not, because of their sexuality” is unending.88 For Eribon, central to this structure of feeling is the loss of “the sometimes unavowed dream of family life” and particularly “the loss of family ties.”89 It should be noted that such family ties, in Chinese societies, designate not only the parents, siblings, and close family circle, but to some extent also indicate the social network and an individual’s subject position in relation to the family unit. These relations are, as previously discussed, historically entwined with the discourses of filiality (xiao), family-state ( jia-guo), “face” (lian and mianzi), and guanxi (social networking through familial kinship and reciprocal “human feelings” [renqing]). To identify as tongzhi in Chinese society, accordingly, is a bitter negotiation between avowing and expressing one’s desire and identity, and affirming one’s position in the family-based, heteronormative social institution. While one’s pursuit of a tongzhi identity usually puts at risk his/her family ties and social position, securing one’s ties for a tongzhi subject likewise means compromising his/ 85 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, pp. 147-148. 86 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 149. See also Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 113. 87 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 164. 88 Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, p. 37. 89 Ibid.

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her desire and self-identification (repressing one’s homosexual desire and passing as straight, or entering a heterosexual marriage while leading a double life).90 This bitter negotiation or trade-off, therefore, affects a sense of loss and alienation integral to tongzhi subject formation. As Marco Wan comments, however “well-intended” the question of (straight) marriage may be, when raised by friends and family members, By assuming that I could be part of the institution as it currently exists, it effaces a fundamental part of me from the family gathering. There is a sense in which I’m not fully there at the moment of utterance, because there is a part of me that simply cannot exist within the logic of [the] question [aligned with the heteronormative institution].91

Heteronormative institutions, in the meantime, abound with rosy imaginaries for straight individuals regarding marriages, families and future. The absence of equivalent imaginaries for tongzhi individuals, by contrast, inevitably installs an obstacle to tongzhi identification, and furthermore, by detaching tongzhi from the projected life trajectory naturalized through straight lifestyle, deeply inscribes the sense of loss that so many tongzhi subjects have to confront and may even be haunted by throughout their lives. All in all, gay melancholy in Chinese society, I contend, can be understood first and foremost as a structure of feeling constituted by a sense of loss that exists in immense tension with heteronormative family and social institutions. c) A Temporal Dimension of the Queer Structure of Feeling My conceptualization of gay shame and gay melancholia in a Chinese cultural setting coincides in significant ways with Williams’s structure of feeling, which reflects on “experience at the juncture of the psychic and the social.”92 Admittedly, the social changes, so too does the empirical (i.e. in how we experience the social), which in turn may gradually have a psychic impact and even alter the way the feeling is structured. In exploring gay shame and melancholia, I by no means preclude the possibility of structural changes in the psyche and feeling due to larger social changes over time. For 90 Jeffreys and Yu, Sex in China, p. 91. 91 Marco Wan, “Dignity and Shame, Or, a Personal Take on LGBTQ Rights in Hong Kong,” p. 129. 92 Love, Feeling Backward, p. 12.

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instance, the gay/tongzhi movements have to a certain degree re-signified and countered the meaning and feeling of gay shame through the affirmative idea of gay pride. The possibility of same-sex marriage (or at least civil union) and “diverse family formation” (duoyuan chengjia),93 and the increasing viability of artificial insemination or assisted reproductive technologies in the region94 have also, to some extent, revised the bleak imaginaries associated with gay lifestyles, which, as discussed, are fundamental to gay melancholy. Acknowledging such changes, I see the composition and significance of gay shame and gay melancholy not as fixed attributes but as indices that allow for and adapt to alterations in time and place. Equally important: any meaningful alterations in the structure or significance of gay shame and gay melancholy must take place over time; few (if any) social changes take effect overnight. But discrimination also alters in form and scale all the time (marriage equality is thus but one major battleground for the tongzhi/queer communities against forms of homophobia). Even as the fight for gay liberation against homophobia has made progress, now-dominant gay affirmative psychology, as Liu Wen notes, has been troubled by “a paradox, especially in social and behavioral sciences, that continues to bleed through our social reality and queer scholarship. In it, the image of the happy and healthy queer is [nonetheless] idealized in the context of [continuing] queer vulnerability to poor mental health and suicidal ideation.”95 Shame and melancholy are inevitably marked by what Sara Ahmed terms a sense of “stickiness” against social and cognitive changes.96 Once inflicted, they are deeply woven into the psyche and long-enduring, with regard to both the individual and the collective. In his book on the Broadway musical, D.A. Miller, while recognizing the important social and cognitive changes in the wake of gay liberation, underlines the continuity between individual experience before and after such changes, particularly the persistence of one’s adolescent feelings into adulthood: “the solitude, shame, secretiveness 93 For various accounts of the legal processes involved in “marriage equality” (hunyin pingquan) and relevant issues such as “gay parenting” (tongzhi qinquan) and “gender equality education” (xingping jiaoyu) in Taiwan in recent years, see the special issue titled “Marriage Equality in Taiwan” in Forum in Women’s and Gender Studies No. 107 (October 2017), pp. 6-107. For debates about the marriage institution among tongzhi/queer groups and activists in Taiwan, see Szu-Ying Ho, “Zhi po bu li, wuyi weiji” (Destruction without re-construction). 94 For a brilliant discussion of the cases in Taiwan, see Szu-Ying Ho, “‘Feifa’ qingjing xia de ku’er shengzhi” (Queering reproduction in a prohibited context). 95 Liu Wen, “Toward a Queer Psychology of Affect,” p. 47. 96 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 194.

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by which the impossibility of social integration was first internalized […] the excessive sentimentality that was the necessary condition of sentiments allowed no real object,” and “the intense, senseless joy […] extricable from [these destitutions].”97 Examining gay shame and gay stigma, Sedgwick and Butler likewise foreground the tenacious influence of both personal and collective histories marked by harm, emphasizing that influence’s political usage in today’s queer politics, wherein a “stigmatized childhood”98 or a collective past of “accusation, pathologization, insult” must be constantly recalled and reworked toward “futural imaginings.”99 In her articulation of a queer historiography through negative feelings, Heather Love, while urging a fuller engagement with the queer past “as past” (as opposed to being in “haste to refunction such experiences”),100 further points out an intriguing factor in historicity that is beyond the personal and the empirical. This factor, according to Love, manifests in “the subjectivities of queer men and women who grew up after Stonewall [but] who are as intimately familiar with the structures of feeling [that] the rhetoric of pride [is] meant to displace.”101 The circulation of pre-Stonewall structures of feeling throughout the post-Stonewall world thus suggests “a historical continuity even more complex […] than that of individual character;” Love argues that “direct experience of the pre-Stonewall moment is not solely responsible for a range of feelings that we today designate as pre-Stonewall.”102 The insistent political appeal to gay pride in various tongzhi/queer movements also ironically attests to the haunting existence and lasting influence of shame, melancholy, and other negative feelings. I believe this ambivalent status and continuity of feeling is imperative to our understanding why gay camp or tongzhi camp – an aesthetic purportedly animated by the particular experience and affect associated with being gay/tongzhi in a predominantly oppressive social environment – is still an indelible cultural presence in times when tongzhi/queer activisms have been gaining political ground. That is, while “oppression and camp are inextricably linked, the waning of the [oppression],” however, does not automatically lead to what Daniel Harris calls “the death of [camp],”103 not least because of the feelings oppression produces have such a lingering influence. 97 Miller, Places for Us: Essays on the Broadway Musical, p. 26. 98 Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity,” p. 12. 99 Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 226, 228. 100 Love, Feeling Backward, p. 19. 101 Ibid., p. 20. 102 Ibid. 103 Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, p. 34.

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From the Queer Feeling to Tongzhi Camp: A Case Study of Zero Chou This section approaches gay shame and gay melancholy from another perspective, as two salient coordinates that structure queer feeling and underpin tongzhi camp. In particular, I focus on Taiwanese lesbian filmmaker Zero Chou’s work, examining the dynamic between gay shame, gay people’s blood families, and the larger social institution, alongside the melancholic feeling interwoven into Chou’s work. Chou’s documentary Corner’s (2001) not only reflects the queer structure of feeling under discussion, but captures the subtle transformation of that queer feeling into camp expression. Chou’s sensitivity to camp is also evident in her subsequent feature Splendid Float (2004), whose camp aesthetic strategically enlists a peculiar indigenous manifestation. Essentially, Chou’s sensitivity to queer feeling and tongzhi camp straddles the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, between fiction and documentary, and between textual space and tongzhi/queer living space. In Corner’s, Chou and her partner-cinematographer, Hoho Yun-ho Liu, reflect on how socially normalizing forces configure the living space for the tongzhi/queer demographic in Taipei around the millennium. That living space, as the film suggests, is a contracted one that intersects with multifarious spheres: concrete and abstract, public and private, those that are seemingly abstract yet palpably concrete, ostensibly public yet intimately private. Such a space is conditioned by, for instance, the lack of social recognition and legal protection for gay people, and the fact that their presence at semi-public places like gay bars or clubs is often disturbed, and their access to fully public locales (such as the New Park – known for gay cruising since the early postwar years, as discussed in Chapter 1) is often policed. Broadly speaking, insofar as Taipei figures as a predominantly heteronormative community, its tongzhi/queer living space is undeniably marginalized and compressed. Another significant factor in this marginalization is tongzhi/queer individuals’ troubled relationships with their original families. A middle-aged gay man in the film attests that he is now a divorcee, but he still encounters other married gay men leading double lives. While another subject vividly recalls the traumatic experience of hearing his father, a retired army general, berating TV coverage of a gay rights demonstration, another gay male subject, whose parents tried to change his sexual orientation by severing their financial support, now lives on his own but never recovered from the hurt of being “abandoned” and “exiled” by his family. A young lesbian couple,

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unable to come out to their parents, stay as far away as possible from their families, ending up in Paris. Towards the end of the film, the divorced gay man likewise leaves for Los Angeles. Original families for many tongzhi individuals were not safe havens but rather points of departure in their own self-identification. Narrated in French, Zero Chou’s poetic voice-over laments, “Why not go home? Why be content with enduring such diaspora? The stress of being unable to come out in their homelands often forces gay people to depart for some distant foreign lands.” She adds, “It is not easy at all to roam and live in a foreign land. Just like this foreign language [French] is hard for me. But otherwise I cannot speak of certain things; otherwise I cannot live some part of my life.” While original families are not easily reconcilable with the most private and intimate parts of their lives, those tongzhi/queer individuals may, somewhat ironically, find it relatively easy to share moments of intimacy with their friends and even casual acquaintances in gay bars. They open themselves up, feeling more “homey” here than with their families. In fact, it is precisely this sense of “feeling homey” (wenxin de ganjue) that the owners of the bar in the film – Corner’s – wanted to provide for its customers. On the other hand, gay bars are essentially public, or at least semi-public, places. Their operations are sanctioned by the state, and their activities, unlike those in “private” residences, are subject to police inspections. As the film shows, the incident that led to the drastic downturn in business at Corner’s (and its eventual shutdown) involved the police abusing their power. By questioning the validity of the bar’s business license, the police appeared to target the gay customers. As the bar owners recall, the fiftyodd customers were repeatedly yelled at with slurs – “swine,” “perverts,” “homos” – and forced to have their photos taken. Corner’s patrons were humiliated and deeply shamed.104 Although this incident – along with several others105 – subsequently sparked protests along several tongzhi and human rights groups, and the provisions of police checks were thereafter judicially redefined,106 this particular incident was, nonetheless, symptomatic of the 104 This particular incident happened on November 7, 1999; however, the malicious police checks actually lasted for a month. See Qiu Yi-xuan (Ed.), Yi jing datong (Proceeding to equality), p. 116; Zhuang Huiqiu (ed.), Yang qi caihong qi (Raise the rainbow flag), p. 261. 105 For instance, in December 1998 the police allegedly forced gay customers at the AG Health Club to enact “indecent behavior” and took photos as “evidence” of unlawful activities in the gym. The incident drove customers away, forcing the gym out of business. This incident is also shown in Mickey Chen’s powerful documentary Scars on Memory (2005). 106 On December 14, 2001, Taiwan’s Justices of the Constitutional Court under Judicial Yuan issued Interpretation No. 535, which clearly states that the provisions of The Police Service Act

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overall compression of the tongzhi/queer living space, mediated by socially normalizing forces (at least by the early 2000s). This episode resonates with “the power of space” and “the spatial conditions of desire,” as Taiwanese urban planner Bih Herng-da and Hong Kong sociologist Denise Tse-shang Tang call it.107 The compressed condition of tongzhi/queer living space not only reflects the prevalent, penetrating oppression of heteronormative patriarchy; it directly affects the rights of many tongzhi/queer individuals to fulfill their desires and realize their self-identification. The deep-seated tension between those individuals and the heterosexual establishment thereby animates an unresolvable sense of alienation and diaspora in many tongzhi/queer subjects with respect to their own identities, their original families, their homelands, and even their native languages. On a more fundamental level, I would argue, the compressed tongzhi/queer living space comprises the material basis of contemporary gay sensibility, or rather, queer structure of feeling. In the previous section I suggested that the queer structure of feeling in a Chinese cultural setting is characteristically mediated by such negative feelings as shame and melancholy. Tenacious yet abstract as they are, shame and melancholy do appear in Corner’s. Shame emerges in, for example, the testimonies in which a gay son voices his deep feelings of terror and mortification at his father’s malicious remarks on the coverage of a gay demonstration, and the two owners of Corner’s recall how their customers suddenly found themselves besieged by police harassment disguised as inspection. Implicitly, all the marginalized locales and precincts that comprise the main queer living space are marked by shame. And a gay subject’s efforts to throw a large party in a high-end hotel (as opposed to a secluded gay bar) can thus be understood as motivated by his ardent desire to confront gay shame, the very feeling that has effectively confined so many gay people to the peripheries. The interplay between Corner’s aural and visual elements also results in a melancholic effect, which appears in its metaphor and metonymy. The “never delegate police unlimited authority to exercise any check, law enforcement or interrogation without due consideration of time, place, manner and subjects.” The complete text is available at http://www.judicial.gov.tw/constitutionalcourt/EN/p03_01.asp?expno=535. 107 See, for instance, Bih Herng-da, Kongjian jiushi quanli (The power of space); Bih, Kongjian jiushi xingbie (The gender of space); Bih, Kongjian jiushi xiangxiang li (Spaces of adventure). These three monographs have been named Bih’s “space trilogy.” Denise Tse-shang Tang, Conditional Spaces; Denise Tang, “‘Tiaojian xing kongjian’: Xianggang nu tongzhi qingyu, juzhu kongjian” (Conditional spaces: Hong Kong lesbian desires and living spaces), trans. Lai Zheng-hong and Yang Ching-yi.

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director’s voiceover is notably filtered by an ambivalent feeling, at once estranged and intimate. It evokes estrangement since it is in French (a language unintelligible to most Taiwanese), yet it is intimate thanks to its first-person perspective. Interspersed throughout the film, this ambivalent, monologue-like voiceover, while lending the documentary a specifically psychic dimension, subtly corresponds to the equally ambivalent structure of gay melancholy figured through the existential dilemma associated with gay identification, as is manifested by the mixed feelings of ‘bitterness’ and ‘bliss’ that are intimately experienced and emphatically identified by the gay-identifying narrator-director. Moreover, at one point early in the documentary, Chou refers to a friend’s experience at Corner’s. While that friend, Lao Yao, who feels at home in the bar, describes himself as “becoming another person once stepping out of the bar’s door,” the director ponders and adds, “But why am I always stuck at the door, half in and half out, frozen in the crack of the door? Finding myself stuck in the crack, I am therefore conscious of myself, conscious that whom I love is another body and soul of the same sex.” Between Lao Yao’s words and Zero Chou’s remarks, the “door” is transfigured from a physical object to a figurative one. The threshold bordering on the interior/ exterior spaces thereby becomes a metaphor for the existential dilemma shared by many queer subjects. It should also be noted that this voiceover is accompanied by the sonic motif of waves (on a non-diegetic level), where the sound of waves is metaphorically associated with homoeroticism (as manifested in the subsequent montage sequence). More to the point, the sound bears a moderate resemblance to that of bustling traffic, another recurring component of the film, which clearly invokes both the metaphor and reality of queer diaspora. Through the strategy of sonic metonymy, in other words, the themes of homoeroticism and queer diaspora are deftly connected, while the intangible melancholy of identifying as gay is written into both the voiceover and the soundscape or “acoustic environment.”108 As a documentary, Corner’s not only provides a window onto the compressed tongzhi/queer living space; the film itself can also be understood as an extension or even a microcosm of tongzhi/queer living space. Straddling the borders between the social and the personal, the cognitive and the psychic, the space the film embodies reflects the constrained social conditions for tongzhi/queer subjects, while the mise-en-scène is marked by gay shame and gay melancholy. The film also shares certain queer structures of feeling characteristic of the larger tongzhi/queer community. Significantly, 108 Schafer, The Soundscape, p. 7.

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the filmmaker, as an insider of that community, who senses and inscribes this intangible queer feeling, further captures the tension between queer feelings and certain unmistakably camp expressions. Here the sound bridge, discussed below, plays a pivotal part. The film’s prologue consists of the director’s monologue-like voiceover as she walks alone through an alley at night. The voiceover, accompanied by the sound of the director’s seemingly heavy footsteps, narrates the heartfelt agony interwoven with her strong desire for another woman, and her ambivalence about choosing a foreign language to more comfortably express herself. The accompanying steady long shot of her pacing down the alley is bracketed by two medium shots: one showing numerous moths irresistibly drawn to a desolate street lamp, and the other some neon lights hanging in a tree, swaying in the wind. The imagery captures a sense of solitude and helplessness. The shot of the neon lights is then replaced by a slightly shaky long shot, in which the lights recede to the left side of the frame while a large rainbow flag appears on the right, at the entrance of a bar. As the camera moves slowly from darkness toward the limelight that illuminates the flag, the voiceover and the footsteps gradually give way to jubilant music emanating from inside the bar. Whereas the rainbow flag in the limelight aptly is “the light at the end of the tunnel,” and the title card here marks the border between two worlds demarcated by heteronormativity, the festive music bridging these two worlds nonetheless points to an underlying continuum. In particular, it hints at a transformation of the experience and affect conditioned by the heteronormative world, which underlies camp expressions in a specifically queer context. Following the festive music through darkness and loneliness, we are shown a different world, where outrageous drag is performed to cheering audiences. The song and the soundtrack are part and parcel of “the miseen-scène of desire” that allows queer subjects to perform their agency and phantasmically approach their subjectivity.109 Here the performers’ agency is notably characterized by camp expressions. Onstage are two female impersonators, dancing and singing a playful tune. Both wear high heels, but otherwise they dress very differently. One wears a pink long-sleeved shirt and clam diggers, plus a permed wig, heavy makeup, and a pink feather boa; the other wears a silky white brassiere and mini-skirt, with less makeup, a more stylish wig, and a cartoonish cow-shaped handbag. The two are pure camp: their styling and performance rely on incongruity, particularly playing on incongruities associated with gender norms to achieve a humorous 109 Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” p. 26; Cowie, “Fantasia.”

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effect. These play out in a number of ways, first and foremost, of course, the audience’s awareness that the “women” onstage are performed by men. Moreover, the femininities onstage are carried to excess, especially in the heavy makeup and feather boa used by the drag artiste in outrageous pink. By contrast, the other performer’s style seems more moderate, if not “natural.” Their distinct styles also draw attention to the excess and incongruity associated with “naturalized” gender: by satirizing types of woman, or “women” in quotation marks, they foreground the artifice of woman and denaturalize it. By highlighting the theatricality of camp, the performers even ridicule the overly dramatized scenarios of straight love affairs in the lyrics of the song they perform. For a predominantly gay audience, it should be noted, those parodies of “women” are first and foremost self-parodies that function against the stereotype and social stigma that equates gay men and “sissies.” When the gay performers and gay audience mock the scripts of straight relationships, they also laugh at their own ironic relationship to straight-oriented scenarios in general, in which gay men negotiate their participation most viably through cross-identifying with feminized positions. At the same time, they are fairly aware that such a cross-identification inevitably perpetuates the longstanding stereotype associating gay people with gender inversion. Irony and incongruity thus often mark gay men’s participation in the very culture that marginalizes them. Through camp, gay men are nonetheless empowered to deal with painfully incongruous situations through transformative laughter, to paraphrase Newton and Babuscio.110 The seemingly carnivalesque atmosphere of a camp performance in a specifically tongzhi/ queer setting should thus be understood as responding to the marginalized situation and oppressive experience the audience faces beyond that setting. There are three more segments in Corner’s that feature female impersonations. The first is a drag rendition of a local show tune, “Fallen in Water” from Angels in a Sleepless City (Tianshi buyecheng), which combines a tango-style melody with hilarious lyrics from the perspective of a seasoned female prostitute who accidentally falls for and is mercilessly dumped by a womanizer. While this self-contradictory comic torch song is characterized by the performer’s lip-synching, the latter two are both oldies with florid lyrics,111 which are sung live, one in falsetto (Figure 4.1), the other in 110 Newton, “Role Models,” p. 109. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” p. 48. 111 They are “Fenghuang yu fei” (A male and a female phoenixes flying together in the sky) originally sung by Zhou Xuan from the mid-1930s, and “Huen ying jiu meng” (Mesmerized by old dreams) originally performed by Bai Guang from the late 1940s.

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Figure 4.1  Still from Corner’s

The third drag performance at Corner’s is later superimposed upon the performer’s own imagined sequence in which he, now in a man’s formal black suit at work, expresses his desire to throw a large gay party in the high-end hotel where he works. Here fantasy collides with reality. Courtesy of Zero Chou

a “natural” register. Like the opening performance, all three play in various ways with gender incongruities, theatricality, and humor, and are to varying degrees characteristically camp. In addition to the drag performances animated by the diegetic music in four sequences, another primary aspect of camp in Corner’s is the subjects’ language. The very first remarks we hear at Corner’s help distinguish the atmosphere inside the bar from that outside it. The patron says to his friends, “To make your men happy, women should have such professional ethics. You should have your oral skills up to speed” – f irst comparing himself to a woman, then sharing his view on being a woman. For him, this is not so much natural as “professional,” and decent oral skills are imperative. His pitch and pronunciation are also key to the campness of the speech. Using a higher pitch, he actually chooses the more formal, somewhat archaic pronunciation of the word “learn” – “xiao,” instead of “xue.” It makes him sound like a learned senior (learned about sex, at least), adding a sense of hyperbole and humor to his already outrageous speech.

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Other campy remarks in Corner’s include off-screen utterances such as “Sis, hurry up,” (said in a piercing effeminate voice near the entrance to New Park), and a disembodied voice describing himself as a strong-minded “superwoman” (nu qiang ren). Thus, not only is the seemingly intangible feeling of gay melancholy inscribed in the documentary’s soundscape, but the acoustic environment and sound bridge hint at the continuum and transformative mechanism associated with queer affect and camp aesthetic. Corner’s appraises Taipei’s compressed queer living space, its queer structure of feeling, and the operation of gay shame in society and how gay individuals try to negotiate it. As I have mentioned elsewhere,112 Chou’s examination of this space and her sensitivity to queer structures of feeling both lay the groundwork for her subsequent feature Splendid Float (2004), which focuses on a troupe of drag performers led by Roy (James Chen Yuming).113 By day, Roy is a Taoist priest performing funeral rites. By night, he becomes Rose, traveling around Northeastern Taiwan in a psychedelically-lit truck, putting on cabaret shows with four other drag queens. On one of her tours, she encounters hunky fisherman Sunny (Zhong Yi-qing), and they fall passionately in love. But later, when Roy is called to preside over a drowned man, he finds to his horror that it is Sunny. Though their love is not recognized by society, Roy/Rose nonetheless decides to invoke and appease Sunny’s spirit separately with the status as a beloved partner (wei wang ren). While the official funeral arranged by Sunny’s family comes to an end, the farewell ritual featuring Rose’s and her friends’ radiant drag performance is just to begin. On one level, Chou’s ongoing exploration of tongzhi/queer identification, particularly the oppressive experience of social marginalization and alienation, is deftly transformed into the themes and plots of Splendid Float. For instance, the image of the “float” of the film’s title does not only refer to the psychedelically-lit vehicle and moving platform on which the drag queens perform. It alludes to the drifting, rootless condition of those drag queens’ lives, on the margins of the society. The surroundings in which they perform – the meandering roads, the sandy banks and the riversides – also 112 Chao Shi-Yan, “Cong yuwang huache kan tongzhi kongjian.” 113 Transgender performer James Chen Yu-ming is also one of four main subjects in Ying Cheng-ru’s award-winning experimental documentary Body at Large (2013), which explores the prohibitions, limitations, and discrimination faced by people straddling gender/body borderlines. It also features Taiwan’s veteran film critic Alphonse Perroquet Quail Youth-Leigh (previously Li You-xin). For the written thesis by Ying Cheng-ru, see “Huangyou shengti” (Body at Large).

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evoke the bleakness and restlessness underneath the “splendor” of those performers’ world. On another level, Chou’s sensitivity to queer structure of feeling informs the characterization and narrative of Splendid Float. Performing funeral rites is Roy’s vocation; his lover Sunny unexpectedly passes away by the first third of the film. This love story is one of profound loss and denied “futurity.”114 A tormented, melancholic mood, joining the yearning for and the letting go of a taboo love object, therefore underlies the narrative of Splendid Float, which, as film critic Steve Erickson writes, centers on “the mourning of a relationship that must remain closeted.”115 Yet Splendid Float does not simply indulge in this tangle of love and hopelessness, embracement and repudiation.116 The film moves beyond the concept of “mourning love”117 – and the dire experience of social marginalization for being gay – by virtue of the transformative quality of camp expression, including gender parody and drag performances, verbal exchanges, and body language. As Rose and her friends find – however momentarily – pleasure and solace through camping, many queers consider camp a crucial strategy that, as Dyer puts it, “keeps us going” in a heteronormative, hostile environment.118 Here it is worth returning briefly to my previous discussion of the Hui comedies, specif ically how class and ethnicity contribute to the excessive, performative quality of Michael Hui’s drag performances in Happy Ding Dong (1986) and Chicken and Duck Talk (1988). It should be noted that in Splendid Float the female impersonations, particularly those by Rose’s friends, also show a local aesthetic taking shape at the intersection of class and ethnicity. Commonly known as su in Mandarin and song in Taiwanese, this is best represented by being “earthy” and “loud – in voice, color, manner.”119 Although song, as Emilie Yeh and Darrell Davis 114 For some queer interventions in the prevailing “reproductive futurism” and “the cult of the Child” in society, see Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (quotes on p. 2 and p. 19). See also Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century; Freeman, Time Binds. 115 Erickson, “Asian Film in Spotlight,” p. 20. 116 I consider this a crucial embodiment of “gay sensibility,” which also manifests in Yonfan’s Bishonen (1998), Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu (2001), Kit Hung’s Soundless Wind Chime (2009), among others. 117 Chang, Ivy I-chu. “Aidao aiqing” (Mourning love), in Quanqiuhua shikong, shenti, jiyi: Taiwan xin dianying jiqi yingxiang (Spatio-temporality, body, memory through globalization), pp. 289-331. 118 Dyer, “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” in Only Entertainment, pp. 135-147. 119 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, p. 219.

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point out, enlists connotations of “hearty vitality, the relaxed but hardy vernacular of working-class/peasant behavior,” it is more often than not “an epithet of condescension” that, from a China-centric perspective, indicates “a ‘typically’ Taiwanese vulgarity” defined as the counterpoint of the supposedly more urbane, middle class-based Chinese mannerism.120 Of course, this perception of the indigenous culture has been stoutly challenged in the wake of rising Taiwanese consciousness that, partially deriving from the nativist movement from the 1970s into the 1980s (see Chapter 1), has developed fully since the mid-1990s. 121 As the cultural connotations of song have evolved from “tacky” into “song ko wu lat” (i.e. song empowered by earthy sincerity and flowing vitality), many in Taiwan now embrace and celebrate song for its loud, garish, and vivacious style – something considered very tai or tai-ke,122 something rooted in the soil of this island.123 In Splendid Float, while the elegant Rose can comfortably pass as a “real woman,” her three stage sisters’ impersonations, by contrast, are marked by a sense of hyperbole and tawdriness. Indeed, as the film’s producer Isaac Li Zhi-qiang notes, they are modeled after Taiwan’s “betel-nut beauties” (binglang xishi):124 local girls who wear heavy makeup, sexy dresses, and platform shoes while touting betel nuts at roadside stands (Figure 4.2). The gaudy, glitzy decoration of the float, meanwhile, vividly mirrors the song 120 Ibid. 121 Emilie Yueh-yue Yeh, “Bentu: Marketplace and Sentiments of Contemporary Taiwan Cinema”; John Makeham and A-chin Hsiau (eds.), Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan. For a detailed analysis of selected films in the wake of bentu localism, see Ma Sheng-mei, The Last Isle, esp. Chapters 1-4. For a rich discussion with a special focus on bentu blockbuster Kano (Ma Chih-hsiang, 2014), see Chiu Kuei-fen, Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, and Gary D. Rawnsley (eds.), Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change.. 122 The term “tai-ke” was originally used by Mainlanders to describe supposedly vulgar Taiwanese mannerisms: wearing very colorful T-shirts, sleeveless undershirts and/or rubber thongs for off icial occasions, speaking loudly or playing loud music, and chewing on betel nuts and/ or spitting were all “tai-ke” behavior or “tai” or “song” characteristics. In the wake of rising Taiwanese consciousness, however, the pejorative aspect of “tai-ke” came under much debate. For an overview of this complicated phenomenon, see Xian Yi-Ying (Ed.), Call Me Tai-ke!, and the special issue of Wenhua yanjiu yuebao (Cultural studies monthly) No. 55 (February 2006): www.cc.ncu.edu.tw/~csa/journal/55/journal_forumtaike.htm. For an insightful intervention from a postcolonial perspective in a global framework, see Chang Hsiao-hung, “Women do si Taiwan ren,” in Jia quanqiu hua (Fake Globalization), pp. 219-291. 123 On the ways “camp” has been employed by gay men from rural Taiwan to negotiate their queer identity vis-à-vis other ethnic groups, see Dennis Chwen-der Lin, “Kejia ‘cungu’ yao Jincheng” (Hakka rural ‘sissies’ go to big cities). 124 Isaac Zhi-qiang Li, Yanguang sishe gewu tuan, p. 28.

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Figure 4.2  Still from Splendid Float

Rose’s three stage sisters dressed in a cheesy, sexy style modeled after Taiwanese “betel-nuts beauties”. Courtesy of Zero Chou

Figure 4.3  Still from Splendid Float

The garishly decorated “electronic float” as the drag queens’ performing stage. Courtesy of Zero Chou

of Taiwan’s “electronic float” (dianzi huache) business: a particular kind of show biz that features young women performing cheesy, often erotic dance and singing on garishly decorated trucks (Figure 4.3).

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How, then, should we take Chou’s incorporation of song into her work, and tongzhi camp in particular? In an interview done for her Teddy Bear-winning box-office hit Spider Lilies (2007),125 Chou states that for her, “tongzhi” is an aesthetic as well as an identity: There are indeed particularities in tongzhi culture. And yet the popular profoundly characterizes Taiwanese culture. I want to find the link between the two, so as to define tongzhi culture within Taiwanese culture. I don’t want to see tongzhi culture to be rootless and homeless. My work shows that tongzhi culture bears resemblance to Taiwanese culture in aesthetic terms: being tawdry, unserious, and glittering. As the local rituals surrounding major life events [from weddings to funerals] are marked by song, so can the tongzhi style be festive and dazzling – even though the latter is usually tinged by a sense of beautiful desolation at the same time.126

Given Chou’s remarks, we may extrapolate that, while Splendid Float, like Corner’s, is marked by a same sense of diasporic sentiment, the incorporation of song as a particular tongzhi aesthetic nonetheless registers the filmmaker’s negotiation with the diasporic existential condition associated with tongzhi identity (see Chapter 1). Chou demonstrates, in short, that tongzhi identity and Taiwanese culture do not sharply contradict each other. Tongzhi culture is not foreign, but firmly ingrained in this island.

Camping in The Hole The Hole is set in Taipei, seven days before year 2000. The deluge is constant and, due to an unidentifiable epidemic, most of the residents have been evacuated. Among the few who refuse to leave, The Man Upstairs (Lee Kang-sheng) and The Woman Downstairs (Yang Kuei-mei) gradually develop a tentative connection due to, and mostly through, a hole left by a plumber who never finished fixing the leak. They spy on and flirt with each other, 125 Spider Lilies, like Splendid Float, is structured by melancholy. Isabella Leong plays a lesbian tattoo artist who refuses to accept the love of Rainie Yang’s character because she is convinced that her father’s death and her brother’s trauma-induced amnesia are for her bourgeoning lesbianism. Though the film shows the character’s gradual acceptance of another’s love and her own identity, the drama is nevertheless predicated upon the seemingly irreconcilable tension between original family and tongzhi identity, suffused with a sense of loss and melancholy. 126 Li Jing-yi, “‘Wo zhengming le tongzhi wenhua jiahe Taiwan wenhua yiyang suyan, sansan baba you liangli’,” p. 5 (my translation).

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but they do not overtly express their feelings. By the end of the film, when The Man realizes The Woman has also contracted the disease, he widens the aperture and pulls her into his apartment. The film ends with the two dancing in each other’s arms. The story is primarily executed in the minimalist, verité style seen in Tsai’s previous films: Tsai’s work, particularly since Vive L’amour (1994), is characterized by long, static takes, simple or even deliberately simplified settings, few characters, sparse dialogue, little or no non-diegetic soundtrack (except for his 1992 feature debut, Rebels of the Neon God),127 and a particular emphasis on spatial relations in the mise-en-scène. However, The Hole departs significantly from this realist style in the interpolation of five gaudy song-and-dance sequences. How do these musical numbers relate to the narrative and the characters? What kind of effect do they achieve overall? And, importantly, why does this arrangement matter to the filmmaker as a gay auteur? Interestingly enough, after Tsai had dealt with implicit homosexual desire in his first film, he made his second and third features with explicitly gay protagonists. Then he made The Hole, containing no obvious references to the characters’ possible queer identities, but providing the audience, instead, with a “romance” between a man and a woman. It seems clear that The Hole walks back the explicitly queer elements of Tsai’s earlier work. I suggest this was related to how Tsai’s previous film, The River, was conceived and received. In particular, The River culminates in Lee Kangsheng’s character inadvertently having sex with his own father in a gay sauna. The film tackles homosexuality and incest at the same time, with the gay son and gay father discover each other’s covert homosexuality in the most unfortunate way; for many, it undoubtedly represents a powerful blow to the heteronormative family institution. Despite gaining local critical support and winning the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the film was a commercial failure, and those who attacked it also questioned how the limited governmental subsidies for filmmaking should be allocated. Some interest groups (especially those involved with local distribution and exhibition, who also invested in local “commercial” productions and were in conflict with filmmakers and critics advocating creative freedom and “art” cinema) questioned why the government should support such an “immoral” – let alone commercially unpopular – production about “homosexual 127 For a meticulous, insightful analysis of the “slowness,” “stillness,” and “silence” characteristic of Tsai’s work, see Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness, Chapters 1, 3 and 4 respectively.

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incest.” They even questioned the legitimacy of Tsai’s accepting government subsidies, due to Tsai’s ambivalent national identity.128 In a sense, the retreat from explicitly queer elements in The Hole can be seen in part as Tsai’s response to the hostile reaction to The River. It should also be noted that, despite dealing with homosexuality in such an audacious manner, Tsai always refused to publicly acknowledge or address his own sexual orientation, even though his gay identity had already become a sort of “open secret.” Tsai’s treatment of his own homosexuality, in other words, remained ambiguous, unspoken, if not “unspeakable,” until he openly spoke of his “sexual tendency” (xing qingxiang) during a press event to promote Stray Dogs in 2014.129 In what follows, I argue that The Hole, Tsai’s earlier artistic response, is born out of camp, in much the same way that camp, for many gay subjects, functions as a survival strategy born out of their disagreeable experience in a heteronormative society. Tsai’s attitude finds expression via the musical genre, known for its camp qualities: “in their narratives sometimes, but more often in their spectacle, in their costuming and sets, their choreography, their ideas for numbers,” Steven Cohan writes, musicals are inherently camp.130 More to the point, the particular way Tsai appropriates musical genre tellingly foregrounds Newton and Babuscio’s coordinates of camp expression – irony/incongruity, theatricality, aestheticism/stylization, humor – that stem from the experience of gay oppression. Through camp, that is, the filmmaker flirts with the mechanism of homosexual closet: there are no more homosexuals in sight, and yet (as in Tsai’s “Taipei trilogy,” discussed in Chapter 1), homosexuality is still out there, imbricated in the form and camp style of this film production. My camp reading of The Hole supplements, to some extent, Emilie Yeh’s and Darrell Davis’s camp approach to Tsai Ming-liang’s work. Their insightful 128 In 1998, Wang Ying-xiang, the most powerful local distributor, filed a complaint against Tsai Ming-liang, citing his lack of Taiwan citizenship. In August 1999, the Governmental Information Office passed an amendment to the film subsidy fund that requires citizenship as one of the application criteria (2000 Cinema Yearbook in the Republic of China, p. 260). Tsai Ming-liang discusses the controversies surrounding him in an interview by Daniele Riviere: see “Scouting,” pp. 117-118. Wen Tien-hsiang points out that the incident actually reformed the system: see Wen, “Shijian, kongjian, shenti yu jiyi de diaoke” (Sculpturing with time, space, body and memory), p. 88; Ye Long-yan, Tujie Taiwan dianying shi (An illustrated history of Taiwan cinema), p. 245. 129 Tsai, Ming-liang, and Lee Kang-sheng. “Natian xiawu: Tsai Ming-liang duitan Lee Kang-sheng” (That afternoon: Tsai Ming-liang in conversation with Lee Kang-sheng). In Tsai Ming-liang et al, Jiaoyou (Stray Dogs), pp. 272-279. See also Zou Nian-zu, “Tsai Ming-liang gongkai chugui le, haiwai lieyan Hsiao-kang bafeng.” 130 Cohan, Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader, p. 105.

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study of Tsai seeks to “complicate prevailing notions of camp”131 by emphasizing the local, working-class inflections in what the authors consider Tsai’s peculiar camp articulation: one that, through “class, ethnicity, and black humor,” invokes song (earthiness) while critiquing “middle-class fantasies of belonging.”132 Pointing to the “strange” phenomenon by which “most critics seem diffident toward the gay quality of Tsai’s films,” Yeh and Davis further argue that “[f]ar from diluting gayness, camp provides [a] greater role for Tsai’s gay elements, especially when they are lodged together with competing sexual and class affiliations.”133 In their analysis of The Hole, however, they unwittingly downplay the role of gay specificity even as they eloquently address that of class and ethnicity. They insist that “‘straight’ camp is at play” in The Hole, while the “fantasies [in the musical numbers] are heterosexual.”134 By emphasizing the role of gay specificity, I argue that, on the contrary, the kind of camp at play is first and foremost gay camp or tongzhi camp. Not unlike what we have seen in Splendid Float, though, it is tongzhi camp inflected by song, and the fantasy sequences are queerly inflected. The Hole features five musical numbers, staged around actress Yang Kueimei’s dance – choreographed by renowned modernist dancer Luo Man-fei (1955-2006)135 – and songs by Grace Chang entitled “Calypso,” “Tiger Lady,” “I Want Your Love,” “Gesundheit!” and “I Don’t Care Who You Are.” Actor Lee Kang-sheng only joins Yang in the third and last numbers. Otherwise, Yang is accompanied by a small group of professional dancers. In the exotic first number, “Calypso,” The Woman Downstairs performs calypso alone in an elevator decorated with neon lights, wearing a colorful dress and a big red feathered hat, strutting “like a proud and handsome rooster” (as the lyrics have it). In the second, “Tiger Lady,” dressed now in a white and red floral dress and red elbow-length gloves, she embodies a Carmen-style character who complains about her poor, nagging husband, calling him a “nasty jealous sod.” Staged in the hallway with highly artificial lighting, the third number, “I Want Your Love,” shows The Woman Downstairs demanding love from The Man Upstairs. But in reality, she is so outwardly confident that the whole sequence only exists in her imagination. Once again, she dressed flamboyantly: a copper-colored dress, with The Man in a red shirt under a silvery suit. The end of this number even features 131 Yeh and Davis, “Camping Out with Tsai Ming-liang,” in Taiwan Film Directors, p. 219. 132 Ibid., p. 221. 133 Ibid., p. 220. 134 Ibid., pp. 232, 233. 135 Lee Kang-sheng’s recent directorial work, Remembrance (2009), which stars Tsai Ming-liang and Lu Yi-ching, is dedicated to the fond memory of Luo Man-fei shared by Tsai, Lee and Lu.

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artificial mist to create a dreamy atmosphere. The choreography in this sequence is also intentionally “cartooned” by the filmmaker, to make it “seemingly incongruous” and humorous.136 Compared with the other four numbers, “Gesundheit!” is the only one that uses a sound bridge: a scene showing The Woman taking a bath gives way to the first sneeze within the number. The performances is set on the staircase, decorated by white silk curtains: The Woman wears a glittering white mini-dress, white gloves, and red artificial feathers – a vamp-like persona. She imagines her popularity among gentlemen, although in real life she is always alone and indeed appears lonely (in the previous fantasy number she cries out for love). The last number, “I Don’t Care Who You Are,” takes place immediately after The Woman is brought up into The Man’s apartment. She is in red chiffon, he is in a white suit. Dancing together, they slowly move their bodies with “mutual holding,” a gesture that moves away from the narrative premise of “gender difference,” but toward what Dyer terms “the pleasure of mutuality.”137 Taken together, from the costume to the lighting and acting, these musical numbers highlight two important features of camp: theatricality and aestheticism. Moreover, they are so incongruous with the bleak, “authentic” setting that they appear “‘outrageous’ or ‘too much’.”138 This incongruity correspondingly amplifies the theatricality of the numbers, whereas the stark contrast between the spectacular numbers and the minimalist realism of the film’s narrative diegesis reinforces the interpretation of The Hole overall as camp. The acting in these numbers is not only exaggerated (especially the gestures and facial expressions), but also registers as “role-playing” – a woman as a rooster, as Carmen, and as a vamp (in the first, second, and fourth numbers respectively). The songs selected by Tsai are not Grace Chang’s most famous or popular tunes. However, they do capture an affected and pretentious atmosphere. They phantasmically evoke the camp performer – a self-conscious “poseur” like Mae West – through the camp reference to artifice, posture, and aestheticism. Moreover, as Yang Kuei-mei dances and lip-synchs to Grace Chang songs from the late 1950s, there exists an ironic distance between the ostensible singer onscreen and the disembodied voice. In the number “I Want Your 136 Tsai, Ming-liang. Interviewed by a French TV anchor. In Chiao and Tsai (eds.), The Hole, p. 108. 137 Dyer, “‘I Seem to Find the Happiness I Seek’,” p. 53. 138 Babuscio, “Camp and Gay Sensibility,” p. 44.

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Love,” when Yang (purposely) fails to lip-synch the English lyrics, the gap is directly exposed. A similar effect is attained in the last number, where lipsynching is totally abandoned. Meanwhile, the old-fashioned orchestration, recording techniques, and singing style, as well as the theatricality in Yang’s performance, also remind the audience of this incongruous gap. All in all, Yang’s lip-synching, together with her hyper-feminized costumes, make-up, and acting, makes her performance style comparable to that of a drag queen.139 In terms of stars, the pairing of Yang Kuei-mei and Lee Kang-sheng invites a camp appreciation too. As Yang is older and more sophisticated than Lee, they do not represent an “ideal” screen couple. Tsai found Yang’s off-screen personality “similar to a man’s,” a trait that actually inspired him when he created her role in Vive L’amour “much in accordance with that for a ‘man’.’” In an interview, he later laughed, “I made her character more aggressive. This is sort of ‘gender inversion’.”140 Yang’s persona – at least in Tsai’s cinematic world – is thus by no means circumscribed by femininity. This point is brought home by the “unusual” choreography of the third number, where The Woman is not guided by her partner, but instead takes the initiative herself.141 Taking Tsai’s view on Yang’s persona a step further, we may also extrapolate that in all the musical numbers in The Hole, when Yang puts on some gaudy costume, there is a sense that she is trying to become a “woman.” The very effort of making herself a “woman” thus stresses the performative aspect of gender. Given this performative overtone, when Yang’s character appears with Lee – the same actor who has come out as gay in Tsai’s work – this coupling inevitably has a camp twist, an “incongruous irony.” When the two dance the final number “I Don’t Care Who You Are,” Yang – in high heels – is as tall as Lee. The lyrics speak of solitude and consolation (“I don’t care who you are/But darling, hold me close/Alone together, you and me/ Come the days of wine and roses…”) but regarding gender, they are neutral. This final moment arguably connotes gender transcendence. We may consider Tsai’s deployment of musical numbers from another perspective: the generic convention of integrating the number into the narrative. Strictly speaking, the songs in The Hole do not succeed in this regard. In terms of the narrative logic, these sequences may be understood as 139 Grace Chang’s songs – coincidentally or otherwise – have become staples of the drag scene in Taiwan and Hong Kong, though it is hard to verify that this is directly connected to The Hole. Deng Xiao-yu, however, does mention a particular gay following for Grace Chang. See Chi Luosong can de rizi (The days of having Borscht meals), p. 204. 140 Tsai Ming-liang interviewed by Chen Bao-xu, in Aiqing wansui (Vive L’amour), p. 202 (my translation). 141 Wen Tien-hsiang. Guangying dingge (Framing the Light and Shadow), p.170.

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the characters’ fantasies, especially in the case of The Woman Downstairs. However, the fourth sequence aside, they tend to begin in a somewhat abrupt manner, with no sonic cues. Though the first two numbers could be interpreted as The Woman’s fantasies, but she is not seen in the shots immediately preceding, which makes this interpretation something of a stretch for the audience. As for the last number, if it were fully integrated into the narrative, the two characters should have remained in the costumes they wore before the number. How is this integration relevant to camp? I suggest that this incomplete integration may reflect the filmmaker’s “open indulgence in sentiment,” which, as Babuscio observes, often saturates camp performance.142 Put another way, as the musical numbers in The Hole diverge from the norm serving a closed diegesis, Yang’s campy performance is arguably opened to extra-diegetic influence, which I contend registers Tsai’s camp sensibility. To elaborate on this, it is useful to introduce Richard Dyer’s elucidation of the film musical and the notion of utopia. Dyer sees Hollywood film musicals as coordinating the sense that modern life is itself replete with inadequacies and absences: the actualities of scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, manipulation and fragmentation.143 Instead of offering solutions, however, film musicals provide the audience with a world of utopian feelings – the sense of abundance, energy, intensity, transparency and community – that seem to answer to our frustrations. And crucial to the evocation of such utopian feelings are “non-representational signs,” which, unlike representational signs, do not rely on a resemblance between signifier and signified. Rather, they rely on “resemblance at the level of basic structuration.”144 That is, whereas representational icons have an “obvious reference to ‘reality’,” non-representational icons are barely comparable to “reality,” since they are embodied through such stylistic and sensuous qualities as color, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, and perspective.145 While the narratives of film musicals privilege “the heavily representational and verisimilitudinous,” the musical numbers appeal more to “the heavily non-representational and ‘unreal’.”146 It should be stressed that Dyer’s formulation primarily reflects on the dynamic between entertainment and a capitalist society. In a capitalist 142 Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” p. 44. 143 Dyer, Only Entertainment, p. 24. 144 Ibid., pp. 18-21. 145 Ibid., p. 18. 146 Ibid., p. 25.

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society “[c]lass, race and sexual caste are denied validity as problems by the dominant (bourgeois, white, male) ideology,” while capitalism in entertainment responds to “only those lacks or inadequacies that capitalism [creates and] proposes itself to deal with.”147 As a form of entertainment ingrained in capitalism, what musicals must therefore do is work through those gaps or inadequacies at three levels: a) between the narrative and the numbers, b) within numbers, between the representational and non-representational, and c) within the non-representational, accounting for the different conditions of production inscribed in the signs.148 Such operations, however, do not always succeed. At any of these levels, there is often contradiction and tension. Although I see this tension playing out in The Hole at these three levels, my interpretation gravitates less toward capitalist mechanisms than hetero­ normative operations. Regarding the tension between the representational and the non-representational, there is an incongruity here between the bleak, minimalist settings of the numbers, which are still in keeping with the narrative of The Hole, and effects of the song-and-dance itself and the way it is staged (with more dramatic camera setup and lighting, colorful costumes, and tighter editing) contradicting, on a representational level, Tsai’s unique realist aesthetic. In contrast to the prevailing inertia and the sense of desolation in Tsai’s cinematic reality, the representational codes associated with the song-and-dance convey distinct non-representational qualities, particularly the utopian feelings of energy, abundance, and intensity. Unlike most musicals dealing with social inadequacies, which console the audience with this sense of utopia, The Hole exposes that mechanism. Within the song-and-dance, the representational rift between the songs and the lip-synching character/performer potentially undercuts the efficacy of the non-representational signs. This ironic representational discrepancy refers back to precisely the performative nature of the non-representational signs associated with the musical genre. Instead of serving as closed diegesis, the song-and-dance numbers in The Hole thereby subvert the musical’s generic norms. As for the third level, I would suggest that an investigation of the rift within the non-representational has to be approached alongside the nonrepresentational qualities of Grace Chang’s voice and songs. A key question concerns the affect evoked by her singing. During the final sequence, where The Woman dances with The Man without any attempt at lip-synching, 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid.

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the visual subsequently cuts to the epilogue while the song continues. The epilogue (in “handwritten” style, Tsai’s “paratextual practice” ever since The River)149 reads, “In the year 2000, we are grateful that we still have Grace Chang’s songs to comfort us.” While the word “we” indicates the director’s invitation to share his emotional investment, “still” and “comfort” suggest that that emotion is marked by a primordial plenitude and its subsequent irretrievability: a feeling filtered by a nostalgic yearning. However, does this yearning represent a definite object from the past? Or, to borrow Rey Chow’s insight on Hong Kong nostalgia films from the late 1980s (see Chapter 3), is it “an effect of something having been displaced in time,” where the object itself is not certain, only “the sense of loss it projects”?150 By emphasizing nostalgia as a “structure of feeling” mediated by a sense of loss, this yearning, accordingly, is animated by an impulse for something that is displaced or repressed, that cannot find its way to proper expression. Tsai once remarked of The Hole that: The musical numbers are weapons that I use to confront the environment at the end of the millennium. Because I think that toward the end of the century a lot of qualities – such as passionate desire, naïve simplicity – have been suppressed. The musicals contain those. It’s something that I use psychologically to confront that world.151

In other words, the kernel of Tsai’s yearning is composed of the emotions that are somehow suppressed. It consists of certain affections that are not easily expressed, if not forbidden from being explicitly expressed. And here, same-sex desire becomes evident as a theme. In terms of the utopic qualities of the musical, transparency in relationships seems especially relevant,152 and I find this trait resonates with the qualities of Grace Chang’s performance. Grace Chang’s stardom, as Jean Ma points out, was modulated by “an aspiration to cosmopolitan worldliness” that, paired with Chang’s singular talents, allowed her “to absorb, adapt to, and enact cultural differences with virtuosic grace.”153 While Chang was known for her versatility, the outstanding feature of her voice, I find, is its operatic character. Associated more with 149 Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness, p. 58. 150 Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism, p. 147. 151 Quote from the July 2001 program of Walter Reade Theater at Film Society of Lincoln Center (p. 3), where “Urban Ghosts and Legends: The Cinema of Tsai Ming-liang” was held from June 29 to July 12, 2001. 152 Dyer, Only Entertainment, p. 24. 153 Jean Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, p. 179.

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professionally trained opera singers than with pop singers in general,154 this operatic component shows in the penetrating and sustaining power her voice easily attains. Meanwhile, it can be measured by how she uses her voice. I find her singing comparatively less dependent on the effort of the throat and the upper level of the chest, as her singing registers a relatively high resonance spot. This higher resonance spot, on the one hand, helps her voice achieve the sense of flowing and floating, which evokes (non-representational) qualities of sustained intensity and abundant energy. On the other, it endows her singing with a personality that is not confined to a circumscribed body; it conveys instead a sense of transcendence, of communication and spatiality that goes beyond physical space. The timber of her voice also possesses a tone of warmth and brightness, echoing the feelings of happiness and affluence in her star persona.155 In sum, Grace Chang’s vocal style enlists certain non-representational qualities, and at an affective level, they evoke and constitute the utopian feeling of musical comedy. Another such non-representational element is the fact that the tunes Chang sings are “oldies” from the 1950s and 1960s. That is, other than the representational detachment of the songs from the lip-synching character/ performer, this “oldness” marks a bifurcation within the non-representational as well. The obsolescence of the songs is perceivable through what Roland Barthes terms the “grain” of the voice and sound.156 It is discernible in the old-fashioned orchestration and recording technology (resulting in differences in the sound field, and thus a different auditory perception vis-à-vis spatiality), as well as the vocal style, so distinct from that of today’s Mandarin pop singers. This obsolescence is another significant aspect of nostalgic yearning. It resonates with the quest for something that is unavailable; meanwhile, through the structure of feeling affiliated with a sense of loss, it appeals to repressed emotions and desires, including homosexuality. In a sense, it is this element of obsolescence that invokes a queer structure of feeling – namely gay melancholy – while homosexuality plays out as an unrepresented desire. It is played out in a “safe” way, though: perceivable, yet invisible. The mechanism flirts with that of passing – in this case, passing as the nostalgic sensibility of a wider, straighter audience. Now let us turn to the first level of the formal contradictions in film musical: the tension between the narrative and the numbers. Although 154 For a classic voice-training manual, see Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice. 155 See Wen Tien-hsiang, “Liang hua (xia),” p. 69. 156 Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image/Music/Text.

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Dyer focuses on how capitalist entertainment defines legitimate needs for the public while rendering class, race, and sexual struggles trivial, he does not ignore the “actual role” of women, gay men and black people in show business. For him, “camp humor and sensuous taste in dress and decor,” for example, illustrate gay men’s influence on the musical genre.157 In Working Like a Homosexual, Matthew Tinkcom further investigates the way “queer subjectivity emerges within the dynamics of capitalist cultural production for audiences that extend well beyond queer male subcultures.”158 He maintains that the outlandish and over-the-top camp style of the Freed unit’s gay labor was co-opted by MGM as a corporate strategy of product differentiation, insofar as the product was able “to pass” as wholesome entertainment while the style remained recognizable as camp by those in the know.159 Such a style, in short, capitalizes on “the dissembling abilities of camp,” giving a Freed musical its double valence.160 Importantly, Tinkcom argues for the appreciation of a “perverse form of film musical integration,” which does not presuppose that a number be “elegantly situated within its narrative constraints as less abruptly breaking with the realist narrative codes that mask the number as number.”161 Instead, “[i]f more customarily the musical number implicates its performers as mystifying the conditions of mundane life,” by integration, “a camp emphasis on performance also points in the opposite direction, implicating everyday life as performative, not least of which when it comes to thinking about gender.”162 The camp style thus potentially builds in “a critical commentary”163 on the integrated form and heteronormative narratives, which render the camp style – and the gay labor behind it – invisible to an undiscerning eye. Likewise, given that these numbers, as discussed, are characterized by a patently camp style, their incomplete narrative integration in the film has another ramification in terms of queer politics. In particular, I argue that the film’s seeming “failure” to subordinate the numbers to an (ostensibly) heteronormative narrative, coupled with a sustained delineation between camp aesthetic and heightened realism, effectively points to the auteur’s reluctance, if not outright refusal, to dissemble his “gay labor” in his own work. Camp style in The Hole therefore functions as what Tinkcom calls an 157 Dyer, Only Entertainment, p. 25. 158 Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual, p. 37. 159 Ibid., p. 46. 160 Ibid., p. 50. 161 Ibid., p. 62. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid., p. 48.

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“alibi” for a queer filmmaker within a hostile social economy,164 especially given that Tsai’s outgrowth of camp comes with an overt disruption of his continuous exploration of queer subjects, which was attacked in particular on the release of his previous feature, The River. We may conclude that The Hole’s musical numbers are not meant to be integrated into the narrative after all. On one hand, the lack of integration repudiates the heterosexual realism that (generically speaking) privileges narrative and integration, while the emphasis on camp style hints at the performative aspect of both the heterosexual narrative and the heteronormative endeavor for integration. On the other hand, these numbers, as noted, are also significant in and of themselves. They are significant to Tsai not least because of their affective capacity: they represent his yearning for a world that supports spontaneous expressions of feelings. Though largely imaginary and otherworldly, that world is not totally intangible. It is phantasmically approachable by means of the utopian feeling musical numbers customarily project, particularly through what Dyer terms non-representational signs and the ways they interact with representational signs. My previous discussion of representational and non-representational signs pointed out the irony of the representational rift between lip-synching and the (simultaneously undercut) performative eff icacy of the nonrepresentational, utopian feeling underpinning the camp numbers. This irony also informs the intricate feeling permeating the film’s seemingly “happy” ending. Here I share Robin Wood’s skepicism toward the perception of The Hole’s ultimate, avowed optimism as a new development for Tsai.165 However, I take this ending less as sheer despair (“No one is saved” at this “inevitable end of civilization,” according to Wood)166 than the unresolvable ambivalence underlying queer camp expression. When Dyer analyzes Judy Garland’s cult appeal to her gay following, he points to the bitter-wit of Garland’s off-screen biography and personality. Widely recognized by her gay fans, this bitter-wit – a “knife edge between camp and hurt” – played a crucial part in reinforcing Garland’s camp persona.167 By the same token, 164 Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual, p. 5. 165 Wood, “Toronto Film Festival 1998: The Hole.” 166 Ibid., p. 56. Wood specifically rejects the common interpretation that the numbers are the characters’ fantasies, arguing (with shades of Dyer) that these numbers in fact represent “the escapist fantasies that capitalism has expediently provided, by which we have been at once captivated and distracted.” The audience’s readiness to accept the end as a “happy end” thus ironically comments on the paradoxical character of popular entertainment, which “(at its best) has certainly comforted us, but has also lulled us into a false sense of security” (p. 56). 167 Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, p. 180.

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in the context of Tsai’s cinematic world, replete with profound solitude, and in particular his refusal to integrate the musical numbers in The Hole, the final performance of the “compulsory,” generic ritual of “heterosexual” bonding in this film is infused with a “knife edge” bitterness and heartfelt pathos. It is sugar-coated bitterness made possible by impossibility, since the couple is very likely already gone. What this seemingly happy ending foregrounds, then, is Tsai’s ironic response to compulsory heterosexuality, coupled with a disembodied yet persistent longing for happiness shared by many tongzhi/queer subjects. This yearning reverberates especially through the melancholic structure of feeling centered on the love-object that is already lost in a heteronormative institution, even as its haunting power remains. As Jane Feuer points out, contemporary queer studies of the film musical have noted a shift from “narrative resolution as heterosexual coupling” to an emphasis on “non-narrative, performative and spectacular elements (an emphasis on the numbers).”168 For me, The Hole is a case in point. Tsai’s camp sensibility is manifested in and through his five musical numbers, and his refusal to subordinate them to the narrative also highlights the performative aspect of heteronormative eagerness for musical integration. While there are no gay characters in The Hole, the film’s heightened camp aesthetic epitomizes the director’s unspoken (if not unspeakable) homosexual desire, and poignantly demonstrates the gay auteur’s insistent negotiation with compulsory heterosexuality.

Concluding Remarks Following my preceding chapters on the tension between Chinese tongzhi/ queer identities and their family-based social institution (Chapter 1), and the dissemination of “mass camp” through Hong Kong pop culture (Chapter 3), this chapter has expanded on the cultural translation of “gay camp” into tongzhi camp. Against the backdrop of ongoing negotiations of camp discourse in Hong Kong and Taiwan, I unpack the nebulous idea of “gay sensibility” by supplementing it with a structure of feeling mediated by gay shame and gay melancholy, with particular ramifications in Chinese culture. This queer structure of feeling reverberates through lesbian filmmaker Zero Chou’s work. In my view, Chou’s documentary Corner’s not only reflects this particular structure of feeling, but also captures the subtle transformation 168 Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, p. 141.

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of that queer feeling into camp expression: a form of Halberstam’s “queer art of failure.” Rather than bypassing “the dark heart of negativity that failure conjures,”169 Halberstam joins Quentin Crisp in proposing that “in true camp fashion, the queer artist works with rather than against failure and inhabits the darkness,” making darkness “a crucial part of a queer aesthetic.”170 Chou’s camp expression is indeed imbricated with the dark feelings associated with being queer; her sensitivity to camp is also evident in Splendid Float, whose camp aesthetic simultaneously registers a particular local flavor, blending the local into tongzhi camp, embodying the filmmaker’s negotiation with the rootless, desolate imaginary of queer diaspora. Finally, this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of Tsai Ming-liang’s deployment of camp in The Hole: here tongzhi camp combines with the musical genre to become a powerful critique of heteronormativity, insisting that homosexuality is still out there. As mentioned at the outset, my exploration of gay camp and, in particular, my translation of gay camp into tongzhi camp, resonate with queer investment in the historical figure of Qu Yuan, the legend of “Lady White Snake,” and Qiu Miaojin’s modern creation of the “crocodile.” It is worth noting that in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud (2005), not only does the director celebrate the “ironic” integration of the spectacular musical into the film’s realistic portrayal of “straight” porn filming (as a “wayward ‘pornographic musical’” for Bao Weihong),171 but two out of the five campy musical numbers (all involving hyperbolic performances and lip-synching to oldies) actually portray Lee Kang-sheng and Lu Yi-ching as some sort of crawling creatures. While I see Lu as imitating a spider (echoing modern queer classic Kiss of the Spider Woman), Lee’s intriguing incarnation represents a lizard-like reptile that, for Sing Song-yong and Vivian Lee, rather embodies a crocodile, recalling Qiu Miaojin’s metaphor for queer existence172 and her “play on camp.”173 Although there is humor in the hyperbolic performance here, I must repeat that this camp humor is inseparable from both Tsai’s and Qiu’s lived experiences as queers on the margins of the society. As also seen in a recent documentary on Qiu Miaojin titled Death of Montmartre (Evans Chan, 2017), the moments of camp onscreen humor ironically associated with the animated crocodile are inseparable from, and indeed motivated by, not 169 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 23. 170 Ibid., p. 96. 171 Bao Weihong, “Biomechanics of Love.” 172 Sing Song-yong, Rujing/chujing, p. 68. Vivian Lee, “Pornography, Musical, Drag, and the Art Film,” p. 131. 173 Chi Ta-wei, Wan’an babilun, p. 145.

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Figure 4.4  Still from Death of Montmartre

The crocodile from Qiu Miaojin’s novel Notes of a Crocodile is found roaming in Central, Hong Kong, in Evans Chan’s documentary Death of Montmartre. Courtesy of Evans Chan

only the torment of the lesbian character Lazi, but torment in Qiu’s other works and her own life that ended prematurely. Recalling my investigation of tongzhi camp through Zero Chou and Tsai Ming-liang, I argue that while tongzhi camp and mass camp may share characteristics such as irony, theatricality and (sporadic) humor, tongzhi camp nonetheless differs from mass camp due to its agents’ continuous negotiation of negative feelings, as epitomized by gay shame and gay melancholy animated by the marginalizing experience of being tongzhi, which (despite changing socio-historical terms) continuously haunt tongzhi subjects in mainstream Chinese societies.

5

Coming Out of The Box, Lalas with DV Cameras Abstract This chapter focuses on China’s earliest documentaries about lesbian subjects, The Box (Ying Weiwei, 2001) and Dyke March (Shi Tou/Ming Ming, 2004), examining the imbrication of technique and content, and the issue of “objectivity” in documentary filmmaking. It further raises the question of how we produce knowledge about social others. Foregrounding the tension between The Box’s knowledge/power scheme and LGBTQ-oriented politics, I then turn to Dyke March to explore the contrast in its sensitivity to the socio-political specificities of its subjects, and its political activist responsibility for its subjects. This chapter finally introduces four more recent lesbian documentaries from China, highlighting a developing trend in Chinese lesbian documentary filmmaking: independent production that emphasizes both collaboration and the specificity of a lesbian identity. Keywords: documentary, lesbian, The Box, Dyke March

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent documentary f ilmmaking flourished in the People’s Republic of China, as Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Zhang Yuan, and Jiang Yue launched what is commonly referred to as the Chinese New Documentary Movement. Until the mid-1990s, this movement was dominated by men, but ever since Li Hong’s Out of Phoenix Bridge (1997), films by female documentarists like Yang Lina, Liu Xiaojin, and Tang Danhong have focused on the turmoil and uncertainty of life in postsocialist China. Zhang Zhen argues that these contemporary women filmmakers are connected by their focus on issues of social change, particularly their effects on women. This approach diverges from that of their male peers in general, especially the epic and idealistic perspective advocated in Dziga Vertov’s concept of “Kino-Eye,” as seen in The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Accordingly, Zhang calls these documentarists, “women with

Chao, Shi-Yan, Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462988033_ch05

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video cameras.”1 Continuing to examine female homoeroticism in China’s changing mediascape, this chapter moves from socialist settings to the current postsocialist environment with its “awakening of new desires and identities,”2 focusing on two independent documentaries made by women: The Box (2001) and Dyke March (2004). While The Box was single-handedly produced, directed, shot, and edited by Echo Y. Windy (Ying Weiwei), Dyke March was a collaborative work by a lesbian couple, Shi Tou and Ming Ming. Echo Y. Windy graduated from the Department of Chinese Literature at Liaoning University and worked as a newspaper and magazine editor before moving into television as a writer-director in 1999. Completed in August 2001, The Box – depicting the past experiences and current life of a lesbian couple in China – is both Windy’s first independent documentary and the first documentary from the People’s Republic to feature lesbian subjects. Meanwhile, Fish and Elephant (Li Yu, 2001) is considered China’s first lesbian feature film. Premiering at the Venice International Film Festival in 2001 and taking the Elivra Notari Prize, Fish was thereafter shown at several other international film festivals, including lesbian and gay film festivals in New York and San Francisco.3 One of the lead actresses, Shi Tou, accompanied the filmmakers to promote the film, and during their stop in San Francisco she seized the opportunity to shoot the raw footage for Dyke March. Co-edited by Shi Tou’s girlfriend, Ming Ming, Dyke March chronicles the lesbian parade that took place in San Francisco on June 28, 2002. Before making this documentary, Shi Tou had been known as a talented female artist from Yuanmingyuan in Beijing, the first artists’ village in China. Her work includes paintings, photographs, and videos, and she has exhibited at home and abroad.4 As the first lesbian to discuss same-sex relationships on 1 Zhang Zhen, “Dai sheyingji de nüren” (Women with video cameras). An extended version of this essay is collected in Ping (ed.), Lingyan xiangkan, pp. 84-95. 2 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, p. 2. 3 In addition to the Elvira Notari Prize in Venice International Film Festival in 2001, Fish and Elephant also won a Special Mention in Berlin International Film Festival in 2002. For two reviews of this film by openly gay Chinese critics, see Cui Zi’en, Diyi guanzhong (The first audiences), pp. 94-98; Fan Popo, Bai bu tongzhi dianying quan jilu (A complete documentation of a hundred tongzhi films), pp. 216-220. 4 Shi Tou’s paintings, photographs and video works have been exhibited at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Berkeley Art Museum, Mills College Art Museum, the Public Art Commission of Silicon Valley, and the Tilton Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, among many other institutions. In addition to Dyke March, Women Fifty Minutes (2005) and a short video We Want to Get Married (2007), Shi Tou has co-directed documentary We Are Here (with Sam Zhao, 2015), and is completing a new feature with Ming Ming titled Xinjiang Girls. For a discussion by Shi Tou about her artwork, see Liu and Rofel, “An Interview with Shi Tou.” On Shi Tou’s Women Fifty Minutes, her artwork “Weapons” and her acting in Cui Zi’en’s Shi Tou

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national television, Shi Tou is arguably also the most noted lesbian activist in China, advocating for LGBTQ issues for the last two decades.5 Dyke March thus shows Shi Tou as both an artist and an activist. Although The Box and Dyke March address similar subjects, they differ in their approaches to production and their political concerns. This chapter compares the two films, examining the effects of technique on content (particularly the use of digital video, or simply DV), and the issue of “objectivity” in documentary f ilmmaking. It also raises the question of producing knowledge about social others. What are the links between knowledge and politics? I argue that a tension exists between The Box’s knowledge/power scheme and its LGBTQ politics. Dyke March, by contrast, is notable for its sensitivity to its subjects’ specific socio-political situations, as well as its political activist responsibility for its subjects. I conclude this chapter by introducing four more recent lesbian documentaries from China, highlighting a developing trend: independent production that emphasizes both collaboration and the specif icity of a lesbian or lala identity.6 and That Nana (2005), see Wang Qi, Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema, pp. 164-168. 5 Shi Tou was also the organizer and host of the first “Chinese Lesbian and Gay Conference” and the first Mainland Chinese “Convention of Lesbians” (both held in Beijing in 1998). She also served as the editor of Tiankong (sky), a community newsletter for Chinese lesbians, and helped set up a telephone hotline to exchange opinions about sexual orientation. Among others, Shi Tou was engaged in the first two Beijing International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (in December 2001 and April 2005, respectively) and Beijing Gay and Lesbian Culture Festival (in December 2005). Since 2007, Shi Tou has also been actively engaged in the annual “lala leadership training camp” involving participants from across China and beyond. Between 2008 and 2012, Shi Tou and Ming Ming joined Fan Popo in the China Queer Independent Films (Zhongguo ku’er duli yingxiang xiaozu; originally initiated by Fan Popo and Xu Bin) to organize the China Queer Film Festival Tour in numerous cities and coordinate resources across the country, aiming at “challenging authorities and building community culture,” to paraphrase Fan. Since 2013, with Fan’s departure, Shi Tou and Ming Ming have become the main coordinators for the China Queer Independent Films and its relevant activities. Much of the information compiled here is based on my personal communications with Shi Tou and Ming Ming over the years (with Shi Tou’s latest e-mail dated November 2018). For a detailed account of the China Queer Film Festival Tour, see Fan Popo, “Challenging Authorities and Building Community Culture.” For the best documentation of the Beijing Queer Film Festival during its first decade, see film curator-director Yang Yang’s documentary Our Story: 10-Year “Guerrilla Warfare” of Beijing Queer Film Festival (2011). 6 The Chinese term lala shares some affinity with lazi, another term for lesbians in Taiwan that originated from Qiu Miaojin’s instant lesbian classic Notes of a Crocodile (first published in 1994). See Loretta Ho, Gay and Lesbian Subculture in Urban China, p. 85; Hongwei Bao, Queer Comrades, p. 85.

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Identity Politics and Production Methods Opening with the official manifesto of the San Francisco lesbian parade, Dyke March possesses a blatant political appeal, drawing on Shi Tou’s background as a veteran lesbian activist. The Box, by contrast, adopts a feminist angle from the very beginning of its production. In her statement “Hezhong qiri” (Seven days in the box), Windy said that she wanted to make The Box because, “In today’s patriarchal society, women remain underprivileged.”7 She found her subjects on the internet, posting: “I am a woman. I am a documentary director. I am making a documentary with women as my subjects. If you are willing to face my camera, please contact me.”8 This feminist stance also incorporates liberal overtones. It diverges from traditional, Chinese state-sanctioned feminism – the officially sponsored project of women’s liberation ( funü jiefang). The latter was based on the premise of naturalized and essential sex difference, manipulating the concept of gender equality to construct and regulate gender behavior and sexual practice “in support of the [state] project of social control and economic development.”9 Under the off icial discourse both men’s and women’s energies “were to be channeled into working for the collective benefit” (see also Chapter 2).10 Since the 1980s, though, this state-oriented discourse has been widely challenged by those who believe that women should define their own needs and create their own subject positions in society. Appealing to women’s own interest and underprivileged social status, Windy’s feminist stance represents this challenge to party-state appropriation. While Windy herself is a straight woman, she focuses on lesbians since they are generally even more disenfranchised. As Leta Hong Fincher notes, “In addition to having to cope with societal discrimination against the LGBTQ community, lesbian groups are marginalized by officially registered Chinese women’s rights groups, including some NGOs.”11 In this regard, Windy’s feminist approach presents an intersectional perspective largely absent from mainstream (straight) feminist agendas. 7 Entitled “Hezong qiri” (Seven days in the box), Echo Y. Windy’s personal statement can be found in “Jilupian Hezi” (Documentary The Box), Nüquan Zhongguo (Chinese feminism: www. feminism.cn, January 28, 2005). 8 Ibid. 9 Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, p. 7. For a discussion of the circulation and impact of the heavily propagated slogans like “The times have changes; men and women are the same. Anything male comrades can do, female comrades can do too,” see Emily Honig, “The Life of a Slogan.” 10 Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, p. 27. 11 Fincher, Leftover Women, p. 181.

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Not only are The Box and Dyke March built on different political foundations, they also take disparate approaches to production. Although both films were shot on digital video (DV), each emphasized different attributes of the DV camera. For Wu Wenguang, the advent of DV in China in the late 1990s signified the birth of “a sort of personal writing” that represents the “civilian standpoint.” By making it “something really personal,” DV emancipates the “imagery of reality” from the mass and the system,12 accelerating the process that takes filmmaking, as Luke Robinson puts it, “from the studio to the street.”13 To Windy, the portable and relatively affordable DV equipment further represents “a liberation of women,”14 allowing female filmmakers to work independently of a male-dominated system: it enabled her to make a documentary single-handedly, on a comparatively low budget. However, whereas the portability of the DV camera is vividly rendered by the dexterous framing in Dyke March, with Shi Tou moving along with the crowd, capturing various arresting moments, The Box exploits the effects of long takes and static camera positioning. Like a talking-head documentary, The Box includes lengthy interviews with a lesbian couple referred to only as A and B, interspersed with observational, slice-of-life sequences. In the opening segment (roughly eighteen minutes long), A and B talk separately about their lives before they met. The second and third sequences (each about nine minutes long) portray moments of their daily life together: the mundanities of the couple’s morning routine – washing their faces, brushing their teeth, combing their hair, putting in contact lenses, tending to the plants – followed by their evening life. This sequence shows their protracted embrace upon B’s arrival home from work (which alone lasts for about one hundred seconds), and their playful wrestling on the bed at night. Both sequences emphasize the couple’s intimacy, not only through the hugs and romps but in more detailed physical interactions – A wiping B’s face, B combing A’s hair and wiping her sweat. However, the following sequence reveals that there was once a woman – W – who came between A and B, and this may be considered the turning point of the film’s narrative. This twentysix-minute sequence consists of both interviews and observational footage. 12 Quoted from Zhu Jingjian and Cao Kai, “Zhongguo xingxiang dageming de DV shidai lailin” (The advent of the DV era and the great revolution of imaging in China). 13 Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary, pp. 29-32. This process is epitomized by “the logic of xianchang” that also emphasizes a refocus “from the public to the private,” as Robinson highlights in his article, “From ‘Public’ to ‘Private’.” 14 Quoted from Li Duoyu, “Cong zuidi de difang kaishi paishe” (Starting filming in the lowest position). Wu Wenguang expresses a similar opinion in a short article entitled “Nüxing yu DV shexiangji” (Women and DV cameras).

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Significantly, the questions posed to the interviewees, along with the interviewer’s bodily presence, are deliberately excluded from the film. Except for a few moments during the second half of the film, we do not hear Windy conversing with either A or B. This technique creates the illusion that the interviews are merely monologues or confessions, and corresponds to the formal consideration of the slice-of-life sequences in The Box. This illusion of not having been tampered with reflects the documentary aesthetic known as “direct cinema,” whose practitioners assume that a filmmaker/camera can observe the events unraveling on the scene without being involved with, or intervening in, what is occurring in front of the camera. In other words, they believe the fly-on-the-wall stance can reveal reality with objectivity. Windy’s self-effacing stance is further evinced in the intertitles. Besides the title card and the closing credits, four inserts appear during the film. They read, in sequence: “Many years later he visited me,” “After that, I found myself pregnant and had an abortion,” “On Mooncake Festival, the year 2000, we got to know each other through the internet,” and “Once between us there was a woman called W.” Note that the filmmaker selects “I” (instead of B) for the first two intertitles and “we/us” (rather than A and B) for the next two, emphasizing her subjects’ first-person perspectives, excluding her own viewpoint. If we discern an attempt to maintain the boundary between filmmaker and subjects in The Box, in Dyke March that boundary is blurred – intentionally and otherwise – by Shi Tou and her subjects. Several times we hear murmurs or whispers from behind the camera, implying that the camera is not a transparent or objective presence. Moreover, those in front of the camera sometimes talk directly to Shi Tou, or even chat with her and her friends. For instance, a white male tells Shi Tou, gesticulating excitedly, “I saw your film [Fish and Elephant]. It’s great!” In another scene, a policewoman amiably asks Shi Tou where she is from. Twice, we witness Shi Tou putting the camera in the hands of her friends. She spontaneously enacts a “coming out” in front of the camera, crossing the boundary between filmmaker and her subjects. Shi Tou is more than a passive observer of the march: she is an active participant in the event. If the impulse permeating The Box (the observational sequences in particular) invokes the realist style of direct cinema or, to adopt Bill Nichols’ categorization, the observational documentary, then Dyke March can be regarded as a “participatory documentary.”15 According to Nichols, observational documentary, with direct cinema as its major 15 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, pp. 179-194.

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Figure 5.1  Still from Dyke March

Director Shi Tou enacts a “coming out” before the camera, obliterating the boundary between filmmaker and her subjects. Courtesy of Shi Tou

expression, conveys to the viewers “a sense of what it is like to be in a given situation but without a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be there.”16 The participatory documentary filmmaker, by contrast, “steps down from a fly-on-the-wall perch, and becomes a social actor (almost) like any other,” giving viewers “a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result.”17 Of course, a discussion of the differences between observational and participatory documentary should also consider their relative significance in 1990s China. The major formal constituents of The Box – namely, direct cinema’s realist approach and the interview format – both possess particular appeal for independent documentary filmmakers in postsocialist China. Contemporary Chinese independent documentarists reject the official tradition of newsreels and “zhuanti pian” (literally, special topic films), which are characterized by images compiled in accordance with pre-written 16 Ibid., p. 181. 17 Ibid.

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scripts, and a direct, top-down address to the audience. In their pursuit of reality, new documentary filmmakers highlight instead a sense of immediacy – “being ‘here’ and ‘now’,” as Wu Wenguang succinctly puts it.18 As Chris Berry notes, they strive for an “unscripted spontaneity.”19 In addition, as Lu Xinyu has argued, they show a deep concern for “civil society” from a “personal standpoint.”20 Contemporary Chinese documentary filmmakers thus try to distance themselves from official approaches in their efforts to document the lives of ordinary people, especially those on the margins of the society.21 Direct cinema likewise contains a heightened “reality effect,” as Nichols states, its “directness, immediacy, and impression of capturing untampered events in the everyday lives of particular people.”22 When this mode of production was introduced in China in the early nineties, it had a dramatic impact. At the same time, documentary filmmakers also started to exploit the “reality effect” of the interview format. By compiling diverse, even mutually contradictory points of view from various interviewees, they strategically offset or debunked official discourses.23 Embedded in this postsocialist milieu, Windy’s formal choices are politically significant. She adopts a feminist approach by blending personal content into a politically informed approach. She thereby has to contend with a prevalent attitude in China that dismisses women writers, artists, and filmmakers for merely “personalizing” issues. Nonetheless, I suggest that the static camerawork and prolonged takes in The Box, together with Windy’s erasure of her own voice, conversely reflects the heightened awareness of a boundary between herself and her subjects. Windy confesses that before she made The Box, she knew little about lesbian culture.24 This filmmaker/subject boundary thus also exists on the axis of sexual orientation. By retaining the demarcation between her own identity as a straight woman and that of her subjects as lesbian women, Windy shows discretion towards, and respect for, that difference. By contrast, Shi Tou chooses not to distance herself from her subjects in Dyke March. Simply by marching with the crowd, the filmmaker shows that she does not want to be a detached bystander, but an active participant. The mobile framing and vivacious rhythm to the editing sensually weaves the 18 Wu Wenguang, “Xianchang: han jilu fangshi yuguan de shu” (Document: A book about the ways of recording), p. 274. 19 Berry, “Facing Reality,” pp. 121-131, esp. 122, 124-125. 20 Lu Xinyu, Jilu Zhongguo (Documenting China), pp. 14-15, 335. 21 Zhang Yingjin, “Fengge, zhuti, shijiao” (Styles, subject matters, perspectives), p. 55. 22 Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” pp. 48-49. 23 Zhang Yingjin, “Fengge, zuti, shijiao,” p. 57. 24 Windy “Jilupian Hezi.”

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viewers into the scene, affectively engaging us with the parade. Blurring the boundary between the filmmaker and her subjects simultaneously evokes a sense of inter-subjectivity between the two parties. The filmmaker’s participatory approach corresponds with her political identification: I am a lesbian too! I am standing by you all!

Bringing out Lesbian Subjects in Contemporary China As many have pointed out, between 1949 (the founding of the PRC) and the 1970s, “homosexuality” was totally absent from public and scholarly discussions. While not explicitly prohibited, or even described, in Chinese law, same-sex behavior between men might incur punishment under such rubrics as “hooliganism” (liumangzui) or disruption of social order. Same-sex behavior was understood to mean sodomy or gender transgression, but not the identity category of homosexuality.25 This picture began to change only in the 1980s, with China’s redevelopment of a market economy and the reintroduction of certain aspects of Western culture. “Sex” was no longer taboo but actually became a prominent discursive formation that has been exploited for commercial enterprise,26 while the taxonomy of homosexuality surfaced in public and scholarly discussions. However, the majority of those published texts, according to Tze-lan Sang, simply rehashed early Western sexological theories of homosexuality as gender reversal and psychological abnormality.27 Stereotypes about homosexuality thus proliferated in literature and medical treatises. Some progress in the Chinese tongzhi (LGBTQ) movement28 finally came at the turn of the millennium. The state’s Criminal Law deleted the category “hooliganism” in 1997,29 and the health authorities removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in 2001.30 Still, society at large remains 25 Ke-qiang An, Hong taiyang xia de hei linghuen, pp. 8-9. Hongwei Bao, Queer Comrades, pp. 178-179. 26 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, p. 168. 27 Ibid. 28 Here I use the word tongzhi with some flexibility. When tongzhi appears unmodified, it mostly refers to LGBTQ. When it is employed with female and male, the term mainly signifies lesbians and gay men, respectively. 29 Travis Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, pp. 154-155. For a detailed account of relevant legal controversies, see Lucetta Yip Lo Kam, Shanghai Lalas, pp. 47-51. 30 Homosexuality as a mental illness was removed in 2001 from the Categories and Diagnostic Standards of Mental Illness in China (Third Edition), published by the Chinese Psychiatry Association. See Cui Zi’en, “Filtered Voices.”

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mostly uninformed about or prejudiced against lesbians and gay men. Most Chinese women and men who engage in same-sex acts still encounter tremendous difficulty becoming active and visible, even though many of them have already developed lesbian or gay identities, as well as a knowledge of transnational lesbian and gay cultures.31 Unable to embrace their identities fully or display them in public, the majority of lesbians and gay men have been forced to lead closeted or double lives. To some degree, The Box and Dyke March also underline this dilemma, which one can see reflected in the locations. Except for two segments, The Box was mostly shot inside the house of A and B, coinciding with the imagery of confinement in the film’s title. On the other hand, the decision to shoot in the home might have been to preserve some level of anonymity for A and B, by not revealing their location to the general public. The film’s mise-en-scène points to the oppressive forces, visible or otherwise, of wider society and the social system. Dyke March, however, takes a detour, showing some aspects of the lesbian and gay movements overseas. In particular, it provides the domestic tongzhi audience with scenarios that they, too, might someday enjoy: increased public visibility, access to the public sphere, even taking over public spaces. In China’s metropolitan areas in the 1990s a semi-public culture developed around gay cruising zones, unadvertised gay bars and restaurants, and gay corners in discos. At the same time, a substantial number of works depicting homosexuality in contemporary China were also produced by local and transnational Chinese journalists, sociologists and activists, and later international scholars and activists. Even so, the majority, according to Sang, feature “the gay man – and, more specif ically, the gay man in metropolitan Beijing.”32 The lack of public and scholarly accounts of lesbian subjects in China reflects the fact that lesbian activities and subcultures, compared with their gay male counterparts, are even less visible. Similarly, lesbians in China have remained mostly “invisible” to the general public. Against this backdrop, we must first acknowledge a series of efforts to enhance lesbian networking and social visibility made by various dedicated individuals from within the tongzhi community since the late 1990s. As attested by “the mosaic of talking heads”33 in the documentary Queer China, “Comrade” China (Cui Zi’en, 2008), these include Xu Bin, Shi Tou, Sam Zhao, Gogo, Xiangqi, Bai Yongbing, Pan Suiming, Wei Jiangang, Fan Popo, and 31 Wan Yanhai, “Becoming a Gay Activist in Contemporary China,” p. 47. 32 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, p. 170. 33 Robinson, “‘To Whom Do Our Bodies Belong’,” p. 295.

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of course the filmmaker Cui Zi’en himself.34 They have worked shoulderto-shoulder with figures such as China’s leading sexologist Li Yinhe, AIDS researchers Zhang Beichuan and Wan Yanhai, legal experts Zhou Dan and Guo Xiaofei, TV journalists Xu Gehui and Chai Jing, film directors Zhang Yuan and Li Yu, and film curators Yang Yang and Zhu Rikun. To some degree, The Box can also be understood as an early attempt to document lesbian subjectivity, initiating a dialogue between the straight populace and (female) tongzhi. Like many new documentary films that make an effort to learn about, understand, and feel sympathy for those on the margins of society, The Box is arguably addressed to mainstream audiences in China. Several of the interviews in The Box, for example, are unwittingly complicit with mainstream discourses about homosexuality. As the film opens, A and B talk separately about their families and their experiences growing up. B, the more extroverted partner, says that she grew up in an ordinary family, while A confesses that she has been afraid of her parents since her childhood. She not only “lacked maternal love,” she also had a father “who hated the family” and an elder sister who seemed “like a boy.” A concludes, “In retrospect, I assume they more or less have contributed to my loving girls.” In a subsequent discussion about their early sexual experiences, A confesses that she had been sexually harassed by men, including her cousin and her own father. B reveals her tumultuous experience with her ex-boyfriend, including becoming pregnant, getting an abortion alone in a clinic, and eventually being deserted by him. It seems clear that such remarks from A and B do not necessarily challenge mainstream ideas about same-sex desires. Taking the form of “confessions,” they somehow reinforce the public imagination of homosexuality: it is a product of dysfunctional family ties and frustrated heterosexual relationships. Tellingly, several articles that discuss The Box do indeed interpret lesbianism in a way that is patronizing and biased. They discuss the “cause of [A and B’s] homosexuality”:35 “One was hurt by her family; the other by a man. Eventually they choose to escape [from a straight lifestyle].”36 34 Four insightful discussions of veteran queer filmmaker Cui Zi’en’s work follow: Bao Hongwei, “Cui Zi’en the Queer,” in Queer Comrades, pp. 119-147; Petrus Liu, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, pp. 48-58; Yue, “Mobile Intimacies in the Queer Sinophone Films of Cui Zi’en”; Berry, “The Sacred, the Profane, and the Domestic in Cui Zi’en’s Cinema.” For two crucial interviews with Cui, see Fan Popo, “Interview with Cui Zi’en”; Wang Qi, “The Ruin Is Already a New Outcome.” 35 See, for instance, Zi Feiyu, “Weimei, gudian, liuchang” (Romantic, classic, fluent); Cheng Suqin, “Ling yizhong jiyi” (Another kind of memory). 36 Li Bingqin, “Pingminghua, duli jingshen yu jilupian chuangzuo” (Popularization, independent spirit and documentary creation). Zi Feiyu holds a similar opinion. See Zi, “Weimei, gudian, liuchang.”

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Echoing this unapologetic misunderstanding, some commentators even praise the film’s “sociological significance.”37 However, to borrow Michel Foucault’s insight from The History of Sexuality, we should be aware of how the dominant discourse of sexuality in a society produces human subjects and their knowledge about sex: by encouraging them to “talk” about and “confess” their sex. In so doing they produce the “truth” about human sexuality, which conversely solidifies the power/knowledge structure or “regime” (as Foucault puts it) of society.38 To put it another way, remarks by members of a sexual minority do not automatically forge a challenge to the dominant discourse. To assess a film like The Box, we have to pay special attention to the power relations in which the film is embedded. On one level, we may wonder, for instance, how the interviews were conducted. What exactly were the questions that Windy presented to A and B? Furthermore, who has the right to pose questions, or rather, who has the right to study and question social others? What kind of power structure does the knowledge thereby produced serve or reflect? In addition to such methodological concerns, we find that some elements of the film are also meant to give the impression that the misfortunes of A’s and B’s pasts are somehow connected to their current lesbian identity. The strategy of comparison plays an essential role here. Other than thematic comparisons like past/present, misfortune/happiness, single/couple, and straight/lesbian, we notice that when A and B talk about their troubled pasts, the footage is in black and white. But after the insert indicating the beginning of their relationship, the footage changes to color. It seems clear that the shift conveys the message that the couple’s current life is a redemption from their grim histories. This color sequence begins with a medium shot of the green plant at the window, which is then replaced by a close-up of the same plant. While the greenery signifies rebirth, the change of lens punctuates the message in the viewers’ minds. The Box is thus not as objective as one may assume. The various comparisons in The Box support the impulse to make sense of these lesbians as social others. In particular, the impression that lesbian subjectivity in The Box is explicable through each woman’s past coincides with the public belief that sees same-sex eroticism as an aberration. What other assumptions subtend The Box, besides the idea that lesbian subject is something that needs to be explained? In her own statement, Windy reveals why she chose A and B as her subjects: A adores Pedro 37 See Zi “Weimei, gudian, liuchang” and Cheng “Ling yizhong jiyi,” as well as Li Bingqin, “Pingminghua, duli jingshen yu jilupian chuangzuo.” 38 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.

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Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999), a detail that convinced Windy that A is “a person of high cultural taste,” with the result that she “immediately decided to videotape them.”39 Interestingly, not only does The Box include a sequence where A is painting and B is playing guitar and singing, but we repeatedly hear western classical music in the background. Furthermore, the film ends with a sequence featuring A and B reciting poems, again evoking “a spiritual world of elite qualities,”40 to paraphrase two critics. Although the music played in the scene was determined by A and B41 and the poems were actually written by A, the framing reveals the imbrication of cultural taste, class, gender, and sexuality. A pervasive issue in public discussions in post-Mao China is the “quality” (suzhi) of the populace. 42 This discussion derives from concerns about population control and desirable offspring, centering on the constitution of Chinese subjects who are capable of accumulating wealth for their families in this postsocialist economy. The idea of suzhi also promotes proper bourgeois subjectivities, which are demarcated by wide-ranging variables such as class-inflected cultural tastes, 43 levels of education, 44 and the division between urban and rural. 45 It seems to me that the emphasis on a lesbian couple’s suzhi functions as an ideological lever, whereby their higher level of cultural taste and class counterbalances the lesbian couple’s “failure” to conform to women’s supposed destinations – the heterosexual family and reproduction. In addition, the film’s emphasis on the couple’s suzhi, along with its stress on the spiritual aspect of their life, helps the subjects skirt the stigma associated with their carnal desire. Not unlike early gay activism in the United States, which adopted a conformist strategy and pleaded for social tolerance, The Box’s portrayal of 39 Windy “Jilupian Hezi”. 40 Zi “Weimei, gudian, liuchang” and Cheng, “Ling yizhong jiyi.” 41 “Di’er jie Zhongguo jilupian jiaoliuzhou jiabin yu guanzhong jiaoliu quanjilu” (A full record of the face-to-face communication between the guests and the audiences during the second ‘week for Chinese documentary communication’). http://www.topart.cn/cn/ room/show/htm, accessed May 2005. 42 Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi).” 43 Pierre Bourdieu argues that cultural distinctions support class distinctions. Taste is a highly ideological category: it functions as a marker of class, a double-coded term that refers to both a socio-economic category and a particular level of quality. To consume culture is “predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences.” See Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 7. 44 For a debate on population and education in present-day China, see Ann Hulbert, “ReEducation,” pp. 36-43, continued on 56. 45 Rofel, “Qualities of Desire,” in Desiring China, pp. 85-110.

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Figure 5.2  Still from The Box

A and B enjoy their shared moments painting, playing guitar, and singing. Courtesy of Ying Weiwei

its lesbian subjects – low-profile, yet with respectable cultural taste – could also be a political strategy. That is, an affective appeal to largely straight audiences might have been anticipated as a part of the film’s discursive effect, which asks non-tongzhi viewers to cultivate respect for and acceptance of these socially marginalized subjects. Windy’s film certainly contributes the increasing visibility of Chinese lesbian subjects in a socio-cultural environment that is ignorant of, yet paradoxically hostile to, tongzhi groups. While taking into account Windy’s discretion and her respect for the differences between herself and her lesbian subjects, I also want to explore the power relations of this documentary film. Behind the filmmaker’s ostensibly disengaged approach to her subjects, I argue there is tension between its three perspectives: the filmmaker’s expansive feminism, the film’s intended non-tongzhi audience, and the standpoint of a more radical queer politics. Partly because the filmmaker herself was an outsider to lesbian socio-cultural networks, and partly because the target audience was non-tongzhi, the film does not challenge the dominant discourses about homosexuality. Instead, the priority seems to be revealing a social group that is largely invisible to heteronormative society.

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In her own statement, Windy uses words like “pure,” “beautiful” and “fragile” to describe “the world of A and B.”46 Though I find their world earnest, I do not consider it especially “pure” or “fragile.” Doesn’t W coming between A and B suggest that the relationship is not utterly “pure,” and doesn’t the very resilience of their relationship, despite W’s intervention, contradict the perception that it is “fragile”? There seems to be a disparity between the subjects as represented and the (undoubtedly empathetic) picture the filmmaker had in her mind. I also wonder if those terms echo another idealized yet intangible sentiment, some utopian world or “all-women’s world,” which a straight feminist filmmaker unwittingly projects onto a lesbian couple with whom she sympathizes (perhaps a little too much). 47 This utopian imagination, coincidentally or not, underlines A and B’s higher level of “cultural taste” and “spiritual world.” The result is ambiguous: by de-emphasizing the couple’s carnal desire, the film sidesteps the issue of homophobic stigma. While it fosters a stronger affective appeal in the largely non-tongzhi audience, it does so, paradoxically, by avoiding specifying A and B’s relationship as lesbian. Perhaps due to Windy’s lack of familiarity with lesbian culture, and perhaps also her conception of the film as a personal one simply about women, The Box does not emphasize the significance of lesbian identity in relation to the social and the political. By this, I do not mean to deny the work has a political tenor. In fact, Windy’s techniques – i.e. observational documentation, the interview format, the effacement of the filmmaker’s own voice, the inserts – are themselves informed by the larger cultural and socio-political climate. Likewise, the film’s location hints at the way the personal is blended into the political. The political commitments of The Box are not invisible, but they are rendered in an indirect way. Still, lesbians in present-day China encounter various practical issues that are marginalized in, if not completely absent from, The Box. These include the tension between identifying as lesbian and dealing with one’s natal family, the difficulty of finding acceptance in the workplace and among friends, the pressure to marry, and finally, life among the emerging lesbian (sub) culture and community. All of these issues are significant to contemporary Chinese tongzhi, both female and male. Notably, the subject of “coming out,” 46 Windy, “Jilupian Hezi.” 47 In “Hezhong qiri” (see n. 8), Windy perplexingly describes her first impression of A and B as “shocking”, though they were doing nothing but standing in the bright sunshine. She also wondered “if such a pure and beautiful world [the world of A and B] would someday collapse,” lamenting that she feels “helpless” and “sentimental.”.

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arguably the thorniest issue encountered by Chinese tongzhi – the focus of gay activist-documentarist Fan Popo’s Chinese Closet (2009), Mama Rainbow (2012) and Pink Dads (2016) – and one that requires complex negotiating strategies, 48 is not treated as an issue at all. We do not know if A and B’s family members know anything about their sexual orientation, let alone how they view it. Interestingly, when B talks about having had an affair with W, she mentions at one point that her sister tried to talk her out of it, implying that at least one of B’s family knew her lesbian identity, even back then. This fact, however, is not discussed anywhere else in the film. In sum, as a documentary film, The Box seems to promise an “objective” view of Chinese lesbian subjects by virtue of its seemingly disengaged approach to its subjects. However, due to Windy’s lack of familiarity with lesbian culture, her aim of making a personal film about women, and the non-tongzhi target audience, The Box is nonetheless imbricated in discourses mediated by heteronormative thinking. Despite its good intentions and expansive feminist standpoint, The Box contains an unresolvable tension with a more radical tongzhi/queer politics. 49

Lalas with DV Cameras In Foucault’s view, “power and knowledge directly imply one another.”50 Of course, Foucault meant not only to challenge the seemingly “repressive” mainstream, but to put in question all discourses that establish identities in the name of sex, including those that appear in the name of gay liberation. If the view of lesbian subjectivity produced by The Box unwittingly speaks to a heteronormative discourse about sexuality, we must likewise pay attention to the power/knowledge of Dyke March. Whereas in The Box Windy utilizes 48 For anthropological scholarship on coming out among Chinese lesbians, see for example, Lucetta Kam, “Negotiating the Public and the Private,” in Shanghai Lalas, pp. 73-87. Regarding Chinese gay men, see Travis Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities, pp. 156-169. 49 I appreciate the comment by a reviewer of this manuscript regarding the cultural specificity of tongzhi in the PRC. As the reviewer notes, although the tongzhi discourse started in the late 1990s, it only really became popular in the 2000s, with a burgeoning queer community and social movements after homosexuality was de-pathologized in 2001. Dyke March is one of the first community documentaries that specifically identity as tongzhi. The film actively participated in the construction of a tongzhi discourse in the PRC. By contrast, the two lesbians in the 2001 film The Box should be understood in the discourse of tongxinglian, which has a longer history in the post-Mao China. This to some extent explains why The Box did not engage with the tongzhi discourse from a historical perspective. 50 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27.

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an observational approach and a non-hierarchical attitude to her subjects, Shi Tou establishes her identification with the people she films through the use of a participatory method, and it is one that simultaneously crosses national/cultural boundaries. This boundary-crossing identification invokes a specific form of knowledge about lesbian subjects: this knowledge informs and is informed by power. There is no doubt that to some lesbians in China, the knowledge and politics represented by Dyke March are not easy to digest. If The Box speaks to a largely non-tongzhi audience in China, Dyke March speaks to a queer audience in China, but a particular queer audience. This audience is arguably more urban than rural and fashions itself as cosmopolitan enough to care about queer people in other countries. If we take the dyke march at face value, we must also acknowledge that there are many lesbians – even in the United States – who would not feel comfortable marching in a dyke march or who feel that such a march is not relevant to their lives. By contrast, The Box reflects other ways of being lesbian. For example, it captures the precise sense of being isolated and closeted. Nevertheless, to numerous lesbians in China, particularly those who are relatively cosmopolitan, being equipped with the positivist knowledge associated with Dyke March can be empowering. It offers an uplifting vision of collective identity and self-identification. It affirms the idea that they are not alone, that they should also have the right to be proud of themselves and their partners, that they can also pursue the right to adopt children and form (same-sex) families, and that they can be equally concerned about various political and human rights issues from a tongzhi perspective – from resisting capitalism, to liberating Palestine, to decriminalizing prostitution (as seen during the parade in the film). In other words, even though it documents an event taking place overseas, Dyke March also encourages female and male tongzhi at home to strive for their own rights, in the hope of obtaining a more promising future.51 In Dyke March the filmic techniques and representations inform each other; they simultaneously invoke and reify a positivist politics and knowledge about being lesbian. In terms of the camerawork, for instance, Shi Tou chooses to portray the throaty motorcycles leading the parade with several long shots from a lower camera angle. From this angle the scale (and 51 Dyke March has been shown at the China Documentary Film Festival in Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing (June 2004) and the Beijing International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (April 2005), among others. In our e-mail exchanges, Shi Tou informed me that the film has been screened at numerous tongzhi gatherings, though she is equally interested in showing the film at events that are not specifically for tongzhi.

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movement) of the choppers is moderately magnified, while the long shot treats the “dykes on bikes” and the cheering public in the background as being equally important. The subjects and the surroundings are therefore in balance, foregrounding the dynamic between them. The jubilant atmosphere highlights the pride of being a lesbian. Several times throughout the film Shi Tou chooses a higher position as her vantage point, panning and zooming to capture the marching crowd. Early on in the film, for example, she dexterously uses a high-angle shot and zooms in to direct our attention to the group gathered under the banner “Asian Queer Women’s Services.” Arguably, Chinese lesbian viewers will more easily establish an identification with these queer-identifying Asian women (as opposed to lesbians without Asian ethnic/cultural heritages). Later on, Shi Tou’s camera, in another high-angle shot, slowly pans to the right and zooms in to show us the far end of the street packed with people marching by. She then zooms out and pans to the other end of the street. With no cuts, only framing and reframing, this forty-second take shows the crowd’s magnitude, conveying the collective power of lesbians marching shoulder to shoulder. As noted earlier, the cinematography of Dyke March is characterized by the DV camera’s easy mobility. As the filmmaker marches with the crowd, her identification with her subjects is vividly inscribed in her camerawork. Moreover, Dyke March pays special attention to the section of the parade that features lesbian parents and their children. During postproduction Shi Tou and Ming Ming applied the split screen format exclusively to that footage (Figure 5.3). The Chinese characters translating the signs that read “Our family” and “I love my two moms” appear onscreen, bottom left. As the images appear side-by-side and are given equal importance, the split screen device seems to punctuate the very doubleness and equality of these families’ core members. Notably, the Chinese characters here are tinted with the colors of the rainbow flag, a central motif of the whole film: rainbow patterns are seen on flags, top hats, suspenders, neck cords bearing whistles, leis, whirligigs, and a pet dog. The film’s opening design and captions superimposed on the imagery are also rainbow-patterned. If the rainbow pattern has become a symbol of or lingua franca for queer identification, such a political identification is not only seen in the film’s San Francisco subjects but also eagerly expressed, in postproduction, by the filmmakers from China. Shi Tou and Ming Ming’s queer identification thus forms an organic part of Dyke March. Here I must emphasize that, even though Dyke March provides the domestic tongzhi audience with a glimpse of San Francisco’s lesbian parade,

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Figure 5.3  Still from Dyke March

The split-screen device, with caption “our family” and “I love my two moms” in a rainbow pattern, punctuates the very doubleness and equality of the core members of the same-sex families in the dyke march. Courtesy of Shi Tou

the significance of this documentary in the context of the Chinese tongzhi movement does not consist in an open call for a full-scale transplantation of the political tactics and ideas of the Western gay rights movement. Nor do I believe that Shi Tou and Ming Ming wholeheartedly embrace the universality of a global gay identity. To assess the specific meaning of this film, I propose we look beyond the rigid thinking that presumes the local and the global to be two polarized and mutually impermeable entities. Additionally, we have to acknowledge the importance of imagination in the configuration of human subjectivities.52 We may assume that when tongzhi audiences in China watch the dyke march taking place overseas, they are stimulated to imagine the legitimacy of their own identities, and to strive for their equal rights. In fact, global flows of queer knowledge (e.g. various gay civil rights debates overseas) and media representation (e.g. pirated copies of the TV series The Unfilial Daughter [2001, Taiwan],53 52 Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Rofel, Other Modernities. In her essay “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference,” Mayfair Yang also stresses the aspect of imagination in constituting transnational Chinese subjectivities. 53 In one of my early conversations with Shi Tou back in June 2004, she actually brought up this mini-series from Taiwan, which she had recently finished watching.

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The L Word [2004-2009, USA],54 Zero Chou’s Spider Lilies [2007, Taiwan], and Todd Haynes’s Carol [2015, USA]) have become indispensable to the formation of local tongzhi and lala subjectivities. As Stijn Deklerck and Xiaogang Wei point out, the boom in queer online media in China in the mid-to-late 2000s (e.g. the launch of the popular webcast Queer Comrades in 2007) has taken up “the role of spreading information and reporting on LGBT issues.”55 By rapid circulating ideas and transnational media, they have already constituted the translocal and “glocal” dimension of tongzhi subjectivity.56 Notably, even though global flows influence such a tongzhi subjectivity, it is by no means a direct copy of a gay identity developed in the West. As Arjun Appadurai points out, globalization is not a merely reductive and homogenizing process; it is instead full of differences and disjunctures.57 In her book Translingual Practice, Lydia Liu also stresses that any ideas entering a culture from overseas can only be made sense of in terms of the existing cultural conditions and conventions. She thereby foregrounds negotiation and local agency.58 Lisa Rofel pays special attention to the role of indigenous cultural belonging (or “cultural citizenship”) in the configuration of local (male) tongzhi identities. Her concept of “transcultural practices” precisely describes the intricate process that resists any “interpretation[s] in terms of either global impact or self-explanatory indigenous evolution.”59 The part that Dyke March plays in such transcultural practices is to raise consciousness, engaging Chinese female/male tongzhi performing and negotiating their identities. As mentioned above, while The Box emphasizes a personal portrayal of a lesbian couple, it offers an indirect critique of the socio-political environment that keeps lesbians from public visibility. In 54 For a fascinating account of the show’s lasting influence through its Chinese fan base, see Jing Jamie Zhao, “Queering the Post-L Word Shane in the ‘Garden of Eden’.” 55 Stijn Deklerck and Xiaogang Wei, “Queer Online Media and the Building of China’s LGBT Community.” For discussions of Queer Comrades as China’s only independent, long-running webcast, see also Robinson, “‘To Whom Do Our Bodies Belong’,” pp. 297-301; Rofel, “Grassroots Activism.” 56 I borrow the term “glocal” from Roland Robertson. See Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” 57 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, Chapter 2. 58 Liu traces, for instance, the historical contingency of the discourse of individualism particularly in relation to “the master narrative of the nation-state in the early republican period,” where individualism was sought by some Chinese intellectuals, in Liu’s words, “not to liberate individuals so much as to constitute them as citizens of the nation-state and members of a modern society.” Translingual Practice, pp. 86, 95). 59 Rofel, Desiring China, pp. 85-110.

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comparison, Dyke March, by taking a detour abroad, encourages tongzhi to envision a scenario in which they have obtained access to public locales and the public sphere: enhancing public visibility and partaking in public affairs are imperative for tongzhi communities working to further their civil rights. An essential part of Dyke March’s consciousness-raising function is the sense of queer performativity engendered in the tongzhi audience. By “queer performativity” I mean the sense of subversion animated by acts and performances that voluntarily challenge the heteronormative reiterations configuring our subjectivity, and that in effect transform the signification of “shame.”60 Like the rainbow pattern, displaying one’s body is a central motif of Dyke March. Shi Tou’s camerawork frequently directs our attention to women who publicly expose their breasts or proudly exhibit their unclad torsos. To domestic tongzhi viewers, such public exposure and other forms of bold behavior are beyond the merely exotic or erotic. They are endowed with a sense of queer performativity in that they challenge the tongzhi/queer imaginary of today’s China in (at least) four respects. First, they directly challenge the socio-politics that discipline women’s bodies in terms of gender, class, and sexuality. The very fact that these women expose their bodies in public contradicts the bourgeois concept of decorum. As the women’s bodies on display are meant for other women and not for men, they also contest the economy of the heterosexual male gaze as well as patriarchy. Second, these self-identified lesbians challenge the division of public and private sexuality. By making lesbian subjects visible in public, they challenge the oppressive puissance that otherwise excludes queer behavior and identities from the public sphere, transgressing (as Berlant and Freeman put it) the “categorical distinctions between sexuality and politics, with their typically embedded divisions between public, private, and personal concerns.”61 Third, the constricted political sphere in today’s China means that all acts involving a mass group or publicly visible marginalized group inevitably confront state politics. The state is undoubtedly heteronormative. Thus, if a dyke march, along with an array of queer performances, poses a strong challenge to the heteronormative policing of the public/private division, such activities in China must at 60 Butler, Gender Trouble; Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity”; Sedgwick, “Affect and Queer Performativity.” (Note: published in Working Papers, a publication by The Center of the Studies of Sexualities at National Central University in Zhongli, Taiwan). Thomas Waugh identif ies the performance/performativity tradition in early gay/lesbian documentary filmmaking. See Waugh, “Walking on Tippy Toes.” 61 Berlant and Freeman, “Queer Nationality,” pp. 196-197.

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one and the same time contest China’s restricted political circumstances. Queer performativity, in China’s case, is designed to break through this larger political oppression. Fourth, by dint of transcultural imagination and practice, the lesbian parade with its emboldening queer behavior delivers to local audiences a message that thwarts efforts to make homosexuality equivalent with shame. In this context, Shi Tou’s presence in front of the camera is especially meaningful: her participatory performance exerts a strong impact on the audience that is informed by a shared sense of wish-fulfillment and queer performativity.

Concluding Remarks Windy’s endeavors in The Box to create a dialogue between the non-tongzhi public and tongzhi groups deserve recognition. From the standpoint of tongzhi politics, however, I am more touched by the example of Shi Tou and Ming Ming. Borrowing from Zhang Zhen’s term “women with video cameras,” I would like to dub filmmakers like Shi Tou and Ming Ming “lalas with DV cameras.” By this I mean those filmmakers who are (or who at least politically identify with) lesbians, who are highly aware of the varied experiences and issues associated with being a lala, and who express this political concern in their work. My term “lalas with DV cameras” aligns with Thomas Waugh’s notion of the “committed documentary.” As Waugh asserts, committed filmmakers are “not content only to interpret the world but [are] also engaged in changing it.”62 Committed films, accordingly, “must be made not only about people directly implicated in change, but with and for those people as well.”63 Regarding “lalas with DV cameras,” what cannot be overemphasized is thus their commitment to changing the social status of Chinese lesbians, premised on a sensitivity to their specific socio-political conditions. At the same time, I sense a trend developing in the fledgling Chinese lesbian documentary filmmaking scene: the call for collective creation from within the community. Corresponding to Waugh’s idea about making films “with” and “for” the underprivileged, this development has United States counterparts in anti-racist, feminist, and lesbian and gay documentary films from the 1970s and onward, as well as AIDS videomaking from the late 1980s, where filmmaking has become an efficacious extension of the activism 62 Waugh, “Introduction,” in“Show Us Life”, p. xiv. 63 Ibid., p. xiii.

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and consciousness-raising of various civil rights and minority liberation movements.64 When I wrote the first version of this chapter, The Box and Dyke March were the only documentaries available that were either about or by Chinese lesbians. I concluded that article with an urge for more “lalas with DV cameras” to join them.65 Since then, a stream of other documentaries featuring Chinese lesbians or issues of same-sex eroticism have come to my attention. These notably include The Girls That Way (Bieyang nühai, 2005), Gender Game (Shang hua, 2006), “T” Is for Tomboy (2009), and Our Marriages: When Lesbians Marry Gay Men (Qi yuan yisheng, 2013). While The Girls That Way focuses on a group of young Beijing lesbians, Gender Game follows a “T,” a tomboy or butch lesbian, living in the Shanghai metropolitan area. While “T” Is for Tomboy tackles the “T” archetype through several twentysomething, Beijing-based lesbians, Our Marriages explores the practice of “contract marriage” (xingshi hunyin: nonsexual marital arrangements between Chinese lesbians and gay men to alleviate their common social pressures),66 focusing on four lesbians in Shenyang in Northeastern China. To my knowledge, all the filmmakers are themselves insiders (quan nei ren): they are self-identified lalas, and they befriended the subjects well before shooting. Because the filmmakers are insiders, a sense of shared understanding, along with a sense of group participation, is evident between those behind 64 For an excellent examination of AIDS videomaking vis-à-vis AIDS activism and communal self-empowerment, see Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video. For an analysis of early feminist documentary filmmaking, see Julia Lesage, “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics,” and Erens, “Women’s Documentary Filmmaking: The Personal Is Political.” 65 Chao Shi-Yan, “Hezi nei wai de qingyu zhengzhi – jian lun Nütongzhi Youxing Ri” (The erotic politics inside and outside of The Box, alongside a discussion of Dyke March). 66 The practice of contract or cooperative marriage has drawn much attention in recent anthropological scholarship. For a more positive view on this practice, see Lucetta Kam, Shanghai Lalas, esp. Chapters 4 and 5. According to Kam, “the marriage partners create for each other a new everyday space that accommodates their non-normative desires and relationships. This new space, which we can call a tongzhi counter-space, […] opens up further possibilities of family forms and kinship networks,” functioning as “an essential community resource at a time when tonghzi are still struggling for spaces in both their private and social live” (p. 102). For a more critical perspective on this, including the unequal cost along the gender line and its premise upon the “complicit […] idea that homosexuality must remain invisible and never spoken of,” see Engebretsen, Queer Women in Urban China, p. 121 and Chapter 5 more broadly. Hee Wai Siam likewise considers the popular contract marriage reinforcing the homosexual closet in China’s public sphere, resulting in “a negative impact on the LGBTQ movement on the Mainland in the long run.” Siam, Cong Yanshi dao xingshi, p. 301.

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the camera and those before it. If The Box unwittingly downplays the lesbianism of its lesbian subjects, The Girls That Way, Gender Game, “T” Is for Tomboy, and Our Marriages take on a variety of issues intimately concerned with being lesbian in urban (rather than rural) China today. In Girls, the directors Shadow Zhang and Jude Tian, assisted by a three-person production team (Maxwell Sun, Tina Wei and Ekyo Zhang), address such topics as the management of non-normative relationships (including a subject’s soured experience with a bisexual girl), the experience of coming out, the formation of particular work and life philosophies, and how some Ts deal with their looks (their strong rejection of skirts since childhood, for instance) and have trouble accessing women’s restrooms. Gender, directed by Tracy Ni (a.k.a. Zhi Zibai) and designated the f irst work presented/ produced by “PeriUnion Studio” (Meihao tongmong, a lesbian-identified organization based in Shanghai), foregrounds different issues about being a T working and living in a big city. Lesbian identity, particularly the “T” role of itself, is further complicated by the testimonies of the five main subjects in “T” Is for Tomboy, produced by Ana Huang (2008). Juxtaposed with another f ilmed subject seemingly comfortable with her role as a T, one subject in particular is reserved about butch/femme role-play, identifying herself as neither T nor P (the feminine partner to T) but “bufen” (a lesbian gender defined against the butch/femme dichotomy and usually claimed “to have a more fluid desire that is not limited towards either T or P”).67 Yet another subject, Sam (Sam Zhao, editor of the popular lesbian magazine les+, launched in 2005), identifies as a “feminine T” – a T with some perceived traits of a P – also remarks on the loosening of the T role-type in the lesbian community in recent years. A T/P couple featured in “T” likewise attest the shifting T/P dynamic in their private life over time.68 It is significant that Girls also provides a view of a functioning alternative family ( jiazu) consisting of six core members, all of whom are lesbians except one (another member’s twin sister). They became acquainted through the internet and have since hung out together, calling one another “brothers” and “sisters.” Through appropriating familial terms, these lesbian subjects manifest their collective agency from within the emerging lesbian community 67 Lucetta Kam, Shanghai Lalas, p. 122 n. 13. 68 For an elaboration on the T/P roles and their variations, along with an expansion of “T” to include “transgender” identity in the Chinese lala community, see Ana Huang, “On the Surface.” T/P culture in China was in part influenced by T/P culture in 1990s Taiwan. For a history of Taiwan’s T/P culture since the 1970s, see Antonia Chao, “Lao T banjia” (Moving house).

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in Beijing. The way lesbian subjects negotiate their own alternative family is best exemplified by Our Marriages, directed by He Xiaopei and Yuan Yuan and produced by “Pink Space” (Fense kongjian), a women’s sexual rights NGO founded in Beijing by He Xiaopei.69 Set in Shenyang, the film follows four lesbians who, pressured to get married, looked for gay husbands to enter nonsexual contract marriages. In the process, the four met, fell in love, and moved in together as two couples, along with two cats and two dogs as their children. As the film’s subtitle suggests, the focus of the picture is on lesbians, not gay men. The gay husbands, wherever relevant, are only presented from the lesbians’ perspective. The picture zooms in on the lesbian subjects’ life experiences, particularly how they have negotiated the terms of their marriages with wit and humor,70 and how they manage their long-term cohabitation – what Lucetta Kam calls “an extended tongzhi kinship network” through “a tongzhi counter-space”71 – with caring and mutual support. A clear sense of collective queer agency reverberates through the tale of this negotiated alternative family. Throughout the film, we also perceive the filmmakers’ open, easy interaction with their subjects in this intimate environment, which must not be as readily accessible by outsiders (be they straight women or gay men) as by committed, talented lala filmmakers like He Xiaopei and Yuan Yuan. When The Box stresses the intimate and the individual, it takes recourse in “personalized writing,” a rhetorical and creative strategy popular in 69 Activist-scholar He Xiaopei completed her Ph.D. – with a thesis titled I Am AIDS: Living with the Epidemic in China – at the University of Westminster in 2006. In 2007 she founded the Pink Space Research Centre, dedicated to giving a voice to the sexually oppressed, particularly women living with HIV/AIDS, sex workers, transgender people, women married to gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and women with disabilities. Since 2009, Pink Space and He have made a series of videos, including Our Marriages (2013), but also Love You Too (2009) on mental disability and sexuality; Polyamorous Family (2010) portrays a family consisting of diverse racial/ethnic identities; The Lucky One (2011) follows a HIV+ woman during her final months; Jolly Christmas (2014) documents a woman with cancer spending her last Christmas; Yvo and Chrissy (2016) follows the idiosyncratic lifestyles of two Britons (one a cis woman and the other transgender). Pink Space’s co-founder Yuan Yuan graduated from the Beijing Film Academy. Her photographic works include “Photo Shoots of Same-sex Couples Performing their Weddings on Qianmen Street in Beijing on Valentine’s Day” (2009), “Rural Women and Children with HIV Photo Exhibition” (2011; Pinyao International Photography Festival), and “At This Moment, I Want to Be” (2013; “Special Mention” at the 2013 Holland Pride Photo Award). She has also contributed to a number of documentary films, including The Lucky One and Our Marriages. 70 He Xiaopei also has a track record of “performing” parodic marriage ceremonies. For reportage of one such event in Beijing, see He Xiaopei, “My Unconventional Marriage or Menage a Trois in Beijing.” 71 Lucetta Kam, Shanghai Lalas, pp. 101-102.

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China since the 1990s.72 Dyke March, Girls That Way, Gender Game, “T” Is for Tomboy and Our Marriages, by contrast, appeal to lesbian subjects as political identification and collective belonging through both their content and their production methods. That is, to many lala individuals at this historical moment, unity and community are as important as the pervasive pursuit of individuality in larger society, if not more so. A differentiated collectiveness must be underscored. Whereas The Box is characterized by the seeming disengagement of Windy from her subjects, films with the sense of commitment seen in Dyke March, Girls, Gender, and Our Marriages emphasize the political consciousness and social function of documentary filmmaking. Involving themselves with social reality in a more politically positivist way than The Box does, the makers of Dyke March and the participants of Girls, Gender, “T”, and Our Marriages define themselves through these emerging lala communities.

72 For a critique of this self-centered tendency or “me-me-ism” (wowo zhuyi) in China’s independent cinema, see Paul Pickowicz, “Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in China,” pp. 14-15. For the term “me-me-ism,” see Chen Mo and Zhiwei Xiao, “Chinese Underground Films,” p. 148.

6

Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Postsocialist China Abstract This chapter focuses on Tang Tang (Zhang Hanzi, 2004) and Mei Mei (Gao Tian, 2005), two Chinese documentaries. Although each documentary centers around a female impersonator, they approach their subjects in distinct ways. While Mei Mei portrays its subject with nuance and intense emotional investment, Tang Tang emphasizes formal experimentation. Positioning Tang Tang at the intersection of what I call the film’s “performing documentary” and the subject’s “performance of gender,” I argue that the reflexivity permeating Tang Tang foregrounds the openness of the queer subjectivities it portrays. My investigation further addresses each film’s subjects as human beings materialized in and through a matrix of social, political, and economic conditions marked by spatial and temporal parameters. Keywords: documentary, transgender, Tang Tang, Mei Mei, Postsocialist China

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Chinese New Documentary Movement of the 1990s distanced itself from official discourses, choosing instead to document the lives of ordinary people, especially those on the margins of society (bianyuan ren).1 This thematic choice lent itself to subjects such as the lives of marginalized artists, migrant workers, miners, Tibetans, the disabled, the elderly, the poor, and those who identify as queer. While lesbian subjects have been the focus of several films since 2001 (see Chapter 5), the lives of female impersonators and transgender individuals2 have also been filmed 1 Wen Hai, Fangzhu de ningshi (Exilic gaze), p. 98. 2 I use the English term “transgender” in the light of Susan Stryker’s research. She notes, “During the 1970s and 1980s, [transgender] usually meant a person who wanted not merely to temporality change their clothing (like a transvestite) or to permanently change their genitals

Chao, Shi-Yan, Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462988033_ch06

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by independent documentary filmmakers. Miss Jin Xing (Zhang Yuan, 2000) follows the transgender dancer of the same name, and Snake Boy (Michelle Chen and Li Xiao, 2001) takes as its subject male vocalist Coco Zhao, whose incredible stage performance is characterized by “drag” on a sonic level.3 A stream of documentaries about transgender people followed, including Tang Tang (Zhang Hanzi 2004), Mei Mei (Gao Tian 2005), Beautiful Men (Du Haibin, 2005), Madame (Qiu Jiongjiong, 2010), Be A Woman (Fan Popo, 2011), and the first short about a subject undergoing FTM gender reassignment, Brother (Yao Yao, 2013). This chapter focuses on Tang Tang and Mei Mei in order to shed light on China’s transgender documentary scene. 4 Although each of the two documentaries centers around a female impersonator, they approach their subjects in distinct ways. While Mei Mei portrays its subject with nuance and intense emotional investment, Tang Tang emphasizes formal experimentation. In the first of four sections in this chapter, I examine the ways in which Tang Tang blends fiction into documentary from the vantage points of the realist aesthetic of xianchang (literally, on the scene) and the device of reflexivity. Positioning Tang Tang at the intersection of what I call the film’s “performing documentary” and the subject’s “performing gender,” I argue in the second section that the reflexivity permeating Tang Tang foregrounds the openness of the queer subjectivities it portrays. While technologies of representation are one focus of this chapter, my investigation looks beyond the textual. It aims to understand each film’s subjects as human beings materialized in and through a matrix of social, political, and economic conditions marked by spatial and temporal parameters. This matrix is my second focus, and to explore it I turn to Mei Mei. Analyzing the practice of cross-dressing in terms of geopolitics or what Caren Kaplan calls “a politics of location,”5 I then explore the multilayered significance of (like a transsexual) but rather to change their social gender in an ongoing way through a change of habitus and gender expression, which perhaps included the use of hormones, but usually not surgery. When the word broke out into wider use in the early 1990s, however, it was used to encompass any and all kinds of variation from gender norms and expectations.” Stryker, Transgender History, pp. 36-38. 3 For a discussion of Snake Boy, see my article, “Documenting Transgenderism and Queer Chronotope in Postsocialist China.” 4 Zhang Hanzi is a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Before filming Tang Tang, Zhang directed and edited for television, commercials and music videos. Gao Tian, a young graduate from the directing program at Beijing Film Academy, made his film debut with Mei Mei, which won the Jury Prize at Korea’s Gwangju International Film Festival in 2005. 5 As Kaplan notes, “The notion of a politics of location argues that identities are formed through an attachment to a specific site – national, cultural, gender, racial, ethnic, class, sexual, and so

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female impersonation as contingent upon the contexts of its expression. In the final section, I locate the cross-dressing subjects of both films at a time of social transition in order to highlight the ways in which gender-crossing performers negotiate their subjectivity in postsocialist China. Because of its dual focus, this chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach, tentatively weaving f ilm studies into performance studies, sociology, economics, and anthropology to produce a panoramic view of the films’ subjects. As for the naming of Tangtang’s and Meimei’s performances, the performers themselves prefer the term fanchuan. Literally meaning “gender-role reversal” performance, fanchuan originally refers to the theatrical practice of female/male impersonation in Chinese opera. Even though their performances do not belong to the operatic stage, Tangtang and Meimei favor this terminology primarily due to its artistic pedigree, while they strongly oppose the label renyao (literally “human prodigy”) for its pejorative connotations.6 If they likewise reject the English translation “drag,” I assume this reflects the term’s susceptibility to the stigma associated with renyao, and the implication that their performances are of inferior quality: lip-synching is often the norm in drag, but not in professional fanchuan. In the following I use cross-dressing, female impersonation and gender-crossing performance interchangeably to refer to the subjects’ fanchuan performances, and discuss fanchuan with regard to human agency.

Performing Documentary: “Xianchang” Aesthetic and Reflexivity Tang Tang blends several elements of fiction. Revealed over the course of the film, they result in a curious parallel between the film’s “performing documentary” and the subject’s “performing gender.” The story of Tang Tang unfolds around its title character, a Beijing-based female impersonator. In nightclubs and large family-style restaurants across the city, Tangtang on – and that site must be seen to be partial and not a standard or norm.” Kaplan, Questions of Travel, p. 25. 6 For a historical account of the term during the first half of the twentieth century in China, see Wenqing Kang, Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900-1950, pp. 33-39. For an account of the idea “renyao” in Chinese literature during the Ming and Qing dynasties (13681644 and 1644-1911, respectively), see Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange, pp. 98-106. For a more recent delineation of the discourse of “renyao” in 1950s Taiwan that compounds the epistemic genealogies of the term in Mainland China since the Ming-Qing period, see Howard Chiang, “Archiving Taiwan, Articulating Renyao,” pp. 21-43.

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Figure 6.1  Still from Tang Tang

Courtesy of Zhang Hanzi

performs songs and dances in modern female attire (Figure 6.1). During the filming of this documentary, Tangtang meets a lesbian couple, Xun and Lily, who are mesmerized by his performance, and a friendship follows. At the same time, a romantic relationship develops between Tangtang and Xiaohui, a young man. Eventually, Xiaohui leaves Tangtang without explanation, and Xun and Lily’s relationship turns sour. Xun drops her plan to go abroad with Lily, who leaves for New Zealand. In their loneliness, Tangtang and Xun bond and even come to identify themselves as a “couple.” It is noteworthy that Lily and Xiaohui are both played by actors. That is, the sequences involving the two are reenactments based, according to the director, “on true events.”7 Below, I elucidate how Zhang Hanzi foregrounds the performative nature of Tang Tang as a documentary. In particular, I focus on the reenacted sequences associated with Lily, as well as the beginning and ending of the film. Whereas performing documentary in Tang Tang presupposes the filmmaker’s view of documentary as a genre fashioned in counterpoint to fiction, I argue that by blending fiction into documentary he expresses his reflections on the ontology of the genre. That is, the filmmaker is less concerned with treating Tang Tang as a piece of evidence from the historical world than with considering the status of documentary itself. While the “truthfulness” of the film is the primary concern when evaluating a documentary as evidence, I would stress that treating documentary as a genre allows for shifting attention to the reflexivity of the work; in Tang Tang, 7

Zhang Hanzi, “Tang Tang,” p. 40.

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this is enhanced by the film’s persistent revelation of its own constructed nature. By shifting the emphasis from “truthfulness” to reflexivity, I do not imply that authenticity becomes insignificant to Tang Tang. Rather, the film’s exploration of these matters raises such questions as: How does reflexivity respond to “truthfulness” as a foundational characteristic of documentary film? In what sense is the combination of reflexivity and documentary in Tang Tang pertinent to the representation of the subject as queer? What roles do performance and performativity play in this operation? Ultimately, what kind of queer subjectivity is portrayed in Tang Tang? Lily (as a character) is shown in four reenacted segments that problematize assumptions about authenticity in documentary filmmaking. Lily is last seen in a sequence where she and Xun sit enjoying a moment of shared intimacy at a park. Juxtaposed with this heartwarming imagery, however, a subtitle informs viewers that Xun is stranded in Beijing, while Lily has left for New Zealand alone, anticipating that Xun will join her there. This sequence, which contains no dialogue, is accompanied by a non-diegetic soundtrack of simple yet lyrical piano. In other words, this segment is a “montage” that, rather than depicting a specific past event, conveys a general idea or impression. It attempts to portray what it felt like between the couple during their best days, imbuing the scene with a sense of sentiment and nostalgia. In contrast, the first three reenacted segments associated with Lily exhibit the more conventional quality of apparently “documenting” specific events. The first occurs when Xun and Lily come backstage to meet Tangtang after one of his performances, marking the first encounter among the lesbian couple, Tangtang, and the film crew. During the second reenactment, the director invites the lesbian couple to be in the documentary and incidentally interrupts an intimate moment between them. When the director explains his intent to Xun and Lily, their conversation is brought to a sudden end by Xiaohui’s entrance. In the third reenactment, Xun talks to the director about her relationship with Lily. She also expresses curiosity about the sound recorder and is encouraged to try on the headphones (Figure 6.2). Finally, Lily arrives and suggests the three continue the conversation elsewhere. These three reenactments deliberately imitate on-the-spot realism to convey certain qualities associated with documentary filmmaking. These qualities play out in three interrelated ways. First, they intentionally highlight the unintended nature and spontaneity of the events documented. For instance, Xun and Lily join in only after the project has started; Tangtang is surprised by Xun’s unexpected request to allow her to kiss him; Xiaohui comes upon the videotaping process, accidentally interrupting the conversation between the director and the lesbian couple. Second, the acting

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Figure 6.2  Still from Tang Tang

Courtesy of Zhang Hanzi

and the spoken lines incorporate a misleading sense of improvisation and non-professionalism. For example, Lily (an actor) portrays uneasiness in front of the camera; some of Tangtang’s remarks appear extemporaneous; the director himself sometimes stutters. Third, all three sequences expose their production process: the audience can spot the filming equipment, director, and sound technician through the reflection in a mirror; they directly witness the soundman with his recording equipment. The subjects/ characters also show their awareness of the camera. More importantly, all three sequences capture the continuous interactions occurring in front of and behind the camera, such as the conversations between the director and the couple, or when Xun tries to stop uninvited shooting with her hand (Figure 6.3). In other words, by highlighting the spontaneous nature of the events as well as the extemporaneous quality of the participants’ interactions, Tang Tang presents certain events as if they were happening unplanned. Meanwhile, by exposing the filming process itself, Tang Tang lets the audience witness the filmmaking as if it were really unfolding. Taken together, the audience is invited not only to see the reenacted events themselves but to see those prearranged events with a heightened sense of unmediated immediacy. Such an intrinsic paradox becomes even more provocative if we take into account the beginning and the ending of the film. Though separated diagetically, these two parts develop around the same event. In the film’s prelude, we find Tangtang applying makeup in preparation for an interview

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Figure 6.3  Still from Tang Tang

Courtesy of Zhang Hanzi

with the director, who has supposedly been intermittently documenting Tangtang for a long time, and is videotaping right now. Once Tangtang and the filmmaker are ready for the interview, however, Tangtang unexpectedly fetches a pistol from his handbag. Following a verbal exchange, he proceeds to shoot himself in the mouth. The scene erupts into chaos, followed by the film’s title: Tang Tang. The end of the film returns to this incident, with Tangtang’s performance on Valentine’s Day 2004 marked as the director’s “last” available footage of the subject’s performance. Tangtang’s singing is a bridge into the next sequence, which begins in slow motion with Tangtang shooting himself (as seen in the prelude) and falling to the ground. As the image gradually stabilizes and the speed normalizes, the director announces, “Cut! Very good!” The film crew then swarms over Tangtang, helping him get up. His suicide is fabricated, and is revealed as such in the finale. On the one hand, the form (or “look”) of this suicide scene resembles the Lily sequences. For example, Tangtang’s suicide is (initially) portrayed as an unanticipated event beyond the director’s control. Their verbal exchange immediately beforehand also simulates the unrefined feel of improvisation (e.g. the director informs Tangtang, “I am shooting. I have been … I never turned off the camera”). Furthermore, a sense of immediacy, particularly a sense of being both temporally “in-the-moment” and spatially “on-the-spot,” is invoked through their constant interaction (e.g. Tangtang asks Zhang for a cigarette), as well as by the director unveiling his filming process (setting up the camera, adjusting the focus, etc.) as the event unfolds. To

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a certain degree, the aesthetic resonates with the concept of xianchang central to contemporary Chinese independent filmmaking. According to Wu Wenguang, “xianchang” can be described as “of the ‘present tense’ and ‘being on the scene’.”8 It is a filmic approach to temporality and spatiality. For Zhang Zhen, the essence of xianchang also lies “in the sensitivity toward the relationship between subject and object, and in a conscious reflection on the aesthetic treatment of that relationship.”9 The Lily sequences and Tangtang’s “suicide” do succeed – on the surface – in simulating the “present tense” and “on the spot” quality, since the narrative and filming are both rendered as being in process. Meanwhile, a deep concern for the relationship between subject and object is discernable through the filmmaker’s engagement with the events unfolding. On the other hand, we must not neglect the paradox at the core of these sequences. The semblance of documentary ( jishi) is, in fact, deliberately planned out and executed. They are, in short, performed documentary. By incongruously overlaying a xianchang style onto fictitious content, in Tangtang’s suicide sequence Zhang foregrounds xianchang as subject to appropriation. Stated differently, if xianchang represents “a cinematic practice and theory about space and temporality, which is charged with a sense of urgency and social responsibility,”10 it is first and foremost a means by which contemporary Chinese independent filmmakers negotiate and express their concern for social reality. In Tang Tang, such a creative concept and practice is nonetheless appropriated and emptied through pastiche – through a “knowing imitation” of the xianchang style,11 an “effect of xianchang” (xianchang gan) is thereby produced and rendered duplicable. However, what is the significance of pastiche, especially of xianchang, in Tang Tang? Three observations and inferences follow here. First, a comparison of Tangtang’s staged suicide and the first three Lily sequences reveals that their similar renditions of the “xianchang effect” reference different formulations of reality/fiction: pure fiction vs. events “based on real events.” This difference reflects the indeterminacy of the signifying process of the “xianchang effect.” Conversely, it points to the ostensible expressiveness or performativity of xianchang. This, and the fact that xianchang itself may 8 Wu Wenguang, “He jilu fangshi youguande shu” (A book about the ways of recording), pp. 174-175. 9 Zhang Zhen, “Building on the Ruins,” p. 116. 10 Ibid. 11 Dyer, Pastiche.

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be appropriated, underscores the parodic relationship between xianchang and the “xianchang effect,” destabilizing the assumed correspondence of xianchang with reality. Second, the performativity of xianchang also calls into question the assumed meaning of reenactment. If, as is usually the case, the audience cannot judge or verify the extent to which a reenactment is true to the original events, the kernel of a reenactment is thus not so much its truthfulness as whether the reenacted plots look real enough in the eyes of their beholders. That is, the audience may take for real a reenacted event due to its documentary style, but they may also downplay the fact that reenactment is itself a form of (re)presentation that may deviate from the original events. Third, Tang Tang’s destabilization of the assumed correspondence between xianchang and reality, and its reflection on the role of the audience’s perception, illuminate the constructedness and opacity of the text in question. Along with the film’s revelation of its own production, this heightens the film’s sense of reflexivity.12 Thus pastiche, in particular the pastiche of xianchang documentary aesthetic, is key to Tang Tang’s artistic reflexivity. In what sense, then, is Tang Tang’s reflexivity significant or unusual in contemporary Chinese cinema, and how is it relevant to the “authenticity” of the film – and the “queer subjectivity” of Tangtang in particular? In a number of works by China’s Sixth-Generation filmmakers, which exhibit an innovative film language that “comments on and critiques social reality instead of simply mirroring it,”13 we arguably observe a sense of reflexivity. However, although the blending of documentary into fiction has become a common device in SixthGeneration cinema, fiction remains the core element. In contrast, Tang Tang is foremost a documentary. Furthermore, Tang Tang’s self-deconstructive dimension is uncommon in Sixth-Generation cinema. If Sixth-Generation cinema is marked by its critical relationship to social reality, Tang Tang, I argue, contemplates the very nature of reality and representation. Tang Tang’s xianchang pastiche and the film’s blending of fiction and documentary redefine the cultural practice of xianchang and challenge the audience’s expectation that the documentary look corresponds with reality. Meanwhile, the prelude and ending of the film foreground and ostensibly deconstruct the film’s authority: we witness the filmmaker losing control 12 Borrowed from philosophy and psychology, the idea and technique of reflexivity in the arts refers to “the process by which texts foreground their own production, their authorship, their intertextual influences, their textual processes, or their reception.” Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, p. 200. 13 Zhang Zhen, “Introduction,” in The Urban Generation, p. 7.

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of his subject (Tangtang’s suicide appears to have been a shock), and the subject negotiating with the filmmaker (before “killing” himself, Tangtang requests that the director delete all his previous footage). Zhang Hanzi thereby calls attention to the subject-object relationship between filmmakers and their subjects, implicitly posing such questions as: Do the “subjects” of documentary films have any claim to “authorship” of works about them? If a documentary subject retains autonomy during the filming, how much authorship then can they (as opposed to the filmmaker) enjoy? Significantly, as Tang Tang time and again deliberately reveals its own filming process, it also makes its viewers aware of the artifice of the film, the constructedness of its meaning, and even their very viewing behavior. As a sense of tension apparently builds between the film and its main subject, the film stresses the role of the audience: it appeals to the audience’s attention to issues regarding film production and representation. According to Bill Nichols, relative to other modes of documentary film, reflexive documentary is characterized by its attention to “the processes of negotiation between filmmaker and viewer.”14 That is, when watching a reflexive documentary, we are frequently drawn to “the filmmaker’s engagement with us, speaking not only about the historical world but about the problems and issues of representing it as well.”15 Rather than “seeing through documentaries to the world beyond them,” we are invited “to see documentary for what it is: a construct or representation.”16

Performing Gender/Subjectivity through Reflexive Documentary To a large extent, reflexive documentary filmmaking has shifted the focus from the represented to the representing process. In the West, the popularization of the discourse on reflexivity has much to do with the “poststructuralist critique of language systems”17 that interrogates the “transparency” of languages, concepts, and representations. In poststructuralist theory, “concepts and representation […] are inevitably caught up in discourse, power, intertextuality, dissemination, and difference,” while language systems constitute and structurally condition individual subjects.18 In 14 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, p. 194. 15 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, p. 194 (emphasis added). 16 Ibid., emphasis original. 17 Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 63. 18 Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature, p. xv.

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“The Totalizing Quest of Meaning,” documentarist-scholar Trinh Minh-ha likewise adopts a poststructuralist (and postcolonial) stance, dissecting the interconnections between knowledge/power regimes and the myth of documentary verisimilitude. Proposing a nonfiction epistemology to challenge the nexus between filmic patterns and authority, Trinh maintains that, instead of replacing one source of unacknowledged authority with another, we must “challenge the very constitution of authority,” “empt[ying] […] or decentraliz[ing]” any single source of authority.19 Although Trinh also endorses the notion of reflexivity, she cautions against allowing it to be “reduced to a question of technique and method,” which merely serves to perpetuate the knowledge/power regime. She rather underscores the importance of the “reflexive interval” between the textual and the extratextual: “No going beyond […] seems possible if the reflection on oneself is not [simultaneously] the analysis of established forms of the social that define one’s limit.”20 Significantly, if a documentary film “displays its own formal properties or its own constitution as work,” and if the epistemic and power relations between Same and Other are being challenged, then the subject “points to him/her/itself as subject-in-process”: the identity or subject takes the form in which “the self vacillates” and embodies a certain amount of elasticity.21 In short, not only does reflexive documentary emphasize the mechanism of representation, but the subject or identity constituted through the work is inclined to both instability and resiliency – they are characterized by some non-essentialism. Therefore, to the maker and the subject of a reflexive documentary, the question of whether the represented is “true” to him/her/ itself may not be the most pertinent issue, as such an inquiry is premised upon a different epistemology. A concern with truth rests upon the belief that documentary film opens a window to the historical world, offering audiences access to truth or reality. However, this may seem idealistic to practitioners and participants of reflexive documentary. On one hand, it implies a kind of teleological thinking that overemphasizes the singularity and absoluteness of meaning, while downplaying its multiplicity and relativity. On the other hand, such a belief or quest also presupposes full trust in the completeness of human agency and subjective autonomy, while underestimating the opacity of meaning and the social and cultural influences on meaning making. If documentary subjects are inscribed by differences of culture and identity, 19 Trinh Minh-ha, “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning,” in When the Moon Waxes Red, pp. 41-42. 20 Ibid., pp. 46-48. 21 Ibid., p. 48.

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this quest for “truth” may by implication “essentialize” others who share those differences, as if the documented could represent the whole group, and the whole group possessed a homogenous and transcendental essence that could be captured on camera. As reflexive documentary aligns with a non-essentialist sense of subjectivity, the preeminent quality of reflexivity in Tang Tang, I suggest, similarly endows the audience with a non-essentializing appreciation for the film’s subjects. Especially given the film’s documentary and fictional elements, we can hardly determine Tangtang’s “authentic” subjectivity, or point to a preexisting being behind his representation. If we consider questions of performance, performativity, and the subject, an intriguing aspect of Tang Tang involves the relationship between Tangtang and Xun, particularly following their separations from Xiaohui and Lily, respectively. Indeed, a significant portion of the film depicts and “documents” that relationship. Tangtang (“originally” a gay man) and Xun (“originally” a lesbian) at first cohabitate as “good sisters” (hao jiemei), then gradually come to identify themselves as a “couple.” Although they are at face value a “straight” couple, their partnership embodies a reversal of traditional gender roles, wherein Xun is more like the “husband” of a household, and Tangtang the “(house) wife.” I should stress I do not question the plausibility of this scenario, but I also suspect it involves an element of drama or performance. I posit that the presence of the filmmaker/camera promotes Tangtang and Xun’s desire to perform, so that under those gazes, they like the filmmaker, play up the fluidity of identity by interpreting and acting out their relationship with a degree of self-consciousness. Nonetheless, I also want to propose that it does not automatically follow that their relationship is untrue or fake. Tangtang and Xun’s subjectivities are not necessarily “distorted” by the scenario that they are not just “being” themselves. According to Judith Butler, neither gender nor subjectivity are expressions of free will. Rather, it is through non-voluntaristic performative reiteration of heterosexualized gender norms that individuals “approximate” heterosexualized gender identities and socially assigned subject positions. Nonetheless, precisely because this process of phantasmatic imitation and approximation “is bound to fail, and yet endeavours to succeed,” it propels itself into an endless repetition. Simultaneous with this “compulsive and compulsory repetition,” the effect of the “naturalness” of gender and that of the “originality” of heterosexuality are produced.22 Therefore, drag is to gender, or gay is to straight, “not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to 22 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” p. 21.

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copy”;23 drag, in imitating gender, “implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself.”24 Yet Butler’s elucidation seems to better account for the situation of the social mainstream than that of sexual minorities. As Chris Straayer points out, Butler’s model “seems more useful for understanding [the social mainstream’s] attempts to live up to an ideal – that is, their complicity with the maintenance of sexual difference [and gender norms] – than for understanding feminist [and sexual minorities’] rejections of the ideal.”25 The gendering and re-gendering of some transgender individuals’ bodies, for instance, cannot be explained simply as a failure to repeat gender norms. Therefore, Straayer differentiates between “a failure to repeat” and “a refusal to repeat,”26 so as to highlight the subject agency engaged in the latter. To synthesize Butler’s formulation of “gender performativity” (as opposed to voluntaristic performance) and Straayer’s emphasis on queer agency, I suggest we approach Tangtang’s subject status – both as a performer and in relation to his being represented – via “strategic essentialism.” Strategic essentialism, in Gayatri Spivak’s account, stresses “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.”27 Nodding to the fact that identity is inevitably essential, Spivak suggests we strategically view identity “not as descriptions of the way things are, but as something that one must adopt to produce a critique of anything.”28 Substituting an identitarian essence for the subjective experience contingent to that identity, strategic essentialism thus appeals to a non-essentialized subject position. Arguably, such a position foregrounds subject agency, as Straayer emphasizes, but without downplaying the regulatory mechanism, as seen in gender performativity. From the perspective of strategic essentialism, queer subjects thus straddle the line between voluntaristic performance and non-voluntaristic gender performativity; they struggle continually with “failures to repeat” and “refusals to repeat.” Between gender performativity and voluntaristic performances also emerges the possibility of queer performativity: subversion animated through acts that challenge the heteronormative reiterative practices conf iguring gendered identities, and that in effect transform the signification of “shame.”29 23 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 31. See also Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” p. 22. 24 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 137. 25 Straayer, “Transgender Mirrors,” p. 218. 26 Ibid. 27 Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 205. 28 Spivak, “The Problem of Cultural Self-Representation,” p. 51. 29 Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity”; Sedgwick, “Affect and Queer Performativity.”

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Tangtang’s cross-dressing performances constitute first and foremost a theatrical performance against gender performativity. From his perspective as a sexual dissident, we must recognize his willful resistance to regulatory gender norms. As queer performativity is exerted through female impersonation, so queer subject agency is routinely vitalized in the performer. Meanwhile, cross-dressing performance can be considered a survival strategy for queer subjects like Tangtang. Other than monetary reward, such performance offers its performer a way to negotiate his subjectivity in public. As the film shows, Tangtang regularly compares his performance to that of Mei Lan-fang (1894-1961), a legendary fanchuan male artist in Peking opera.30 During his performances, Tangtang therefore “straddles a fine line – publicly announcing his sexuality but at the same time plausibly denying it by couching it in performance and artif ice.”31 Strategically, Tangtang fashions his own subjectivity against heteronormative gender codes in public, while he himself retains a degree of ambivalence: after all, his performance is by nature an artistic citation of gender codes developed in the operatic system. Flirting with the curiosity and imagination of the public, his subjectivity is nevertheless situated between the gender norms of quotidian life and those of the theatrical arena, between a full expression of one’s will and a semi-voluntaristic citation of artistic conventions. His performance, in short, is self-empowering yet not meant to translate the “essence” of his identity. In a sense, Tangtang’s non-essentialist strategy of self-representation coincides with the device of reflexivity integral to the film, insofar as they both highlight the process of something: subjecthood and filmmaking, respectively. Moreover, Tangtang’s faked suicide is more than a scripted act. It mocks the contracted imagination of the social mainstream which assumes that social and sexual dissidents are prone to tragic ends. From the prelude, general audiences may expect the rest of Tang Tang to be a candid portrayal of Tangtang’s deterioration. However, not only does the film never explain why he apparently chose to kill himself, but it ultimately reveals his suicide was fabricated. Tangtang’s performance of a pre-scripted act thus has the effect of queer performativity, for it repudiates the public’s imaginary tragic end for a social non-subject who routinely subverts the gender norms that performatively constitute social subjects. 30 On Mei Lan-fang’s artistic achievement in theater and beyond, and his admirable off-stage persona, see Li Lingling, Mei Lanfang de yishu yu qinggan (Mei Lan-fang’s art and affect). 31 See the catalogue of the 2006 New Festival (The 18th New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Film Festival), p. 74.

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If there is indeed some coeff icient of performance in Tangtang and Xun’s relationship, the making of this documentary, I contend, must have helped the subjects engage further with what Anthony Giddens terms the “everyday social experiments”32 facilitated by wider social changes. Challenging traditional images of intimacy, the couple’s relationship echoes Giddens’s meditation on the transformation of intimacy, particularly his conceptualization of the emerging “confluent love”: a democratic relationship that cuts across the heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy, highlights personal choices, and need not be combined with sexual fidelity, marriage, or heterosexual family models.33 Resonating with confluent love, Tangtang and Xun’s union is simply sustained by a negotiated consensus. Even so, intimacy abounds in the couple’s lives: they tenderly care for their feline “son”; they share the same bed and blanket; Xun affectionately kisses Tang on his cheeks. Notably, their relationship also contests Giddens’s conceptualization. While Giddens considers “reciprocal sexual pleasure” central to confluent love,34 the role of sex in this couple’s intimacy is never made clear. To be sure, the notion that sex is prerequisite to intimacy is itself questionable. As Lynn Jamieson rightly puts it, “it is quite possible to have intensely intimate relationships which are not sexual and sexual relationships which are devoid of intimacy.”35 Giddens’s formulation has also been criticized by some for its over-optimism and insufficient empirical support.36 Tangtang and Xun’s affection is interspersed with quarrels over issues ranging from money to house chores, symptomatic of the tension, inequality, and fragility potentially inherent in any couple’s negotiating and sustaining their relationship. At once convergent with and divergent from confluent love, Tangtang and Xun’s relationship registers an openness characteristic of their subjects-in-process. While the subjects challenge the gendered dynamic of traditional coupledom, they also embody the progressiveness of queer performativity, fleshing out their queer subjectivity. In sum, performing/pastiching documentary in Tang Tang functions as a means to reflexively approach its queer subjects. The emphasis on reflexivity directs our attention to the very process of representation while responding incisively to the unfixed nature of its subjects’ queer subjectivity. The film 32 Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, p. 8. 33 Ibid., pp. 61-64. 34 Ibid., p. 62. 35 Jamieson, “Intimacy Transformed?” p. 478. 36 Jamieson, Intimacy, pp. 136-157. See also Bell and Binnie, The Sexual Citizen, pp. 126-127.

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also recognizes in its subjects the self-fashioning technique of “strategic essentialism,” through which Tangtang’s agency emerges and Tangtang and Xun negotiate queer subjectivity and explore the possibilities of alternative intimacy. Tang Tang thus represents not only its queer subjects; it also exemplifies a particular means of approaching these queer subjects with the camera.

Mapping Out Gender-Crossing Performance across the Geopolitical Landscape I now turn to the documentary film Mei Mei, to analyze how it makes us rethink the ramifications of gender-crossing through the lens of geopolitical specificity. The film maps Meimei’s journeys onto both geographic and life trajectories, capturing the nuanced and multilayered significance of cross-dressing – particularly the ways in which cross-dressing in differing contexts registers varying cultural connotations and social valuations. Like Tangtang, Meimei is a Beijing-based female impersonator (Figure 6.4). Originally from Northeastern China, Meimei has been performing in nightclubs, pubs and gay bars since 1998. About ten minutes into the film, we are informed that the main subject is preparing for his “farewell concert,” for he will soon start a new life in Shanghai with his partner, an insurance salesman. Prior to his relocation, Meimei also wants to pay another visit to his family in Dandong, a border city in Liaoning Province. In fact, the original concept for this documentary consisted only of these two events: a retrospective of Meimei’s life and career before his married life in Shanghai.37 However, Meimei ends up leaving his husband and returning to Beijing after only a month in Shanghai. A sequel to the failed marriage plan follows. Having spent most of his savings, Meimei tries to return to the spotlight but can barely make ends meet. Worse, he unexpectedly falls ill and – unable to afford the high medical and living expenses in Beijing – is taken home by his parents. Initially, Meimei hopes to be back on stage by the lucrative Christmas season. However, five months after his departure from Beijing, he is still in Dandong when the film crew makes another visit. Though Meimei appreciates his family’s loving care, he desires to leave for the outside world. The film ends without providing the audience with conclusive information regarding Meimei’s next step in life. 37 Interview with Gao Tian by Liu Bin, “Di san jie jilupian jiaoliuzhou yingpian: Mei Mei” (A film in the third ‘week for documentary film communication’: Mei Mei).

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Figure 6.4  Still from Mei Mei

Courtesy of Gao Tian

On one level, Meimei’s dress sense in quotidian life (as opposed to onstage) has much to do with where he is, reflecting a geopolitics enacted along the axis of urban/rural difference. Meimei remarks at one point that when he is in Beijing, he sometimes chooses to wear skirts even when he is offstage, as passersby are likely “only to comment that this woman is somewhat taller than other women.” In Dandong, however, he must wear trousers instead, to avoid the scrutiny and gossip of locals, who may ask, “Is that person a man or a woman?” Similarly, we can perceive that although Meimei occasionally wears makeup on the streets of Beijing, he never does once he returns to his hometown. Clearly, Meimei enjoys more autonomy in regard to his looks in the Beijing metropolis than in his hometown, a remote small city. This limited autonomy is poignantly depicted in the latter part of the film. Meimei is first shown in a series of tracking shots: we witness him leaving home, walking alone through the streets and alleys. Not only has he given up makeup, but he is now in plain attire obviously designed for men, and his long hair has been trimmed short. Apparently, Meimei has conformed to the customs of the local community in the past few months. One shot is especially saddening. Capturing the subject from behind, it shows that Meimei appears to have lost weight due to his illness and at one point has a coughing fit. The physical frailty of the subject seems incongruous with the slightly loose, somewhat awkward fit of his men’s attire, which appears imposed on rather than tailored for him. This contrast between his weakened physique and seemingly forced attire bespeaks a sense of helplessness when faced with the

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confrontation between individual will and normalizing social institutions. Meanwhile, beneath Meimei’s shortened hair we notice for the first time a thinning area on the back of his head. The relentless disclosure of this spot must be embarrassing to Meimei, whose stage name in Chinese means “beautiful.” As a small-town sexual dissident whose personal desire contradicts public expectation, Meimei sought relative autonomy in metropolitan Beijing. However, he cannot help but concede to the more constricted regulatory institution of his hometown after losing his mobility to poor health and economic instability. Gesturing toward the heteronormative oppression of society, the scenario depicted here underlines how this oppression plays out differently in urban and rural environments. It also hints at what Caren Kaplan emphasizes as the “material conditions” of travel/displacement, often dismissed in contemporary theory, highlighting the financial terms of the individuals involved.38 If, rural-city migrations represent degrees of freedom and independence for queer subjects, such migrations must at the same time be materially conditioned. Furthermore, Meimei’s performances in Beijing mainly take place in nightclubs, discos, and gay bars. The emergence and popularity of these venues has been facilitated in densely populated Chinese metropolises since the 1990s by myriad interrelated factors – urbanization, the expansion of commerce, the formation of consumer culture, etc. Dandong has neither a robust economy nor a vibrant consumer culture, so there is no prosperous nightlife scene. However, other opportunities for gender-crossing performance exist. When Meimei is still recuperating, he begins learning and practicing Peking opera to allay the tedium. At one point, wearing neither makeup nor a costume, Meimei performs in a “Peking Opera Concert” sponsored by the local Party branch and held at a “community center.” Significantly, Meimei’s high-pitched operatic singing employs falsetto, a vocal skill in which he already excels, yet which contemporary male pop singers have rejected as “effeminate” and “unnatural.” Although there is no overt gender ambiguity in Meimei’s looks here, there is in his voice. Here we must take into account the broader tradition of jingju, where a matrix of “formulated” (chengshi hua) skills associated with various role-types (hangdang), together with an abstract signifying system of stage installation, have developed through the centuries.39 Not only do its vocal styles not conform to the falsetto/“natural” divide (a relatively modern concept),40 but the genders 38 Kaplan, Questions of Travel. 39 Luo Zheng, Zhongguo jingju er’shi jiang, pp. 17-40. 40 Chao Shi-Yan. “Trans Formations of Male Falsetto”; McCracken, Real Men Don’t Sing.

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of various role-types do not have to match a performer’s biological sex. The gender system in jingju, in other words, is not fully subject to the principles of “reality.” Operatic cross-dressing (predominantly female impersonation) can be divorced from the social stigmas associated with “gender inversion” precisely because it is justifiable as an “artform” and even “national heritage” (guocui). The fact that Meimei practices jingju while stranded in Dandong can thus be understood as an expedient way of (moderately) channeling his passion for female impersonation, yet simultaneously keeping negative reactions at bay. Recalling the sense of voluntaristic agency and queer performativity in Tangtang’s reference to fanchuan in jingju, particularly its icon, Mei Lan-fang, Meimei’s practice of jingju can be understood as a means of negotiating his queer subjectivity while involuntarily coming to terms with social pressure. Interestingly enough, female impersonation is seen in still another type of public performance in Meimei’s hometown. One night before he heads for Shanghai, Meimei visits an old friend, Mr. Lee, also a performer. Lee performs at a beer garden that presents a nightly variety show. It is a place where families and friends gather for meals and drinks while being entertained. Although Lee’s cross-dressing here and Meimei’s in Beijing both take the form of popular entertainment instead of the artsy operatic mode, their styles are markedly different. Meimei endeavors to pass as a “real” woman, both visually and vocally, whereas Lee’s performance highlights the incongruity between the visual and the vocal. That is, Lee’s female impersonation is visually hyper-feminine in his makeup, costumes, and gestures, yet deploys a not-quite feminine voice in song, and even less femininity in speech. Rather than seeking to pass as a woman, Lee strives for a comedic effect. This particular mode of cross-dressing, I suggest, also registers a tacit consensus between the performers and their audiences. This consensus is predicated on the male performers’ mimicry of “woman” in such an imperfect way that not only is the “performative” quality of the imitation foregrounded, but the subversive potential of cross-dressing gives way to comic effect and public entertainment. 41 41 Symptomatic of this dynamic is a shot where in the background Meimei’s friend is performing onstage, and in the foreground Meimei, like most of the other customers, is eating, drinking, and not paying much attention to the show. Suddenly, we notice a middle-aged man joining Lee, dancing in the empty space between the stage and the audience. In front of all the customers, that man imitates Lee’s effeminate movements onstage and improvises his own acts to accompany Lee’s singing. I f ind this intriguing episode generally reflects how the audience receive this mode of female impersonation. To them, the song-and-dance onstage is by no means serious performance, and thus can be further mimicked or casually duplicated by any member of the

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Figure 6.5  Still from Mei Mei

Courtesy of Gao Tian

Nevertheless, a sense of tension is perceivable between the impersonator and some of the audience, as illustrated by a curious episode immediately after the show. Most of the customers have left the beer garden, but a small group lingers near the shabby backstage where Lee is changing his clothes. These local residents apparently have a voyeuristic curiosity about the performer: they hope to see “something” from behind the curtain. Lee appears before long, putting on his pants. While some of his makeup remains, his masculine torso is bare (Figure 6.5). I read this as the audience’s implicit wish to affirm the female impersonator’s “real” gender identity. Further, this moment embodies the surveillant mentality and gaze of the public, who want to ensure that cross-dressing is solely for entertainment purposes and that gender ambiguity is “properly” limited to the stage.

Situating Gender-Crossing Performance in Postsocialist China In this final section I situate the gender-crossing performances in both Mei Mei and Tang Tang within the socio-economic milieu of postsocialist China. Since the late 1970s, China has seen the reintroduction of Western culture and the redevelopment of the market economy. In China’s pre-reform audience. In so doing, the sense of parody and amusement shared by the cross-dressing performer and audience is simultaneously amplified.

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era, labor – without a functioning labor market – was allocated to various work units (danwei). Neither the individual nor the work unit was free to choose. Although full employment was attained through the government’s administrative measures, it happened at the expense of labor productivity and economic efficiency. In the reform era, labor flexibility has been emphasized along with labor reforms in three primary areas: the reduction of state regulation of the labor force; the diversification of channels of labor allocation; and the establishment of a labor contract system. 42 The resulting changes have attested to the “ideological acceptance of labor as a commodity” and the “marketization of labor” in postsocialist China. 43 In terms of supply and demand, workers now face considerable freedom and competition over their choices of employment, whereas employers adopt various market- and profit-driven policies. Competition in particular has proven the obsolescence of a pre-reform public mentality associated with the “iron rice bowl” (tie fanwan): “the protective embrace of a paternalistic state” that centered on one’s job assignment, enveloped by “a range of welfare services including housing, health, education and pension rights.”44 Along with a secure job and a relatively valorized (low) pay, the “iron rice bowl” mentality was mirrored in people’s low incentive to work and their poor productivity. Not surprisingly, people in post-Mao China have commonly accused previous regimes of teaching the workers to “eat out of one big pot” (chi daguo fan): no matter how much or how little workers produced, they all ate the same “food,” that is, they received the same wages.45 However, as Lisa Rofel points out, by “essentializ[ing] […] a disposition in workers [of previous times] toward laziness, disorderliness, and transient material desires,” those workers were viewed as a hindrance to “China’s effort to realize modernity.”46 Such a conception, on one hand, breaks with previous power/knowledge schemes that hinged upon labor, through which socialist subjects came into being. On the other hand, this stereotyping simultaneously installs “new modes of discipline.”47 Now a multitude of capitalist tenets (emphasizing self-interest, monetary gains, consumption, time and efficiency, among other things) have come to play a significant part, competing with other ideas or ideologies constituting human subjects in postsocialist China. Simply put, if “labor” under socialism 42 Grace Lee, “Labor Policy Reform,” pp. 16-21. 43 Ibid., p. 34. 44 Flynn, Holliday, and Wong, “Introduction,” in The Market in Chinese Social Policy, p. 3. 45 Rofel, Other Modernities, p. 108. 46 Ibid., pp. 107-8. 47 Ibid., p. 108.

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served as “the principal cultural site for the production of identities,” the “market” has emerged as a new arena for the cultural production of modern subjects. 48 At the macro-economic level, post-Mao China has seen the emergence of a labor market and the development of both the commodity and capital markets. At a micro level, we may consider our film subjects, Meimei and Tangtang, as independent workers/production units. Technically speaking, because they lend their talent to the performance arts circle in metropolitan Beijing, they directly sell their labor/commodities on that market. So far as their jobs are not officially registered, they also engage in “underground” economic activities. Inevitably, such unofficial economic activities are facilitated by the development of a market economy in a macro sense and the acceptance of capitalist logic in the larger society, where money has become a crucial mediator between forms of demand and forms of supply. To some degree, the introduction of a market economy into this socialist nation has destabilized its socio-political structure, allowing Meimei and Tangtang the room to publicly act out their queer desires in some metropolitan areas. Though their desires and performances are not “officially” acknowledged, Meimei and Tangtang still can earn a living through gender-crossing performances as “unofficial” economic activities. As long as the audiences or customers like them, their labor/commodities are valuable on that market. In terms of competition, the performance arts circle/market in Beijing is no exception. As mentioned in the film, Meimei’s wish to retire is partly due to the “competition,” exacerbated by newcomers who have lowered their prices to compete with other performers. Meanwhile, as is often the case in performing arts, age is also a major concern. Among the numerous cross-dressing performers in Beijing, Meimei belongs to the “elder” generation, while newcomers have the advantage of youth. The issue of age also has a wider resonance in China’s postsocialist climate. As noted above, labor reforms in the 1980s were accompanied by the introduction of new wage systems. Replacing the seniority system that had defined labor valuation in socialist China, new wage systems are predicated on a new cultural valuation of tasks, where youth – in the name of “productivity” – has become a preferred criterion of laborers. 49 The new wage systems at once reflect and reify the changing cultural interpretations of age. Furthermore, the issue of age, particularly the stress on youth, strikes a chord with a neologism, “rice bowl of youth” (qingchun fan). A figure of 48 Ibid., pp. 122-123. 49 Ibid., pp. 115-117.

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speech that has gained wide currency since the early 1990s, “rice bowl of youth” originally referred to “the urban trend in which a range of new, highly paid positions have opened almost exclusively to young women.”50 With youth and beauty being the foremost prerequisites for their jobs, however, these “professional” women often function as “advertising fixtures with sex appeal.”51 In a broader sense, if the “iron rice bowl” has, in retrospect, become a trope for a socialist economy characterized by inefficiency and inertia, the “rice bowl of youth” symbolizes the exuberant labor force of those who, in order to enjoy consumer culture, are eager to cash in on their youth by taking up highly lucrative but often unstable and sometimes risky jobs. Building on its cultural “appreciation” since the 1980s, youth is the most important economic capital, and individuals must make the most of it before it depreciates. As Meimei advises his young friend, female impersonators who eat out of the “rice bowl of youth” must better manage their incomes precisely because their careers are relatively short-lived. By highlighting this mentality in postsocialist China, I do not suggest that the market has totally replaced socialist thinking to monopolize the production of modern Chinese identities. To say the least, the government never gave the market full rein; the regime tethers economic reform to its political authority through what it calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Not only is the rhetoric of “socialism” imperative to the regime’s political legitimacy, it is by consistent intervention into the relations between market mechanisms and socialist concerns that the party-state affirms its legitimacy to citizens. Market forces and “traditional socialism” thus remain in tension. According to Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, Chinese postsocialism is characterized precisely by the coexistence of capitalist and socialist economic, political, and social relations. This coexistence represents “a departure from […] a Chinese modernity, embodied above all in the socialist revolutionary project.”52 That is, the “post-” in China’s postsocialism must be grasped in relation to (the failure of) the state project of “modernity as revolution and socialism.”53 Chinese postsocialism, then – as Chris Berry puts it – is “China’s specific experience of postmodernity,” where “Maoist socialism would be the particular grand narrative of modernity that has lost its credibility with the Cultural Revolution, and yet which continues to condition all that has developed since the end of that event and Mao’s death 50 Zhang Zhen. “Mediating Time,” p. 94. 51 Ibid. 52 Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, “Introduction: Postmodernism and China,” p. 3 53 Ibid., p. 8.

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in 1976.”54 It is therefore no surprise that the socialist conceptualization of “labor” still informs certain aspects of human behavior and reasoning. In particular, socialist discourse on labor joins a range of capitalist tenets in configuring subjects in postsocialist China. In Mei Mei, the stigma associated with gender inversion, and the subject’s gender-crossing performance in particular, is recast in terms of both the socialist reverence for labor and the capitalist emphasis on wealth. When discussing his family’s attitude toward his career, Meimei says that his father has been supportive, justifying this by referring to an old Chinese proverb, xiao pin bu xiao chang. Literally meaning that “people deride the poor but not prostitutes,” the proverb generally expresses the idea that some societies judge a person in terms of how much wealth one possesses, rather than how exactly (read: “immorally”) one acquires it. In a postsocialist context, this saying points to China’s continuing yet uneasy transition to a capitalist consumer society, during which money has ascended to a status atop a range of social values and traditional morals. While this phenomenon is troubling to some, to others, like Meimei and his father, it is enabling and liberating. Meimei and his father further justify Meimei’s performance by arguing that what he does is “in no way against the law,” and that “he earns a living by his own labor.” Whereas the abovementioned proverb resorts to a capitalist valuation of social status in terms of wealth, the other two arguments appeal to the socialist tradition that values one’s labor and hard work. The statement that “somebody makes a living by his own labor” interestingly blends a capitalist rationale (of making money) into a socialist reasoning.55 The capitalistic turn of the larger society also influences forms of intimacy. In Tang Tang, for instance, one reason for Tangtang and Xun’s gender reversal within the family has to do with their incomes. Partly because Xun contributes a bigger and relatively stable monetary share to the family, she is the “husband” of the two; Tangtang is considered the “wife,” and compensates for his lesser financial contribution by doing more household chores. Money affects the relationship between Meimei and his “husband” even more deeply. In an interview conducted after their breakup, Meimei’s husband tells the filmmaker, “My salary and other aspects are pretty satisfactory.” Since Meimei “didn’t ask for much,” he adds, “I could 54 Berry, “Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By,” p. 252 (my emphasis). 55 We encounter this reasoning again in the documentary Beautiful Men (Du Haibin 2006). Cross-dressing performer Tao Lisha, now in his late forties, confesses that in the 1980s he was sent to a “labor camp” for burglary. Having turned his life around through enforced labor (in a socialist system), he stresses that what he does now is by no means illegal, but simply a mode of supporting himself through his own labor.

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satisfy him.” He attributes the failure of their relationship to social pressure and Meimei’s unreadiness to give up the spotlight. However, according to Meimei, his husband never rented the apartment he promised, but instead made him stay at a friend’s abode. Even though Meimei had little money, he gave his husband RMB 600 yuan on his arrival to Shanghai, for his husband somehow had only one hundred at hand. Meimei was also pressured to meet his friends so that his husband could sell them insurance. When Meimei finally leaves, “the only thing [the husband does is take] out a 100-yuan bill to buy me a McDonald burger and [leave] me with the change.” In other words, by Meimei’s own account, the most decisive reason for leaving his husband is neither social pressure nor his desire for the spotlight. It is rather about their relationship, which is always imbricated with and overshadowed by money. If we accept Meimei’s account as more credible, the husband’s dismissal of the monetary influence on their relationship may be taken as a disavowal that attests precisely to the significance of what it denies. In this sense, the film – by juxtaposing these contradictory views – also foregrounds the monetary factors integral to modern intimacies against the backdrop of China’s postsocialism. Another aspect that constitutes the modern subjects in postsocialist China is “the increasing cosmopolitanism of the homeland.”56 In tandem with China reopening its doors to the world, and its integration into the global economy, cosmopolitan experiences and imaginaries have gained a footing in certain coastal cities and in the metropolitan areas through the transnational flows of capital, people, media, ideas/ideologies, and technology.57 While in postsocialist China “the modernist imaginary of the nation-state” competes with its capitalist counterpart by emphasizing “essentialism, territoriality, and fixity” in Chinese citizenship,58 cosmopolitanism demonstrates the “disembedding” effect (as coined by Anthony Giddens): the “lifting out” of social relations from the local contexts of interaction.59 As Tang Tang reveals, a cosmopolitan outlook is at once liberating and a hindrance. At one point, Tangtang mentions to Zhang that he has been interviewed by some European journalists, who he claims regard his performance as artistic and even “avant-garde.” This comment contrasts the Westerners’ praise with his public harassment by some Chinese male patrons, whom 56 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai,” p. 289. 57 Arjun Appadurai outlines five “landscapes” as a framework for understanding heterogenization and disjuncture in cultural processes on a global scale. See Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” 58 Ong Aihwa, “Chinese Modernities,” p. 173. 59 Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, pp. 21-29.

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he considers tasteless and of low “quality.” To be sure, Tangtang’s reasoning presupposes an unthinking Eurocentrism that rests on a conflation of the West with progress and greater civility. Privileging the value judgments of Europeans, Tangtang’s rationale unwittingly echoes a colonialist power/ knowledge scheme and is not unproblematic. Yet it must be stressed that such a rationale also represents the means by which a social subaltern like Tangtang legitimizes his performance and lifestyle. We should not ignore the agency involved in Tangtang’s negotiating his subjectivity. When discussing cosmopolitanism in present-day China, we must also pay attention to regional cultural influences and the role of the mass media. According to Mayfair Yang, the mass media in present-day China “harbors potential for liberation from hegemonic nationalism and statism.” Combined with the forces of overseas capital, they have become significant “vehicles for imagining […] the larger space beyond the national borders,” enabling “the transnationalization of Chinese identity out of the confines of the state.”60 However, Yang argues against critical theories that identify capitalism “only as a Western force.” In many cases, she maintains, the cultural “Other” that post-Mao China encounters is facilitated not by Western capitalism but by “the regional or transnational ethnic capitalism of overseas Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Asia.” Importantly, what many Mainland Chinese identify with are not so much Western subjects than those associated with “the modernized and commercialized Chinese societies of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese.”61 Interestingly, if Maoist socialism once manipulated the concepts of women’s liberation ( funü jiefang) and gender equality to channel the energy of both men and women into the state project of nation-building, post-Mao China has witnessed a regendering or “sexing” of society.62 From a postsocialist vantage point, Maoism has been understood as having “deferred China’s embrace of modernity by impeding Chinese people’s ability to express their essential humanity.” Similarly, state feminism has been reinterpreted as “a transgression of innate femininity that repressed gendered human nature.”63 The “sexing” of post-Mao society thus presupposes and imposes an essentialized view of gender, a central motif of what Rofel calls “the postsocialism allegory of modernity.”64 Such an effort to “naturalize” gender also finds expression in 60 Mayfair Yang, “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai.” pp. 288, 296. 61 Ibid., pp. 300-304. 62 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, p. 168. 63 Rofel, Other Modernities, p. 31. 64 Ibid., p. 217.

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the transnational Chinese imaginary via mass media. As Yang points out, Mainland Chinese consumers of mass media from Hong Kong and Taiwan are able to imagine “a different way to be Chinese, where state identity diminishes in importance and female and male genders become salient categories.”65 Rejecting the Maoist subjectivity that sought to merge the self with the body of the state, for example in the Maoist loyalty dance, audiences now embrace “a Chinese cultural Other of Taiwan or Hong Kong who has a gender.”66 In the same vein, the main subjects of Mei Mei and Tang Tang choose pop songs from Greater China for their gender-crossing performances. Tangtang’s favorite is “How Many Dear Sisters on Earth Do You Have?” (Ni jiujing you jige hao meimei) from Taiwan; Meimei opts for “Woman as Flower” (Nüren hua) from Hong Kong.67 Performed in Mandarin Chinese, both songs adopt and simulate women’s perspectives. Whereas “How Many Dear Sisters” portrays a girl in love with a ladies’ man, the performer of “Woman as Flower” compares herself or himself to a blossoming flower that needs love and tending, presumably from men. As is typical of mass cultural products, gender plays a crucial part in the identification and desire of those who perform or consume these songs. Through performance and consumption, individuals learn to desire and identify with gendered social positions, thus becoming gendered subjects performatively and phantasmatically. As a key component of the transnational Chinese imaginary, gender marks ways of being Chinese that are not only distinct from Maoist socialist subjectivity but are related to the subject experiences associated with other Chinese societies deemed more modern and affluent. To the general public, such processes at once inform and are informed by the efforts to naturalize gender in the larger society. To female impersonators like Tangtang and Meimei, however, they engage with the transgression of the gender norms sanctioned and naturalized in the mainstream media. Neither Tangtang nor Meimei comes from economic privilege, and their sumptuous costumes indicate that their performances intersect with the imaginary of an economically more privileged class. Arguably, for Chinese female impersonators, not only does performing and consuming pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan manifest their engagement with a gendered translocal Chinese imaginary, but to a certain degree gender itself 65 Mayfair Yang, “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai,” pp. 301-302. 66 Ibid. 67 “How Many Dear Sisters on Earth Do You Have?” was originally sung by Taiwanese female vocalist Meng Ting-wei. “Woman as Flower” was originally performed by the Hong Kong pop star and gay icon Anita Mui (a.k.a. Mei Yan-fung).

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(to borrow Butler’s formulation) forms the “vehicle for the phantasmatic transformation of […] class.”68 Cross-dressing performance animates the fantasy of becoming a woman – a “real” woman – in order to find a man who represents the promise of permanent shelter from homophobia and poverty. For some Chinese female impersonators, accordingly, the consumption of transnational mass media involves the negotiation of a translocal imaginary mediated by gender, where gender is always embedded in class and inseparable from sexual orientation. Such processes, I argue, are another crucial dimension of the subject-formation of numerous male-to-female gender-crossing practitioners in postsocialist China.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter I have examined a number of salient points associated with cross-dressing performances by male artists in postsocialist China, punctuated with a consideration of the specificity of documentary as a form of expression. Through the themes of xianchang realist aesthetic and generic reflexivity, I investigate the relationship between the performance of documentary and the performance of gender in Tang Tang. I argue that the work’s appeal to reflexivity and its emphasis on non-essentialism reverberate with the film’s queer subjects, who are always in process, straddling the boundary between performance and performativity. By reflecting on xianchang, rooted in postsocialist Chinese culture, Tang Tang also writes Chinese postsociality into its experiment with form. Meanwhile, Mei Mei sheds light on other aspects of cross-dressing by drawing our attention to its socio-geographically ingrained formal variations, going beyond the experience of metropolitan Beijing. In the last section I pay special attention to the ways in which female impersonators like Meimei and Tangtang negotiate the significance of their performances and their queer identities in the context of postsocialist China. In particular, I situate their life experiences among a range of issues, including the state’s redevelopment of a market economy, the changing valuations of “labor” in the larger society, the monetary impact on forms of intimacy, the deepening influence of cosmopolitan experiences and imaginaries on human subjectivities and the consumption of the mass media in relation to subject-formations. Importantly, all these processes – at once postsocialist and translocal – constitute the everyday experiences of those individuals who perform and transgress gender norms on a daily basis. 68 Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 130.



Conclusion

This book applies a queer theory/cultural studies approach to examine the production and reception of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, particularly those produced in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. Embracing the discursive approach and interdisciplinarity of cultural studies, it brings together bilingual scholarship and materials from film/media studies, gender/queer studies, sociology, anthropology, performance studies, and literary criticism (among others), with the objective of more properly reflecting the complicated processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries take shape. Locating tonghzi/queer agency within the intricate negotiations between the individual, the local, the intraregional, and the global, this project challenges the conception that perceives the local as the opposite of the global, and that conveniently ignores the more complex, multi-directional interactions involving the regional and the individual in any local articulations of tongzhi/queer agency. Concomitantly, the book further contests the rhetoric that either equates Western gay identity with modernity and Asian homosexualities with tradition or, conversely, sees the local tongzhi/queer movement as merely a neocolonial embodiment of the Western-dominated global gay movement, devoid of local agency. This project also incorporates a strong emphasis on the specific cultural histories of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. I have mapped out the social institutions imperative to the production of queer images in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and analyzed queer imagery in this historical moment as it emerges from the margins of Mainland Chinese society. I consider this book first and foremost a historically embedded project – in part to counter the tendency in certain queer scholarship to over-generalize theories while downplaying the significance of local histories. This book is anchored by four main themes or discourses: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera and melodrama, camp aesthetics, and documentary film. Discussing the Chinese familial-kinship system, I recast the notion of “filiality” in terms of a discursive formation, as opposed to some mythical cultural essence, to explain why filiality (and Confucianism

Chao, Shi-Yan, Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020 doi: 10.5117/9789462988033_concl

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in general) have been susceptible to different political maneuvers in different historical periods. This discussion foregrounds the strengthened linkage between filiality and loyalty through the reinforced “family-state” discourse prevailing in martial-law-period Taiwan. I consider this familystate discourse fundamental to what I term the “Chinese queer diasporic imaginary” that epitomizes the tension between Chinese tongzhi/queer subjects and their family-based social settings. While my examination of Chinese opera and tongzhi/queer imagery informs Chapter 1 and Chapter 6, it is the prime focus of Chapter 2. My analysis of Two Stage Sisters draws special attention to the tension between the film’s text – as a political melodrama – its subtext, replete with homoerotic overtones, and its context, the heteronormalizing reform of Yueju. It thus invokes a queer intervention that rewrites the historical “surplus” of homoeroticism back into the official history of the socialist “seventeen years” (1949-1966). This integration represents an alternative historiography that is at the same time posited against the ahistorical tendency underlying certain queer reading practices. My subsequent investigation of camp aesthetic picks up two related strands. The first traces the diffusion of “mass camp” impulse in Hong Kong popular culture – characterized by a self-conscious, often parodic attitude toward the artifice of conventions – and how this mass camp impulse has contributed immensely to the proliferation of gender parody in contemporary Hong Kong mainstream cinema. The second investigates the articulation of “tongzhi camp,” which is characterized by irony, theatricality, aestheticism, and humor, and significantly mediated (I contend) by gay shame and gay melancholy in their particular Chinese cultural manifestations. This systematic investigation of mass camp impulse and tongzhi camp aesthetic is original to this study, and, I believe, vital and innovative. Engaging thoroughly in the work of cultural translation, it provides an explanation for the widespread phenomenon of gender parody in Hong Kong pop culture, and to some degree serves as an alternative history of contemporary Hong Kong cinema. In large part, my articulation of tongzhi camp in Chapter 4 is a tongzhi-oriented answer to mass camp in Chapter 3, wherein tongzhi camp is simultaneously predicated upon the “Chinese queer diasporic imaginary” of Chapter 1. Documentary film in postsocialist China is the main focus of Chapters 5 and 6, which explore depictions of lesbian subjects and female impersonators respectively. These chapters tackle queer issues in China’s new documentary film movement, devoting attention to how digital media help shape emerging local tonghzi/queer identities in a transnational framework.

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Importantly, these queer-themed documentary films also reflect the ways in which certain tongzhi/queer subjects negotiate their agency against the parameters of both temporality (the post/socialist eras) and spatiality (the local-regional-global nexus) in contemporary China. My reading of “performing documentary” (Chapter 6) further resonates with quintessential performance traits of both Chinese opera and camp aesthetic (see Chapters 2, 3, and 4), as well as my proposed idea of “familial performativity,” discussed in relation to Tsai Ming-liang in Chapter 1. In practice, the traits of performance and performativity serve as yet another overarching theme of this project. By now, it must also be evident that this project puts crucial emphasis on the processes through which tongzhi/queer imaginaries have evolved. These processes are not only historical, but they continue to evolve. Toward the end of Chapter 1, for instance, I pointed out some recent interventions in the dominant Chinese queer diasporic imaginary, such as the rethinking of ethnicity in Taiwan beyond the framework of Han Chinese, as seen in Alifu: The Prince/ss (Wang Yu-ling, 2017) and Tale of the Lost Boys (Joselito Altarejos, 2017), and the reframing of family that works toward reconciling the tension between tongzhi/queer individuals and their natal families, beginning with The Way We Write (Amy Wen, 2006) and Artemisia (Chiang Hsiu-chiung, 2006). Wen’s film in particular rewrites the seemingly inextricable tension of the father-son relationship in Niezi by highlighting the “homecoming” of a banished son with his partner, as well as the father’s gradually easing interaction with his son’s partner. Artemisia likewise, albeit less directly, gestures toward a single mother’s gradual acceptance of her son’s gay identity. Later, we see a married husband coming out as gay in Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (Alvin Chen, 2013), and the “diverse family formation” in Girlfriend Boyfriend (Yang Ya-che, 2012). We have also started to see onscreen same-sex couples becoming parents of their biological children, either through surrogate mothers or personal networking, as in Baby Steps (Barney Cheng, 2015) and Bao Bao (Shie Guang-cheng, 2018). Thus, just as its process of democratization and localization has accelerated, Taiwan’s tongzhi/queer movement has advanced significantly in the past decade, with same-sex marriage officially legalized in mid-2019. (Before the bill was passed, in 52 HZ, I Love You [Wei Te-sheng, 2017] a lesbian couple steps forward to participate in Taipei’s group wedding ceremony and receives the public blessing). Because of the changing public perceptions about what constitute both state and family on the island, the dominant Chinese queer diasporic imaginary is also undergoing reconfiguration. How exactly these changing public perceptions will affect queer representations in Taiwan-affiliated film and media productions is worthy of future research.

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In the meantime, from the mid-to-late 1990s Hong Kong also saw the emergence of tongzhi/queer representations that were, contrary to mass camp impulse, characterized by a largely self-affirmative attitude toward tongzhi/queer identity politics. These films are notably also characterized by narratives that unfold through forms of dislocation and by a strong sense of queer diaspora, comprising another body of “Chinese queer diasporic imaginary” that must be studied alongside Hong Kong’s particular social institutions and postcolonial history. Among many such films, Simon Chung’s First Love and Other Pains is an ideal case study. In post-Handover Hong Kong, Mark, a 19-year-old gay college student, is smitten with his English literature professor, Hugh, a frustrated, fifty-something British playwright. Mark strikes up a friendship with Hugh and eventually has sex with him one drunken night. Though Hugh tries to push Mark away afterwards, Mark persists in his quest. After Hugh’s mid-life crisis precipitates a suicide attempt, he is urged to resign his professorship, and his relationship with Mark seems to start afresh. On Mark’s part, the insoluble tension between local queer subjects and their blood families that underlies queer diaspora is downplayed, so much so that the emergence of Mark’s gay identity is aligned with the absence of his original family (he lives with his aunt and young cousin in public housing). On Hugh’s part, his expat status also appears to relate to his gay identity when he was young, coinciding with what he describes as the “love-hate relationships” between some gay writers and their home countries. Here in Hong Kong, queer diaspora becomes a common ground for the former colonizer and colonized, representing the dual forces of queering the diaspora (queers exiled from their home countries) and diasporizing the queer (queers in internal exile). However, the dynamic of this encounter and the union between Mark and Hugh are far from innocent, but imbricated in colonial politics and Hong Kong postcoloniality – thus we find invocations of the “banana queer” (a gay man who is yellow on the outside but white inside)1 and “potato queen” (an Asian man who is predominantly interested in Caucasian men), touching on thorny issues permeating Hong Kong’s male tongzhi/queer community. The significance of this film and Simon Chung’s work in general, along with the larger body of Hong Kong-based Chinese queer diasporic imaginary is, in fact, the basis of my ongoing research.2 1 Simon Chung’s second short, Stanley Beloved (1997), was released in Hong Kong as part of a quartet titled 4 x Banana Queers (1999), exploring the phenomenon of the “banana queer” both within and beyond Hong Kong. 2 In 2017 I presented “Queer Diaspora and Post/Colonial Ambivalence: A Case Study of Simon Chung” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. A full version of the paper is forthcoming.

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China’s independent documentary filmmaking also exemplifies the unfolding processes of Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries, as various filmmakers have explored the lives and concerns of queer subjects more extensively, going beyond the major categories of lesbian subjects and female impersonation. Resonating with what Zhang Zhen identifies as “an activist turn” emerging in the wider independent documentary scene,3 Cui Zi’en’s Queer China, “Comrade” China (2008), for example, deals with tongzhi community-building in Mainland China, while Yang Yang’s Our Story – the 10 Years’ “Guerrilla Warfare” of Beijing Queer Film Festival (2011), documents from an activist perspective the happenings and widespread influence of the eponymous film event. Wei Xiaogang’s Come To Daddy (2009) considers elderly gay men from a cosmopolitan perspective, which juxtaposes a Beijing-based subject (noted gay activist and novelist Tong Ge) with other senior subjects living in Amsterdam (Holland), Turin (Italy), and Antwerp (Belgium). These queer documentaries, along with other more recent lesbian and transgender documentary works (most notably Shi Tou’s and Ming Ming’s soon to be completed Xinjiang Girls), will constitute another focus of my future research. Other topics that fall beyond the scope of this book are equally worthy of future investigation, including queer experimental f ilmmaking (as exemplified by the fascinating non-narrative works by Tony Wu, Kassey Huang, Tzuan Wu, Ellen Pau, and Cui Zi’en)4 and the fast-changing queer fan cultures in the digital age (as illuminated by a recent anthology titled Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols)5 . Equally interesting to me is the tongzhi/queer imagery in Chinese-language media produced outside of the three Chinas, particularly the Chinese diasporic (or Sinophone) communities based in Singapore, North America, and the United Kingdom. Set in Singapore, Rice Rhapsody (Kenneth Bi, 2004) and Solos (Kan Lume and Zihan Loo, 2007),6 like the films detailed in my opening chapter, tackle 3 Zhang Zhen, “Toward a Digital Political Mimesis: Aesthetic of Affect and Activist Video,” p. 324. 4 Tony Chun-hui Wu’s award-winning queer experimental shorts include Sentimental Journey (2001, with Georg Hsin) and Noah Noah (2006); Kassey Jin-ming Huang made the award-winning The Window of Desire (2009); Tzuan Wu is known for Yi-Ren (the person of whom I think), Disease of Manifestation (2012) and Quousque eadem? (or a self-portrait) (2012); Ellen Pau’s Song of the Goddess (1992) tells the romance between Cantonese opera performers Yam Kim-fai and Pak Suet-sin; Cui Zi’en’s best-known works are The Narrow Path (2004) and Refrain (2006). 5 Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao (eds.), Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols. For another great example, see Jamie Zhao, “Queer, Yet Never Lesbian.” 6 E.K. Tan has read Solos as an example that recuperates the troubled relationship between queer subjects and their families, claiming “the queering of the kinship system for a negotiable space of inhabitance.” See Tan, “A Queer Journey Home in Solos.”

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gay identities in relation to the Chinese familial-kinship system. Two more diasporic queer filmmakers have come to my attention: Quentin Lee (e.g. Ethan Mao [2004], The People I’ve Slept With [2012] and Gay Hollywood Dad [2018]) and Ray Yeung (Cut Sleeve Boys [2006], Front Cover [2015] and Suk Suk [2019]), both of whom left Hong Kong around 1997 for the US and the UK, respectively. Their explorations of tongzhi/queer subjectivities are characteristically filtered through an intricate web of identity politics, most notably race, gender, class, and age, and gesture towards a dialogue with the scholarly approach of “queering the diaspora.” Any study on films produced outside of the three Chinas, I insist, must be conducted in a socially and historically embedded manner, as I have demonstrated in this project. Ultimately, I hope this book will prove to be a valuable foundation for any future research on queer representations in Chinese-language film and media.



Chinese Glossary

Adam TSUEI Ah fei aimei ai-si bing Ai zai aizi manyan shi ai-zi bing Alice WANG Alice WU Amy WEN Ang LEE Anita MUI Ann HUI Anthony LIAN Anthony WONG Arvin CHEN Bai Guang Bai Jingrui Bai Ke Bai mao nü Bai niangzi bai shan xiao wei xian Bai Yongbing Baishe zhuan/Lady White Snake Bai shui baitang benshengren bianyuan ren biaojie binlang xishi Brigitte Ching-hsia LIN

崔振東 亞飛 曖昧 愛死病 愛在愛滋蔓延時 愛滋病 王毓雅 伍思薇 溫秀熒 李安 梅豔芳 許鞍華 練劍輝 黃耀明 陳駿霖 白光 白景瑞 白克 白毛女 白娘子 百善孝為先 白詠冰 白蛇傳 白水 拜堂 本省人 邊緣人 表姊 檳榔西施 林青霞

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Bu Wancang Bu-wen (Ji) buxiao buxiao you san, wuhou wei da caipo caiqiao camp-camp-di Caodong (School) Carol CHENG (a.k.a. DoDo CHENG) Chai Jing Chan, Evans Yiu Shing Chan Po-chu Chang Hsiao-hung Chang Tso-chi chao rosi Chen Chao-jung Chen Mickey Chun-chi Chen Duxiu Chen Kuo-fu Chen Ming-lang Chen Rouxi Chen Yin-jung Cheng Hsiao-tse Cheng Pei-pei Cheng Qingsong chengshi hua chi (melody) chi daguo fan Chi Lu-shiya Chi Ta-wei Chiang Ching-kuo Chiang Kai-shek

卜萬蒼 不文 (集) 不孝 不孝有三，無後為大 菜脯 (pronounced in Taiwanese dialect) 踩翹 camp camp 的 曹洞（宗） 鄭裕玲 柴靜 陳耀成 陳寶珠 張小虹 張作驥 炒肉絲 陳昭榮 陳俊志 陳獨秀 陳國富 陳敏郎 陳若曦 陳映蓉 程孝澤 鄭佩佩 程青松 程式化 尺（調） 吃大鍋飯 紀露霞 紀大偉 蔣經國 蔣介石

309

Chinese Glossary

Chiang Hsiu-chiung Ching Siu-tung Chor Yuen Chou Lan-ping Chou Mei-ling (Zero Chou) Chou Wah-shan Chow Yun-fat chuan zong jie dai Cui Zi’en Da’an (Forrest Park) daguan Dandong (in Liaoning, China) Dangshui River danwei daotong Datong (District) dazha xie da xiao Danshui (River) Denise HO Deng Ji-chen Deng Xiao-yu Di Na/Tina Ti dianhua jiaoyou zhongxin Dianying shuang zhoukan dianzi huache Diaoyutai ding Ding Shanxi Diyi tuan Donghe (Temple) Du Haibin Duan Jinchuan

姜秀瓊 程小東 楚原 周藍萍 周美玲 周華山 周潤發 傳宗接代 崔子恩 大安（森林公園） 大官 丹東（遼寧, 中國） 淡水河 單位 道統 大同（區） 大閘蟹 大孝 淡水（河） 何韻詩 鄧寄塵 鄧小宇 狄娜 電話交友中心 電影雙週刊 電子花車 釣魚台 鼎 丁善璽 第一團 東和（禪寺） 杜海濱 段錦川

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duoyuan chengjia Edward LAM/Lin Yihua Ellen PAU Esther ENG Fa Hai fa Fan Popo Fan Ruijuan fanchuan fangong wenxue fangshou xie ganqing fanpan fanshen feiren fei wo zu lei fai zai fei nü Fenghuang yufai Fengshen yanyi Fense kongjian fozu Fu Quanxiang funü jiefang gandie Gan Guo-liang/Kam Kwok-leung gan pu ganshi youguo Gao Tian Gandie ganqing jituo gaoyu shenghuo guanzi ge rou huan fu, ti gu huan mu Giddens KO

多元成家 林奕華 鮑藹倫 伍錦霞 法海 法 范坡坡 范瑞娟 反串 反共文學 放手寫感情 反叛 翻身 非人 非我族類 飛仔飛女 鳳凰于飛 封神演義 粉色空間 佛祖 傅全香 婦女解放 乾爹 甘國亮 敢曝 感時憂國 高天 乾爹 感情寄託 高於生活 關係 割肉還父，剔骨還母 九把刀

311

Chinese Glossary

Grace CHANG/GE Lan Gu lian hua (or Lone Love Flower) Gu Long Guangbuo tai guangtou shentan Guangzhou Guanyin (Edifice) gui xi Guizhou Guo Xiaofei guocui Guoji xueshe guonan dangtou Håkon LIU hangdang haochang hao jiemei Haowai (magazine) He Xiaopei hei’an wangguo Hou Chi-jan Hou Hsiao-hsien Hsu Chih-yen Hsu Li-kong hu yuan hu jin Huang Chuen-ming Huang Cui-hua Huang Lei huangmei opera (film) Huan wo heshan huayu dianying huayu yuxi (Sinophone) huaqiao

葛蘭 孤戀花 古龍 廣播台 光頭神探 廣州 觀音（殿） 鬼戲 貴州 郭曉飛 國粹 國際學舍 國難當頭 劉漢威 行當 好廠 好姊妹 號外（雜誌） 何小培 黑暗王國 侯季然 侯孝賢 許智彥 徐立功 忽遠忽近 黃春明 黃翠華 黃磊 黃梅調（電影） 還我河山 華語電影 華語語系 華僑

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huaxia Huen ying jiu mong huigui xiangtu Jackie CHAN Jet LI “ji” sao jia jia chou jia chou buke wai yang jia-guo jiaxian jiazu jia feng xü huang jiandie dadou pian Jiang Yue jianghu jiangnan jiebai jieji xing Jimo de shiqi sui jin quanzi Jin Yong (a.k.a. Louis Cha) jindai hefeng Jing Xiang jingju (Peking opera) jingzhong baoguo John WOO Josephine HO juancun Karl Maka Kai Tak Airport Kassey HUANG Kiang Mei

華夏 魂縈舊夢 回歸鄉土 成龍 李連杰 「基」騷 家 家醜 家醜不可外揚 家-國 假仙 家族 假鳳虛凰 間諜打鬥片 蔣樾 江湖 江南 結拜 階級性 寂寞的十七歲 進圈子 金庸 近代和風 景翔 京劇 精忠報國 吳宇森 何春蕤 眷村 麥加 啟德機場 黃靖敏 江梅

313

Chinese Glossary

Kit HUNG Ko I-cheng Kowloon kuangren yuetuan (The Beatles) ku’er Kun (opera) Lai Zheng-zhe lala Lan tianshi laogai ying Lau Kar-leung Law Kar Lazi Lee Hsiang-ju Lee Kang-sheng Leon DAI Leslie CHEUNG Leste CHEN Leung Chiu-wai Li Ang Li Bihua Li Cheuk-to Li sao Li Dazhao Li Han-hsiang Li Jia Li Xing (or Lee Hsing) Li Yan-xun Li Yinhe Li You-xin li yi lian chi Li Yu

洪榮傑 柯一正 九龍 狂人樂團 酷兒 昆（曲） 賴正哲 拉拉 藍天使 勞改營 劉家良 羅卡 拉子 李湘茹 李康生 戴立忍 張國榮 陳正道 梁朝偉 李昂 李碧華 李焯桃 離騷 李大釗 李翰祥 李嘉 李行 李彥勳 李銀河 李幼新 (renamed李幼鸚 鵡鵪鶉 in 2009) 禮義廉恥 李玉

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lian lian tai ben xi Liang Zhu Liang Zhu hen shi lianhua huashen Lien Yi-chi Lin Chong (Ye Ben) Lin Hwai-min Lin Ya-zhen Ling Bo Linjie dian (performing troupe) Liou Liang-ya lisan liufang liumangzui Liu Bingjian Liu Jue Liu Xiaojin Liu Yun-ho (Hoho liu) Lu Xiao-lin (renamed Lu Yi-jing) Lu Xun lu yin Lucifer HUNG Lui Kee Lui Tai-lok Lunliu Zhuan Lung Kim Sang Luo Man-fei luying Ma guafu kaidian Mag HSU Man tian li liangjingjing de xingxing Mao Zedong

臉 連台本戲 梁祝 梁祝恨史 蓮花化身 連奕琦 林沖（夜奔） 林懷民 林亞珍 凌波 臨界點（劇團） 劉亮雅 離散 流放 流氓罪 劉冰鑒 劉覺 劉小津 劉芸后 陸筱琳 (陸奕靜) 魯迅 露淫 洪凌 呂奇 呂大樂 輪流傳 龍劍笙 羅曼菲 露營 馬寡婦開店 徐譽庭 滿天裡亮晶晶的星星 毛澤東

315

Chinese Glossary

mao’er xi Maxu Weibang Mazu Mei Lanfang Mei Yanfang (a.k.a. Anita Mui) Meihao tongmeng Meimei meiren Meng Ting-wei mianzi Miao Tien Michael LAM Mickey CHEN Minsheng zhuyi yule lian pian bushu Ming Ming Ming Pao mingmei zhengqu Minnan minquan minsheng minzu minzu xing Mok Hong-si Mou Tun-fei Mudan ting nan lai dian, nü lai dian nannü heyan Nannü heyan shiyan jutuan Nezha Nezha zaici Ni jiujing you jige hao meimei niezhong Niezi (or niezi)

髦兒戲 馬徐維邦 媽祖 梅蘭芳 梅艷芳 美好同盟 美美 美人 孟庭葦 面子 苗天 邁克 陳俊志 民生主義育樂兩篇補述 明明 明報 明媒正娶 閩南 民權 民生 民族 民族性 莫康時 牟敦芾 牡丹亭 男來店，女來電 男女合演 男女合演實驗劇團 哪吒 哪吒在此 你究竟有幾個好妹妹 孽種 孽子

316 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Ninü nü qiang ren Nü tongzhi xinlang ji dui shehui zhidu de mozhong guanzhu Nüren hua Ouyang Tzu Pai Hsien-yung Pak Suet-sin Pan Suiming Pi-tou-si (The Beatles) Prince Chang Ping Qianmen (Street) qing Qingchun qingchuan fan Qinghai qingqing baibai zuoren, renren zhenzhen yanxi Qingshaonian yule huodong zhongxing qingtian pili qinshou daoyan Qiu-hai-tang Qiu Jiongjiong Qiu Miaojin Qu Yuan Quentin LEE rang yige shanlian de ren ping’an di huo xia qu ba Ray YEUNG ren (benevolence) Ren Jianhui/Yam Kim-fai Rene LIU Renjian shiwai renqing

逆女 女強人 女同志新浪暨對社會制 度的某種關注 女人花 歐陽子 白先勇 白雪仙 潘綏銘 披頭四 帝女花/長平公主 前門（大街） 情 青春 青春飯 青海 清清白白做人，認認真真演戲 青少年育樂活動中心 晴天霹靂 禽獸導演 秋海棠 邱炯炯 邱妙津 屈原 李孟熙 讓一個善良的人平安地 活下去吧 楊曜愷 仁 任劍輝 劉若英 人間世外 人情

317

Chinese Glossary

renyao ren zhuang Roman TAM Rosamund KWAN Sammo HUNG Sanmin zhuyi Sang Tze-lan sangang Sek Kai Shangguan Lingfeng Shaoxing xi Shenghuo de mudi zai zenjing renlei quanti zhi shenghuo; shengming de yiyi zai chuangzao yuzhou jiqi zhi shengming shenguai shenguai wuxia pian shenguai yueyu xiqu pian Shi Tou Shi Jihua shidai xing Shu Kei Shui you shuqing si si lou sigong (diao) Simon CHUNG Sing Tao Daily song song ko wu lat su

人妖 人裝 羅文 關之琳 洪金寶 三民主義 桑梓蘭 三綱 石琪 上官靈鳳 紹興戲 生活的目的在增進人類 全體之生活 生命的意義在創造宇宙 繼起之生命 神怪 神怪武俠片 神怪粵語戲曲片 石頭 史濟華 時代性 舒琪 水幽 抒情 四/死 四樓 四工（調） 鍾德勝 星島日報 俗（pronounced in Taiwanese） 俗擱有力 （pronounced in Taiwanese） 俗

318 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Sun Yat-sen suzhi tai tai-ke tai-ri qingjie taixu zhong yilu wu yikao de wangling Tang Danhong Tangtang Tat Ming Pair Tian Han Tian Qi-yuan Tianjin Tianshi buyecheng tie fanwan Tong Tik-sang Tongxingai tongzhi tongzhi fangong tongzhi qinquan tongzhi reng xu nuli tongzhi shang lu tongzhi! shiyan!! tongzhi yuwang Tony Chun-hui Wu tsaan pian Jolin TSAI Tsai Ming-liang Tsao Jui-yuan Tsui Hark waishengren Wan Yanhai Wang chunfeng Wang Tuo

孫中山/孫逸仙 素質 台 台客 台日情結 太虛中一縷無依靠的亡靈 唐丹紅 唐唐 達明一派 田漢 田啟元 天津 天使不夜城 鐵飯碗 唐滌生 同性愛 同志 同志反攻 同志親權 同志仍需努力 同志上路 同志! 實驗!! 同志慾望 吳俊輝 殘片 蔡依林 蔡明亮 曹瑞源 徐克 外省人 萬延海 望春風 王拓

319

Chinese Glossary

Wang Wen-xing Wang Yu-lin Wang Yu-wen Wei Jiangang (a.k.a. Wei Xiaogang) wei wang ren Wei ying hui (Film Guard Association) Wen Tianxiang Wen Tien-hsiang wenhua qingjie yungdong wenxin de ganjue wenyi zhengce Wong Fei-hung Wong Kar-wai Wong Tin-lam/Wang Tianlin wu hou Wu Tzuan Wu Wenguang Wu Xiaolou wuchang Wushuang Po Xi Song xianchang xiandai ticai Xiandai wenxue Xiang Lin’s Wife xiangcao xianggang ren xiangtu xian mu Xiangqi xiao Xiao Dangui Xiao Fang-fang/Josephine Siao

王文興 王育麟 王渝文 魏建剛 （魏小剛） 未亡人 衛影會 文天祥 聞天祥 文化清潔運動 溫馨的感覺 文藝政策 黃飛鴻 王家衛 王天林 無後 吳梓安 吳文光 吳小樓 五常 無雙譜 奚淞 現場 現代題材 現代文學 祥林嫂 香草 香港人 鄉土 賢母 想起 孝 筱丹桂 蕭芳芳

320 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

xiao pin bu xiao chang Xiaodongbao Gewutuan Xiaojing Xiaokang Xiaomingxiong (Samshasha) Xie Jin Xie Jin moshi Ximen ting xin tongzhi dianying xing qingxiang xingping jiaoyu Xiong ying ji xiu sheng xiuzheng zhuyi xizi Xu Bin Xu Feng Xu Gehui Xu Guan-jie (Sam Hui) Xu Guan-wen (Michael Hui) Xu Guan-ying (Ricky Hui) xue Yam Kim-fei Yan Geling Yang Kuei-mei Yang Lina Yang Ya-che Yang Yang yaodiao ta na ‘dongxi’ Yau Ching Yee Chih-yen Yeh De-hsuan yi (righteousness)

笑貧不笑娼 小東寶歌舞團 孝經 小康 小明雄 謝晋 謝晋模式 西門町 新同志電影 性傾向 性平教育 雄影集 修身 修正主義 戲子 徐玢 徐楓 許戈輝 許冠傑 許冠文 許冠英 學 任劍輝 嚴歌苓 楊貴媚 楊荔鈉 楊雅喆 楊洋 咬掉他那「東西」 游靜 易智言 葉德宣 義

321

Chinese Glossary

yi ai wei ming yi jing xiaoyou yimai xiangcheng, yongxu bujue Yi Wen yi xiao zuo zhong Yin Chi yinwei xingwei Ying Cheng-ru Ying Weiwei (a.k.a. Echo Y. Windy) yinghua meng Yonfan youai xiaoyu Youshi wenyi Youyuan jingmong Yu Fa/Ru Hua Yu Jong-jong Yu Kan-ping Yu Li-zhen Yue mong Yuqing sao Yuan Xuefen Yuanmingyuan yuanyu shenghuo Yue meng Yueju (a.k.a. Shaoxing opera) Yuen Woo-ping Yunmen wuji Yuqing sao zhandou wenyi zhandou xing Zhang Beichuan Zhang Che (or Chang Cheh) Zhang Chunfan

以愛為名 以儆效尤 一脈相承，永續不絕 易文 移孝作忠 尹祺 淫猥行為 應政儒 英未未 櫻花夢 楊凡 有礙校譽 幼獅文藝 遊園驚夢 如花 于中中 虞戡平 余麗珍 月夢 玉卿嫂 袁雪芬 圓明園 源於生活 月夢 越劇 袁和平 雲門舞集 玉卿嫂 戰鬥文藝 戰鬥性 張北川 張徹 張春帆

322 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Zhang Dao-fan Zhang Guifeng Zhang Hanzi Zhang Yuan Zhang Ziyi Zhejiang (province) zhenqing shiyi Zheng Sheng-fu Zheng Shuo-nan Zheng Yu-ling/Carol Cheng/Dodo Cheng zhengdang de guisu Zhengqi ge zhengzhi xuanchuan pian zhongjian luxian Zhou Dan Zhou Enlai Zhou Xuan Zhong Chuhong/Cherie Chung zhong Zhongguo ku’er duli yingxiang xiaozu Zhonghua wenhua fuxing yundong Zhong-xiao-jie-yi zhuanjia zhuanti pian Zhufu Zhi Zibai Zhu Rikun zuoren he zuoshi de yuanze

張道藩 張桂鳳 張涵子 張元 章子怡 浙江（省） 真情實意 鄭勝夫 鄭碩男 鄭裕玲 正當的歸宿 正氣歌 政治宣傳片 中間路線 周丹 周恩來 周璇 鍾楚紅 忠 中國酷兒獨立影像小組 中華文化復興運動 忠孝節義 轉嫁 專題片 祝福 栀子白 朱日坤 做人和做事的原則



Bilingual Filmography

2, 1: Couple, Single 52 HZ, I Love You 92 Legendary La Rose Noire A Woman Is A Woman Aces Go Places (series) Aces Go Places III: Our Man from Bond Street Alifu: The Prince/ss All About Love All for the Winner All the Wrong Clues (… For the Right Solution) All’s Well, Ends Well All’s Well, Ends Well Too Angel Strikes Again Angel with the Iron Fists Artemisia Ashes of Time At the Runway’s Edge The Autumn Execution Baby Steps The Bamboo House of Dolls Banana Queers Bao Bao Be A Woman Beautiful Men Beauty of Beauties Being Different, So What? Bishonen Black Falcon Black Rose

2, 1 52赫茲，我愛你 九二黑玫瑰對黑玫瑰 女人就是女人 最佳拍檔（系列） 最佳拍檔: 女皇密令 阿莉芙 得閒炒飯 賭聖 鬼馬智多星 家有喜事 花田喜事 鐵觀音勇破爆炸黨 鐵觀音 艾草 東邪西毒 跑道終點 秋決 滿月酒 女集中營 4 x 香蕉同志 親愛的卵男日記 舞孃 人面桃花 西施 不一樣又怎樣？ 美少年之戀 黑鷹 黑玫瑰

324 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Black Rose II Blue Gate Crossing Body at Large The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful The Box Boys for Beauty Brave Archer Brother The Buddha’s Palm (series) The Bugis Street Butterfly Center Stage/The Actress C’est la vie, mon cheri Challenge of the Masters Chicken and Duck Talk Chinese Closet A Chinese Ghost Story City of Sadness Come Drink with Me Come to Daddy Comrades, Almost A Love Story The Contract Corner’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Cut Sleeves Boys The Days of Being Dumb Days of Being Wild Days of Tomorrow The Dead and the Deadly Dear Ex Death of Montmartre The Decisive Battle

黑玫瑰義結金蘭 藍色大門 晃遊身體 血觀音 盒子 美麗少年 神鵰俠侶 兄弟 如來神掌（系列） 妖街皇后 蝴蝶 阮玲玉 新不了情 陸阿采與黃飛鴻 雞同鴨講 櫃族 倩女幽魂 悲情城市 大醉俠 戀夕陽 甜蜜蜜 賣身契 私角落 臥虎藏龍 我愛斷背衫 亞基與亞飛 阿飛正傳 天長地久 人嚇人 誰先愛上他的 蒙馬特・女書 精忠報國

325

Bilingual Filmography

Descendants of the Yellow Emperor Dirty Tiger, Crazy Frog Dragon Gate Inn Dream of the Red Chamber Drifting Flowers Drunken Master Dummy, Mommy, without a Baby Dust in the Wind Dyke March The Eagle Shooting Heroes East Is Red East Palace, West Palace The Eighth Happiness Emperor Qin Encore Encounter of the Spooky Kind End of Love Enter the Clown Enter the Fat Dragon Eternal Summer Ethan Mao Even Mountains Meet Fantasia Farewell My Concubine The Fearless Hyena Feeding Boys, Ayaya Fig Fire Bulls First Love and Other Pains Fish and Elephant A Fishy Story Fleeing by Night Fong Sai Yuk

皇帝子孫 老虎田雞 龍門客棧 紅樓夢 飄浪青春 醉拳 玉女添丁 戀戀風塵 女同志遊行日 射鵰英雄之東成西就 東方不敗2: 風雲再起 東宮西宮 八星報喜 秦始皇 再演一齣戲 鬼打鬼 愛到盡 丑角登場 肥龍過江 盛夏光年 志同盜合 山水有相逢 鬼馬狂想曲 霸王別姬 笑拳怪招 哎呀呀，去哺乳 無花果 還我河山 心灰 今年夏天 不脫襪的人 夜奔 方世玉

326 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Formula 17 Front Cover Front Page Full Moon in New York Gallants Games Gamblers Play Gender Game Ghosted Gigolo and Whore II Girl Spy 001 Girlfriend Boyfriend Girls That Way Go Go G-Boys The Golden Buddha Golden Gate Girls Good Men, Good Women Good Morning, Taipei Goodbye Dragon Inn Green Island Serenade Green Snake Happy Ding Dong Happy Together He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father He and She He Is A Woman, She Is A Man Health Warning Help Me Eros Her Fatal Way (series) Hibiscus Town Ho Yuk: Let’s Love Hong Kong Hocus Pocus Hold You Tight

十七歲的天空 紐約斷背衫 新半斤八兩 人在紐約 (HK); 三個女人的故事 (Taiwan) 打擂台 鬼馬雙星 傷花 曖昧 舞男情未了 女間諜第一號 女朋友・男朋友 別樣女孩 當我們同在一起 金菩薩 金門銀光夢 好男好女 早安台北 不散 綠島小夜曲 青蛇 歡樂叮噹 春光乍洩 難兄難弟 姊妹情深 金枝玉葉 打擂台 幫幫我愛神 表姐妳好（系列） 芙蓉鎮 好郁 人嚇鬼 愈快樂愈墮落

327

Bilingual Filmography

The Hole The House of 72 Tenants House of Flying Daggers Hu-Du-Men Hui Brothers Show (TV show) The Human Comedy I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone I Have a Date with Spring I Love Hong Kong (series) I Miss You When I See You I Wanna Be Your Man! In Our Time Innocent Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan Intimates It’s A Wonderful Life It’s Always Spring The Iron-fisted Monk Justice, My Foot The Killer Killer Clans Knockabout Lady Bond Lan Yu The Last Message Leaving in Sorrow Lee Rock The Legend of Purple Hairpin The Life of Silence Lonely Hearts Club Lost Souls Love Eterne

洞 七十二家房客 十面埋伏 虎度門 歡樂今宵 人間喜劇 黑眼圈 我和春天有個約會 我愛香港 看見你就想念你 神探磨轆 光陰的故事 只愛陌生人 愛奴 自梳 大富之家 桃李爭春 三德和尚與舂米六 審死官 喋血雙雄 天涯明月刀 雜家小子 女殺手 藍宇 天才與白癡 憂憂愁愁的走了 雷洛傳 紫釵記 犧牲之旅 寂寞芳心俱樂部 打蛇 梁山伯與祝英台

328 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Love Me If You Can Mad, Mad, Mad Sword Madame The Magic Blade Maiden Rose The Maiden Thief Make Up Mama Rainbow The Map of Sex and Love The Martial Arts of Shaolin Mei Mei Men and Women Miao Miao Miracle Fighters Miss Jin Xing Miss Kicki Modern Romance Mon Mon Mon Monsters Money Crazy Mr. Vampire (series) Murmur of Youth My Fair Son My Kingdom for a Husband My New Friends My Rice Noodle Shop New Beijing, New Marriage Night Scene No Biz Like Show Biz No. 1 Chung Ying Street Noah Noah Oh! My Three Guys The Old Testament

飛躍情海 神經刀 姑奶奶 流星蝴蝶劍 女兒紅 玉女神偷 命運化妝師 彩虹伴我心 情色地圖 南北少林 美美 男男女女 渺渺 奇門遁甲 金星小姐 霓虹心 戀愛的天空 報告老師怪怪怪物 發錢寒 殭屍先生 (HK); 暫時停止呼吸 (Taiwan)（系列） 美麗在唱歌 我如花似玉的兒子 璇宮豔史 我新認識的朋友 花橋榮記 新前門大街 夜景 山水有相逢 中英街一號 諾亞諾亞 三個相愛的少年 舊約

329

Bilingual Filmography

Our Love Our Marriages: When Lesbians Marry Gay Men Out of Phoenix Bridge The Outcasts Peking Opera Blues The Peony Pavilion The Personals Pink Dads The River Plain Jane to the Rescue Portland Street Blues Prince of Tears Prince of Thieves Princess Chang Ping The Private Eyes The Prodigal Son Prosperity of Family Protégé de la Rose Noire The Puppetmaster Queer China, “Comrade” China A Queer Story Raise the Umbrellas Rebels of the Neon God The Red Detachment of Women Refrain Remembrance Rice Rhapsody Romance of Book and Sword Rose Rose I Love You Rouge Royal Tramp The Sandwich Man

香平麗 奇緣一生 回到鳳凰橋 孽子 刀馬旦 我的美麗與哀愁 徵婚啟事 彩虹老爸 河流 八彩林亞珍 洪興十三妹 淚王子 賊王子 帝女花 半斤八兩 敗家子 三娘教子 見習黑玫瑰 戲夢人生 誌同志 基佬四十 撐傘 青少年哪吒 紅色娘子軍 副歌 自轉 海南雞飯 書劍恩仇錄 玫瑰玫瑰我愛妳 胭脂扣 鹿鼎記 兒子的大玩偶

330 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Saving Face Scars on Memory The Secret The Secret Book (series) Security Unlimited Sentimental Journey Sex for Sale The Shadow Boxing Shanghai Blues A Young Man’s Afternoon Nap Shitou and That Nana The Silent Thrush Small Talk Snake Boy Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow Song of the Goddess Soundless Wind Chime Spider Lilies The Spiritual Boxer Splendid Float The Spooky Bunch Star Appeal Still Love You After All These The Story of Wong Fei-hong Stray Dogs Supercop Swordsman II “T” Is for Tomboy Tale of the Lost Boys Tang Tang Thanatos, Drunk The Tenants Downstairs Teppanyaki

面子 無偶之家, 往事之城 瘋劫 仙鶴神針（系列） 摩登保鏢 感傷之旅 面具 茅山殭屍拳 上海上海藍 少年午夢 石頭和那個娜娜 失聲畫眉 日常對話 上海男孩 蛇形刁手 似是故人來 無聲風鈴 刺青 神打 豔光四射歌舞團 撞到正 (HK); 小姐撞到鬼 (Taiwan) 星星相吸惜 念你如昔 黃飛鴻傳 郊遊 警察故事III：超級警察 笑傲江湖之東方不敗 “T” Is for Tomboy 他和他的心旅程 唐唐 醉・生夢死 樓下的房客 鐵板燒

331

Bilingual Filmography

The Terrorizers The Thrill Is Gone Tidal A Time to Live, A Time to Die To Be Number One Tom, Dick, and Hairy Tomorrow Comes Today A Touch of Zen Tracey Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars Two Stage Sisters (or Stage Sisters) The Umbrella Story Unfilial Daughter (TV mini-series) Vanished Archive Vive L’amour The Way We Write The Wayward Cloud We Are Here We Want to Get Married We Are Going to Eat You The Wedding Banquet What Time Is It There？ Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? The Window of Desire Woman Basketball Player No. 5 Women Fifty Minutes Wonder Women Wu Feng Xinjiang Girls Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema You Were Meant for Me

恐怖份子 顫慄 潮汐 童年往事 跛豪 風塵三俠 你的今天和我的明天 俠女 翠絲 星際鈍胎 夏日福星 舞台姊妹 人間有情 逆女 消失的檔案 愛情萬歲 寫字魔法 天邊一朵雲 我們在這裡 我們要結婚 地域無門 喜宴 你那邊幾點？ 明天記得愛上我 慾見 女籃五號 女人50分鐘 神奇兩女俠 吳鳳 新疆女孩 男生女相 遊戲人間

332 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

The Young Master Young, Pregnant, and Unmarried Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain

師弟出馬 玉女添丁 蜀山

Bibliography Selected Bibliography in English 2000 Cinema Yearbook in the Republic of China. Taipei: National Film Archive, 2001. Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Abbas, Ackbar, and John Nguyet Erni (eds.), Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Aitken, Ian, and Michael Ingham. Hong Kong Documentary Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Allen, Joseph R. Taipei: City of Displacements. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012. Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. —. Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. —. “The Paradoxes of Tradition: Lau Kar Leung at Shaw Brothers.” In Hing Chao (ed.), Lingnan Hung Kuen: Kung Fu in Cinema and Community. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2018. 87-121. Altman, Dennis. Global Sex. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. An, Jinsoo. “The Killer: Cult Film and Transnational (Mis)Reading.” In Esther Yau (ed.), At Full Speed (2001). 95-113. Anagnost, Ann. “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi).” Public Culture 16.2 (2004): 189-208. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. New York: Verso, 1991. Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. New York: Routledge, 2001. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2.2 (Spring 1990): 1-24. —. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. —. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” Public Culture 12.1 (2000): 1-19.

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Yu Mo-wan, “The Prodigious Cinema of Huang Fei-hong [Wong Fei-hung],” In Lau Shing-hon (ed.), A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film. Hong Kong: The Urban Council/Hong Kong International Film Festival, 1980. 79-86. Yu, Sabrina Qiong, and Guy Austin (eds.), Revisiting Star Studies: Cultures, Themes and Methods. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Yue, Audrey. “Mobile Intimacies in the Queer Sinophone Films of Cui Zi’en.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6.2 (2012): 95-108. —. “Queer Asian Cinema and Media Studies: From Hybridity to Critical Regionality.” Cinema Journal 53.2 (Winter 2014): 145-151. —. “Trans-Singapore: Some Notes towards Queer Asia as Method.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 18.1 (2017): 10-24. Yung, Sai-shing. “From The Love Parade to My Kingdom for a Husband: Hollywood Musicals amd Cantonese Opera Films.” In Wong Ain-ling (ed.), The Cathay Story (2002). 190-199. Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. —. The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Zhang, Yingjin. Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2002. —. Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004. —. Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. Zhang, Zhen. “Mediating Time: The ‘Rice Bowl of Youth’ in Fin de Siecle Urban China.” Public Culture 12.1 (Winter 2000): 93-113. —. “Bodies in the Air: The Magic of Science and the Fate of the Early ‘Martial Arts’ Film in China.” Post Script Vol. 20 Nos. 2&3 (2001): 43-60. —. “Building on the Ruins: The Exploration of New Urban Cinema of the 1990s.” In Wu Hung, Wang Huangsheng and Feng Boyi (eds.), Reinterpretation: A Decade of Chinese Experimental Art (1990-2000). Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 2002. pp. 113-120. —. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. — (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. —. “Transfiguring the Postsocialist City: Experimental Image-Making in Contemporary China.” In Braester, Yomi, and James Tweedie (eds.), Cinema at the City’s Edge. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010. 95-118.

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—. “Ling Bo: Orphanhood and Post-War Sinophone Film Industry.” In Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang (eds.), Chinese Film Stars. New York: Routledge, 2010. 121-138. —. “Translating Melodrama: Observations on the Emergence of Chinese Narrative Films.” In Yingjin Zhang (ed.), A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 25-41. —. “Toward a Digital Political Mimesis: Aesthetic of Affect and Activist Video.” In Zhang Zhen et al., DV-Made China (2015). 316-345. —. “Transnational Melodrama, Wenyi, and the Orphan Imagination.” In Gledhill et al., Melodrama Unbound (2018). 83-98. Zhang, Zhen, and Angela Zito (eds.), DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015. Zhao, Jamie J. “Queering the Post-L Word Shane in the ‘Garden of Eden’: Chinese Fans’ Gossip about Katherine Moennig.” In Lavin et al., Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols (2017). 63-90. —. “Queer, Yet Never Lesbian: A Ten-Year Look Back at the Reality TV Singing Competition Show Super Voice Girl.” Celebrity Studies (Jan. 2018). DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2018.1508957 Zheng, Tiantian. “Sexuality, Class, and Neoliberal Ideology: Same-Sex Attracted Men and Money Boys in Postsocialist China.” In Tiantian Zheng (ed.), Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016. 23-40. Zhu, Dake. “The Drawback of Xie Jin’s Model.” In Semsel et al., Chinese Film Theory (1990). 144-146. Zito, Angela. “Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries.” In Zito et al., Body, Subject & Power in China (1994). 103-130. —. Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-Century China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Zito, Angela, and Tani E. Barlow (eds.), Body, Subject & Power in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989. —. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991. Zou, John. “A Chinese Ghost Story: Ghostly Counsel and Innocent Man.” In Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus (2003). 39-46.

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— (ed.), Susan Sontag wenxuan (蘇珊・桑塔格文選) [Selected writings by Susan Sontag]. Taipei: Maitian, 2002. Chan, Ting-ching 陳廷清. “The ‘Knockabout’ Comic Kung-fu Films of Sam[m]o Hung.” In Lau Shing-hon (ed.), A Study of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Film. (1980). Chan, Winnie Siu-ting 陳曉婷. Wutou, shenguai, zhajiao: yishu danhou Yu Lizhen (無頭, 神怪, 紮腳：藝術旦后余麗珍). Hong Kong: Word Press, 2015. Chang, Chih-wei 張志維. “Baishe/she zhuan: biantai de qingyu yuyan” (白舌/蛇 傳：變態的情慾語言) [M. white snake’s queer discourse of desire]. Chung-wai literary monthly (中外文學) 26.12 (May 1998): 31-46. Chang, Chuan-fen 張娟芬. Jiemei xiqiang: nu tongzhi yundong xue (姊妹「戲」牆： 女同志運動學) [Playing against the wall: female tongzhi movement]. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 1998. —. Ai de ziyou shi: nu tongzhi gushi shu (愛的自由式：女同志故事書) [Lesbians like this and that]. Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 2001. Chang, Hsiao-hung 張小虹. Hoxiandai/nuren: quanli, yuwang yu xingbie baioyan (後現代/女人：權力、慾望與性別表演) [Postmodern/women: power, desire and gender performances]. Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1993. —. Yuwang xin ditu: xingbie, tongzhi xue (慾望新地圖：性別·同志學) [Queer desire: gender and sexuality]. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 1996. —. “Guaitai jiating luomanshi: Heliu zhong de yuwang changing” (怪胎家庭羅 曼史： 《河流》中的慾望場景) [Queer family romance: the erotic landscape in The River]. In Josephine Ho (ed.), Xing/bie yanjiu (性/別研究) (1998). 156-178. —. Qingyu weiwu lun (情慾唯物論) [Erotic micropolitics]. Taipei: Datian, 1999. —. Guaitai jiating luomanshi (怪胎家庭羅曼史) [Queer family romance]. Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 2000. —. Jia quanqiuhua (假全球化) [Fake globalization]. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 2007. —. Shishang xiandai xing (時尚現代性) [Fashioning modernity]. Taipei: Lianjing, 2016. Chang, Hsiao-hung, and Wang Chih-hung 王志弘. “Taipei qingyu dijing: jia/gong yuan de yingxiang yizhi” (台北情慾地景：家/公園的影像移置) [Mapping Taipei’s landscape of desire: deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the family/park]. In Ru-shou Chen et al., Xunzhao dianying zhong de Taipei (尋找電 影中的台北) [Searching for Taipei in film]. Taipei: Wanxiang tushu, 1995. 104-114. Chang, Ivy I-chu 張靄珠. “Xingbie fanchuan, yizhi kongjian, yu houzhimin bianzhuang huanghou de wenhua xianji” 性別反串、異質空間、與後殖民變 裝皇后的文化羨忌 [Cross-dressing, heterotopia, and the cultural ambivalence of post-colonial drag]. Chung-wai literary monthly (中外文學) 29.7 (Dec. 2000): 139-157. —. Xingbie yuejie yu qu’er biaoyan (性別越界與酷兒表演) [Gender crossing and queer performance]. Xinzhu: National Chiao Tong University Press, 2010.

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—. “Yanzhi ko: Kuyi qingyu, guimei xianying” (《胭脂扣》: 酷異情慾，鬼魅顯影) [Rouge: Queer desire, ghostly embodiment]. Chinese Phantom Film Festival (鬼魅影展). Taipei: Taiwan Film and Culture Association, 2004. 71-74. —. “Jiyi tongzhi, mowang lishi – lun Wu ou zhi jia wangshi zhi cheng” (記憶同 志， 莫忘歷史──論《無偶之家，往事之城》) [Scars on Memory: Remembering Tongzhi, Remembering History]. Gender Equality Education Quarterly (性別平 等教育季刊) No. 35 (May 2006): 131-135. —. “Hezi Nei Wai de Qingyu Zhengzhi – Jian Lun Nütongzhi Youxing Ri” (《盒 子》內外的情慾政治 – 兼論《女同志遊行日》) [The erotic politics inside and outside of The Box, alongside a discussion of Dyke March]. In Ping Jie (ed.), Lingyan xiangkan (2006). 143-151. —. “Kuaxingbie yu ku’er shikongti zai houshehui zhuyi yujing zhong de jilu Xianying” (跨性別與酷兒時空體在後社會主義語境中的記錄顯影) [Documenting transgenderism and queer chronotope in postsocialist China]. Monumenta Taiwanica (台灣學誌) No. 12 (Oct. 2015): 75-82. Chen, Fang-ming 陳芳明. Dianfan de zhuiqiu (典範的追求) [In search for literary paradigm]. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 1994. —. Weilou yedu (危樓夜讀). Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 1996. —. Hou zhimin Taiwan: wenxue shilun ji qi zhoubian (後殖民台灣：文學史論及其 周邊) [Postcolonial Taiwan: essays on Taiwanese literary history and beyond]. Taipei: Maitian, 2007. —. Taiwan xin wenxue shi (台灣新文學史) [History of Taiwanese new literature]. Taipei: Lianjing, 2011. —. Wo de jiaguo yuedu: dangdai Taiwan renwen jingshen (我的家國閱讀：當代臺 灣人文精神) [My homeland reading: contemporary Taiwan humanistic spirit]. Taipei: Maitian, 2017. Chen, Mickey Chun-chi 陳俊志. Taipei baba, New York mama (台北爸爸，紐約媽媽) [Taipei father, New York mother]. Taipei: Shibao, 2011. Chen, Fang-ming, and Fan Ming-ru 范銘如 (eds.), Kua shiji de liuli: Pai Hsien-yung de wenxue yu yishu guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwen ji (跨世紀的流離：白先勇的 文學與藝術國際學術研討會論文集). Taipei: Inke wenxue, 2009. Chen, Guan-zhong 陳冠中. “Camp zhuanji” (Camp 專輯) [Special issue on camp]. City Magazine Issue 6 (Feb. 1977): 11-14. —. “Xianggang de tongxinglian guanzi han da nanren zhuyi” (香港的同性戀圈 子和大男人主義) [Hong Kong’s homosexual circle and male chauvinism]. City Magazine Issue 8 (Apr. 1981): 16-19 & 39. —. “From Camp to Post-modernism.” City Magazine Issue 59 (Jul. 1981): 47-49. —. “Camp, Trash, Kitsch.” Zhongguo shibao (中國時報) (Aug. 2-11, 2005): E7. —. Wo zhe yidai xianggang ren (我這一代香港人) [My generation of Hongkongers]. 2nd ed. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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—. Xia yige shinian: Xianggang de guangrong niandai? (下一個十年：香港的光 榮年代？) [The next decade: Hong Kong’s golden age?]. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2012. Chen, Hui-yang 陳輝揚. “Maxu Weibang zuopin xuanping” (馬徐維邦作品選評) [Remarks on selected works by Maxu Weibang]. Film Biweekly No. 131 (Mar. 1, 1984): 29-31. Chen, Jian-zhi 陳建志 (ed.), Liuxing li: Taiwan shishang wenxuan (流行力：台灣 時尚文選) [Power of the popular: selected essays on Taiwan fashion]. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue, 2007. —. Liushui nianhua Fong Fei-fei (流水年華鳳飛飛) [Flowing years of Fong Fei-fei]. Taipei: Dakuai wenhua, 2009. Chen, Kuan-hsing 陳光興 (ed.), Wenhua yanjiu zai Taiwan (文化研究在台灣) [Cultural studies in Taiwan]. Taipei: Juliu, 2000. Chen, Mei-yi 陳美怡. Shishang modeng: tu shuo Xianggang fushi yanbian (時尚摩 登：圖說香港服飾演變) [Fashioning modern: an illustrative account for the evolution of Hong Kong fashion]. Hong Kong: Chunghwa Books, 2011. Chen, Qi-xiang 陳啟祥. “Xianggang bentu wenhua de jianli han dianshi de jiaose” (香港本土文化的建立和電視的角色) [The establishment of a localized culture in Hong Kong and the role of television]. In Sinn (ed.), Culture and Society in Hong Kong (1995). 80-87. Chen, Robert Ru-shou 陳儒修. Taiwan xin dianying de lishi wenhua jingyan (台灣 新電影的歷史文化經驗) [The historical cultural experience in Taiwan new cinema]. Taipei: Wanxiang, 1993. —. “Heliu zhi jiating binglixue yanjiu” (《河流》之家庭病理學研究) [A pathological study of the family in The River]. Imagekeeper (影響) No. 82 (Mar. 1997): 97-98. —. Chuanyue yao’an jingjie: Taiwan dianying bainian sikao (穿越幽暗鏡界：台灣 電影百年思考) [Through a screen, darkly: reflections on one hundred years of Taiwan cinema]. Taipie: Shulin, 2013. Chen, Wei-chi陳煒智. Wo ai huangmeidiao (我愛黃梅調) [I love huangmei melody films]. Taipei: mu cun, 2005. Chen, Wei-Jhen 陳薇真. Taiwan kuaxingbie qianshi: yiliao, fengsuzhi yu yaji zaofeng (台灣跨性別前史：醫療、風俗誌與亞際遭逢) [Pre-transgender history in Taiwan: medical treatment, hostess clubs, and inter-Asia encounters]. Taipei: Transgender Punk Activist Publishing, 2016. Chen, Yu-lan 陳雨嵐. Taiwan de yuanzhumin (台灣的原住民) [Taiwan’s aborigine peoples]. Taipei: Walkers Cultural, 2004. Cheng, Cara 程文瑤and Liu Xian-cheng 劉現成 (eds.), Huayu yingpian guanmozhan, zhuanti tekan (華語影片觀摩展，專題特刊) [Chinese-language film exhibition, catalogue and anthology]. Taipei: Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee, 1996.

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Cheng, Qingsong 程青松 (ed.), Guan bu zhu de chunguang: huayu tongzhi dianying ershi naian (關不住的春光：華語同志電影二十年) [Uncloseted: Two decades of Chinese-language tongzhi films]. Taipei: Baqi wenhua, 2012. Cheng, Mei-li 鄭美里. Nu’er quan: Taiwan nu tongzhi de xingbie, jiating yu quanne Shenghuo (女兒圈：台灣女同志的性別、家庭與圈內生活) [The daughters’ circle: gender, family and the life within the circle of Taiwanese lesbians]. Taipei: nushu wenhua, 1997. Cheng, Edmund W. 鄭煒, and Samson Wai-hei Yuen 袁瑋熙 (ed.), Sheyun niandai: Xiangganh kangzheng zhengzhi de guiji (社運年代：香港抗爭政治的軌跡) [An epoch of social movements: the trajectory of contentious politics in Hong Kong]. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2018. Cheng, Ryan Bing-hong 鄭秉泓. Taiwan dianying ai yu si (台灣電影愛與死) [Love and death of Taiwan cinema]. Taipei: Shulin, 2010. —. Taiwan dianying bianhuan shi: xunzhao Taiwan hun (台灣電影變幻時：尋找 台灣魂) [Taiwan cinema in transition: in search of true Taiwan spirit]. Taipei: Shulin, 2018. Cheng, Suqin程素琴. “Ling yizhong jiyi – dui duli jilupian de fansi” (另一種記 憶：對獨立紀錄片的反思) [Another kind of memory: rethinking independent documentary]. Zhongguo chuanmeiwang (Chinese media website). (http:// academic.mediachina.net, Nov. 11, 2002) Cheng, Yu澄雨. “Puji wenhua zai dingyi” (普及文化再定義) [Redefining popular culture]. City Magazine Issue 43 (Mar. 1980): 66. Cheung, Esther M. K. 張美君 (ed.), Xunzhao Xianggang dianying de duli jingguan (尋找香港電影的獨立景觀) [In pursuit of independent visions in Hong Kong cinema]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2010. Chi, Jing-yi 遲敬意 (pen name for Qiu Shi-wen丘世文). “Macho xinggan jiangshi xingrong nanxing de” (Macho性感將是形容男性的) [Macho sexy will be used to describe men]. City Magazine Issue 31 (Mar. 1979): 17-19. Chi, David Ta-wei 紀大偉. “Dai er si pola: Huang’ren shouji de ku’er yuedu” (帶餓 思潑辣： 《荒人手記》的酷兒閱讀) [Diaspora: a queer reading of Notes of a Desolate Man]. Chung-wai literary monthly (中外文學) 24.3 (Aug 1995): 153-160. — (ed.), Ku’er qishilu: Taiwan dangdai Queer lunshu duben (酷兒啓示錄：台灣 當代 Queer 論述讀本) [Queer archipelago: a reader of the queer discourses in Taiwan]. Taipei: Yuanzuen wenhua, 1997. —. “Taiwan xiaoshuo zhong nan tongxinglian de xing yu liufang” (台灣小說中 男同性戀的性與流放) [Sex and diaspora of the male homosexuals in Taiwa fiction]. In Lin Shuei-fu 林水福 and Lin Yao-de 林耀德 (eds.), Leisi yu bianzi de jiaohuan: dangdai Taiwan qingse wenxue lun (蕾絲與鞭子的交歡：當代台 灣情色文學論) [The intercourse of lace and whip: a study on Taiwan’s modern erotic literature]. Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1997. 129-164.

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Li, Bihua 李碧華. Qing she (青蛇) [Green snake]. Revised edition. Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1993. Li, Bihua, and Cao Cheng-yuan 曹城淵. “Cong Camp dao Post-Modern: bushi baishe shi qing she” (從Camp 到 Post-Modern: 不是白蛇是青蛇). City Entertainment No. 117 (May 1986): 110-111. Li, Bingqin李炳欽. “Pingminghua, duli jingshen yu jilupian chuangzuo” (平民化、 獨立精神與紀錄片創作) [Popularization, independent spirit and documentary creation]. Wuhan shengping (Wuhan radio). (www.whradio.com.cn/co195/co197/ co1126/article.html?id=1536, accessed May 2005) Li, Cheuk-to 李焯桃 (ed.), Qishi niandai xianggang dianying yanjiu (七十年代香 港電影研究) [A study of Hong Kong cinema of the seventies]. Hong Kong: The Urban Council, 1984. — (ed.), Xianggang xiju dianying de chuantong (香港喜劇電影的傳統) [The tradition of Hong Kong film comedy]. Hong Kong: The Urban Council, 1985. —. Ni guan ji, Xianggang dianying pian (逆觀集，香港電影篇). Hong Kong: Ciwenhua tang, 1993. —. Ni guan ji, zhongwai dianying pian (逆觀集，中外電影篇). Hong Kong: Ciwenhua tang, 1993. —. Lingli yingxiang guan, yingyu pian (淋漓影像館，引玉篇). Hong Kong: Ciwenhua tang, 1996. — (ed.), Yueyu xiqu pian huigu (粵語戲曲片回顧) [Cantonese opera film retrospective]. Revised edition. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003. Li, Da-zhi 李大枝. “92 Hei Meigui Dui Hei Meigui: yueyu pian jingdian zaixian, gaitou huanmian youyou shemo huazhao” (92 黑玫瑰對黑玫瑰：粵語片經 典再現，改頭換面又有什麼花招) [92 Legendary La Rose Noire: Cantonese film classics re-presented, and the tricks behind such an appropriation]. Film Biweekly No. 344 (Jun. 11, 1992): 45-48. Li, Duoyu李多鈺. “Cong zuidi de difang kaishi paishe” (從最低的地方開始拍攝) [Starting filming in the lowest position]. Nanfang zhoubao (South Weekly). (http://cn.cl2000.com/film2/dldy/dldycn1.shtml, accessed May 2005) Li, Jian-hui 黎堅惠. “The Age of New Androgyny.” City Magazine No. 173 (Jan. 1991): 120-123, and front cover. Li, Jing-yi 李靜怡. “‘Wo zhengming le tongzhi wenhua jiuhe Taiwan wenhua yiyang suyan, sansan baba you liangli’ – zhuanfang Ciqing [Spider Lilies] daoyan Chou Mei-ling han yanyuan Yang Cheng-ling” (「我證明了同志文化就和台灣文化 一樣俗艷、三三八八又亮麗」 – – 專訪《刺青》導演周美玲和演員楊丞琳) Pots (破報). No. 451 (Mar. 16-25, 2007): 4-5. Li, Jinya 李金牙. (A reader’s letter) City Magazine Issue 7 (Mar. 1977): 2-3. Li, Lingling李伶伶. Mei Lanfang de yishu yu qinggan (梅蘭芳的藝術與情感) [Mei Lan-fang’s art and affect]. Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 2008.

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Newspaper Articles without Bylines “Wild Welcome at Kai Tak for the Beatles.” South China Morning Post (Jun. 9, 1964): 1. “‘Pi-tou-si’ hongdong di gang: Kai Tak jichang wanren kongxiang qijing; Shu qian nannü gemi jijie, fanhei zu yanzhen jiebei” (「披頭四」轟動抵港：啟德機場萬 人空巷奇景; 數千男女歌迷集結；反黑組嚴陣戒備) [The Beatles arrived Hong Kong in sensation: Kai Tak airport saw the spectacular gathering of thousands of mixed-gender fans; anti-riot squads stood by with tremendous caution]. Ming Pao (Jun. 9, 1964): 1.

Index 2, 1: Couple, Single 64n131 52 HZ, I Love You 303 92 Legendary La Rose Noire 191-192, 194 Abbas, Ackbar 190 Aces Go Places (film series) 183-184, 187 Aces Go Places III: Our Man from Bond Street 183-184 affect/feeling gay melancholy 9, 20n33, 34, 199, 207, 209, 213-219, 221-222, 226-227, 230n125, 239, 242, 244, 302 gay shame 34, 62, 199, 207, 209-213, 216-222, 226, 242, 244, 267-268, 285, 302 heterosexual melancholy 214-215 racial/postcolonial melancholia 214 “stickiness” 217 temporal dimension 216-218 see also qing Ahmed, Sara 97n214, 217 AIDS discourse (Taiwan) 77, 83-85, 87, 90, 94 Alifu: The Prince/ss 95, 303 All About Love 197n266 All for the Winner 196n263 All the Wrong Clues (…For the Right Solution) 183 Allen, Richard 9, 185n219 All’s Well, Ends Well 196n263 All’s Well, Ends Well Too 196n263 An, Ke-qiang 255 Anagnost, Ann 259 Ang, Ien 44 Angel Strikes Again 168 Angel with the Iron Fists 167 Appadurai, Arjun 27, 46, 265-266, 297n57 Artemisia 97, 303 Ashes of Time 192 “Asia the Invincible” (character) 157, 178-179, 184, 195 At the Runway’s Edge 47n47 The Autumn Execution 54 Babuscio, Jack 148-150, 203, 206, 213, 224, 232, 234, 236 Baby Steps 303 Bachner, Andrea 23n65, 45, 197n266 The Bamboo House of Dolls 22 Banana Queers 304 Bao Bao 303 Bao, Hongwei 10, 14-15, 25, 249n6, 255n25, 257n34 Bao, Weihong 21n50, 31n128, 243 Barlow, Tani 28n102, 28n104 Barthes, Roland 239 Be A Woman 26, 274

The Beatles 158-160 Beautiful Men 26, 274, 296n55 Beauty of Beauties 53 Beijing Queer Film Festival 249n5, 263n51 Being Different, So What? (music video) 61n123 Bergman, David 147-148, 203 Berland, Lauren 148, 152, 267 Berry, Chris 9, 11, 18-19, 21, 22n56, 25-26, 60n122, 76n156, 87, 89n198, 101n13, 104, 115n58, 116n61, 131n76, 254, 257n34, 295 Berry, Michael 54n85, 57n103, 58n110, 138n117 Bih, Herng-da 221 Bishonen 197, 227n116 Black Falcon 168 Black Rose 168, 191, 194 Black Rose II 194 Blue Gate Crossing 96 Body at Large 226n113 The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful 97n215 Bordwell, David 185n218, 192 Bourdieu, Pierre 259n43 The Box 26, 35, 247-263, 265-266, 268-272 Boys for Beauty 96, 204 Braester, Yomi 21, 69, 169n160 Brave Archer 164 Bronski, Michael 148-149 Brother 274 Browne, Nick 100-101, 109 The Buddha’s Palm (film series) 193-194 Butler, Judith 28-29, 89, 139, 203, 214-215, 218, 267, 284-285, 300 Butterfly 23, 197n267 camp discourse in Hong Kong 155-157, 176, 179, 181, 182n203, 184, 189n229, 191n244, 192, 193n251, 199-202 “camp-camp-di” 156 discourse in Taiwan 202-204, 213, 228n123 “gan pu” 203, 204n22 “jiaxian” 203 “lu yin” 203 discursive approach 146-153 gay/queer camp in the West 147-153, 203, 206, 218, 232, 240-242 (on musical), 241 (on Judy Garland) mass camp in the West 146-155, 158, 160, 164-167 mass camp impulse in Hong Kong and auteur theory 166-167 and demographic change 157-158 and early Cantonese cinema 144-145, 156, 159, 163, 165-168, 187, 191-194

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and education 266-267 and gender parody 24-25, 143, 145-146, 156-157, 169, 172-179, 183-186, 188, 192, 195-197, 199, 302 and Hong Kong New Wave 24, 167, 169, 180-185, 188 and Hui Brothers comedies 169-175, 187, 195-196, 227 and James Bond movies 166-168, 183 and Kung Fu comedies 169, 185-189 and local youth culture 158-160 and non-mainstream cultural activities 162 and nostalgia film 169, 189-195, 238 and social movements 160-162 and Stephen Chow 195-196 and television 162-166, 169-174, 177, 182, 185n218, 187, 189, 194 and Western pop culture 158-160, 164-165, 167, 169, 174, 176, 180-184, 187-188, 189n229 tongzhi camp 19, 29, 32, 34, 47, 98, 153-154, 197, 199-244 and negative feelings 207-218 and Taiwanese bentu localism 227-230 Center Stage/The Actress 23, 189-190 C’est la vie, mon cheri 189 Challenge of the Masters 185-186 Chan, Evans 10, 30, 176n178, 181-182, 197n266, 203n18, 243-244 Chan, Jackie 182-183, 185-188 Chan, Natalia (a.k.a. Luo Feng) 10, 176-177, 190-192, 201-202 Chan, Po-chu 168, 191 Chan, Winne Siu-ting 193n251 Chang, Chih-wei 205 Chang, Chuan-fen 212n70 Chang, Grace 233-234, 235n139, 237-239 Chang, Hsiao-hung 10, 19n32, 20, 22n56, 60n122, 63, 66n137, 203, 228n122 Chang, Ivy I-chu 204n22, 227 Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne 21, 51, 54-56, 58 Chao, Antonia Y. 10, 52, 60n122, 64, 68n141, 120n67, 270n68 Chauncey, George 150, 210 Chen, Fang-ming 10, 21n44, 53n81 Chen, Guan-zhong 155-156, 159n96, 160, 189n229, 202n12 Chen, Kuan-hsing 27n85, 32, 59, 69, 72, 95 Chen, Mickey 10, 30, 96, 204, 220n105 Chen, Robert Ru-shou 20n34, 21n45 Chen, Edwin Wei-chi 10, 144n3 Chen, Xiaomei 117 Cheng, Anne Anlin 214 Cheng, Carol (Dodo Cheng, Zheng yu-ling) 156n77, 177 Cheng, Mei-li 212n70 Cheng, Ryan Bing-hong 95n209 Cheng, Yu 155-156

Cheuk, Pak Tong 163, 170, 183n205 Cheung, Alex 181-183 Cheung, Esther M.K. 162n113 Cheung, Leslie 156, 176, 192, 196, 202 Chi, David Ta-wei 10, 15, 19n32, 22n56, 57n106, 85, 203, 205, 213, 243n173 Chiang, Howard 10, 45, 275n6 Chiang, Kai-shek 50, 52, 63, 64n131, 68-69 Chiao, Peggy Hsiung-ping 59, 100n2, 124n69, 202n13 Chicken and Duck Talk 175, 227 Chinese Closet 262 Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement (Taiwan) 52, 54 A Chinese Ghost Story 184, 188 Chinese Lala Alliance (CLA) 31 Chinese opera Cantonese opera/opera film 124n69, 144145, 159, 166, 187, 192, 193n251, 194, 305n4 Huangmei opera film 94, 124n69, 144-145 Kun opera (or Kunqu) 93-94, 99 Peking opera 73, 99, 102, 184, 188n27, 286, 290 Shaoju 102 Shaoxin opera (or Yueju) 33-34, 99, 102-107, 112, 119, 121, 123, 131-138, 143, 302 Taiwanese opera 48, 73, 93-94, 99 Chinese queer diasporic imaginary 33, 39-98, 302-303 and queer Sinophone cultures 45-46 diasporizing the queer 44-46, 95, 304 queering the diaspora 44-46, 95, 304, 306 recent interventions 95-97, 303 tropes of AIDS 39, 48, 77, 83-85, 87, 90, 94, 98 of ghost/ghostly existence 39, 48, 82, 87-89, 92 of Nezha 33, 39, 48, 76-77, 80-83, 86-87, 89-90, 204n24 of niezi 33, 39, 48, 60-76, 94, 85n185 of Chinese/Taiwanese opera 39, 92-94, 98-99 Chinese Tongzhi Conference 15 Cho, Man-kit 10, 176n178 Chor, Yuen 144, 163-164, 168, 191, 194 Chou, Wah-shan 14, 145n7, 156n78, 163n121 Chou, Zero Mei-ling 10, 29-30, 34, 47, 94, 98, 199, 207, 219-230, 242-244, 266; see also Corner’s, Spider Lilies, Splendid Float Chow, Rey 22n56, 23, 190, 214n80, 238 Chow, Yiu-fai 172n175 Chow, Yun-fat 156, 199 Chu, Wei-cheng 19n32, 57, 58n109, 60n122 Chu, Yiu-wai 28n97, 160, 172n175 Chun, Allen 21n43, 52-53 Chung, Simon 10, 197n267, 304 Chui, Vincent 10, 197n267 Cleto, Fabio 147 Clifford, James 31n130, 41, 46

405

Index

Cohan, Steven 147, 232 Cohen, Robin 40-41 Cole, Alan 49 Cole, J. Michael 97n214 Collett, Nigel 145n7 Come Drink with Me 179 Come to Daddy 305 “Comrade” China, Queer China 25, 256, 305 Comrades, Almost A Love Story 102 The Contract 174-175 contract marriage (China) 269, 271 Core, Philip 148, 158, 203 Corner’s 29, 34, 97-98, 199, 207, 219-226, 230, 242 Cowie, Elizabeth 28, 223 Crimp, Douglas 209, 214-215 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 179 Cui, Zi’en 10, 16f, 26-27, 30, 248, 255n30, 256-257, 305 Cultural Revolution 33, 52, 109, 117, 120n67, 138, 161, 181, 295 Cut Sleeves Boys 306 Cvetkovich, Ann 214 Dai, Jinhua 115-116, 131n76, 133n88 Davis, Darrell William 10, 58, 69n142, 227, 232 The Days of Being Dumb 197n266 Days of Being Wild 189 De Kloet, Jeroen 172n175 De Lauretis, Teresa 28 The Dead and the Deadly 188 Dear Ex 97 Death of Montmartre 243-244 The Decisive Battle 54 Decriminalization of Homosexuality (Hong Kong) 22, 145, 196, 210 Deklerck, Stijn 266 Deng, Xiao-yu 155, 189n229, 193n250, 235n139 Descendants of the Yellow Emperor 53 Desser, David 144n5 discourse discourse analysis/discursive approach 25, 30-34, 146, 151-154, 180, 199, 203, 210, 255, 301 see also camp (“camp discourse in Hong Kong”, “camp discourse in Taiwan”); face/mianzi discourse; filiality/xiao and family/jia discourses; tongzhi discourse Ding, Naifei 84n181 Dirlik, Arif 27, 31, 295 Dirty Tiger, Crazy Frog 185-186 documentary Chinese New Documentary Film Movement 26, 35, 247, 251, 253-254, 273-274, 302 and an “activist turn” 305 “committed documentary” (Thomas Waugh) 267n60, 268 “Lalas with DV cameras” 35, 247, 262, 268-269

observational mode 251-254, 261, 263 participatory mode 204, 252-253, 255, 263, 268 reflexive mode 282-284, 287 “women with video cameras” (Zhang Zhen) 247-248 xianchang (on-the-spot realism) 35, 251n13, 254, 274-275, 280-281, 300 zhuanti pian (special topic film) 253-254 see also The Box, Dyke March, Gender Game, The Girls That Way, Mei Mei, Our Marriages, Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China, “T” Is for Tomboy, Tang Tang (from Mainland China); 2, 1, Body at Large, Boys for Beauty, Corner’s, My New Friends, Scars on Memory, Small Talk (from Taiwan); Death of Montmartre, Raise the Umbrella, Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (from Hong Kong) Dollimore, Jonathan 148-149, 153 Donald, Stephanie 131n76 Donghe Temple 69, 73 Doty, Alexander 27 Dragon Gate Inn 179, 205n31 Drifting Flowers 94, 98 Drunken Master 186, 188 Du, Haibin 10, 26, 274, 295n55 Dufoix Stephane 40-41 Dummy, Mommy, without a Baby 194 Dyer, Richard 10, 29, 130, 148-150, 152, 227, 234, 236-238, 240-241, 280 Dyke March 26, 35, 247-254, 256, 262-269, 272 The Eagle Shooting Heroes 192-194 East Is Red 185 East Palace, West Palace 19, 25 Edelman, Lee 127n70, 227n114 The Eighth Happiness 156, 199 Elsaesser, Thomas 31n128, 107 Emperor Qin 53 Encore 94 Encounter of the Spooky Kind 188 End of Love 197n267 Eng, David 23, 44, 46-47, 214 Eng, Esther 29 Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. 14-15, 120n67, 269n66 Enter the Clown 25 Enter the Fat Dragon 185 Eribon, Didier 215 Eternal Summer 96 Ethan Mao 306 Evans, Harriet 112n51, 117, 250 Even Mountains Meet 192 face/mianzi discourse 211-213, 215 Fairclough, Norman 30-31 Fan, Popo 10, 26, 30, 248n3, 249n5, 256, 257n34, 262, 274

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Fan, Ruijuan 105-106, 124, 136 Fan, Victor 10, 133n90 fanchuan 275, 286, 291 Fang, Gang 132n82 Fantasia 194-195 Farewell My Concubine 22, 93n205, 118n66, 157, 202 Faure, David 261 The Fearless Hyena 185-187 Feeding Boys, Ayaya 25 Feil, Ken 154-157 Fengshen yanyi (The Investiture of Gods) 81-82 Feuer, Jane 242 filiality/xiao and family/jia discourses in imperial China and the Republican era 48-50 and the cultural policy of martial-lawperiod Taiwan 50-54 and the dominant “family-state” discourse in Taiwan 33, 39, 43, 46-48, 60, 301-302 and “familial performativity” 89-90, 303 Chinese familialism and familial-kinship system 18-19, 32-33, 39, 63, 99, 211, 301-302 “duoyuan chengjia” (diverse family formation) in Taiwan 97, 217 family shame ( jia chou) 211 see also “face/mianzi discourse”, “guanxi” and qing (“renqing”) Fincher, Leta Hong 116n62, 250 Fire Bulls 53-54 First Love and Other Pains 197n267, 304 Fish and Elephant 25, 248, 262 A Fishy Story 189-190 Flatley, Jonathan 208 Fleeing by Night 90, 93-94 Fong Sai Yuk 196n263 Fonoroff, Paul 157 Formula 17 96 Fortier, Anne-Marie 43n25 Foucault, Michel 28, 30, 162, 258, 262 Freeman, Elizabeth 28n98, 148, 152, 227n144, 267 Freud, Sigmund 55, 213-214 Front Cover 306 Fu, Jin 135-136 Fu, Jun 137 Fu, Poshek 143 Fuhrmann, Arnika 10, 92 Fung, May 162n144 Gallants 194 Games Gamblers Play 169-175, 195 Gao, Tian 10, 26, 35, 273-274, 288-289, 292 Gao, Yilong 103, 105, 107 Gender Game 269-270, 272 Ghosted 47, 95 Giddens, Anthony 287, 297 Gigolo and Whore II 197

Gilroy, Paul 31n130, 41, 214 Girl Spy 001 168 Girlfriend Boyfriend 97, 303 Girls That Way 269-272 Gledhill, Christine 100-101 Go Go G-Boys 96, The Golden Buddha 167 Golden Gate Girls 29 Golden Horse Film Festival 13n3, 14n9, 15n10 Good Morning, Taipei 20 Goodbye Dragon Inn 22n56, 94, 205n31 Gopinath, Gayatri 9, 44-46, 95 Green Island Serenade 61n123 Green Snake 205 Grossberg, Lawrence 26 Grossman, Andrew 23 guanxi 210, 211n63, 215 Halberstam, Judith 28-29, 176, 209-210 Hall, Stuart 31, 41 Hansen, Miriam, Bratu 31, 108n41 Happy Ding Dong 174-175, 227 Happy Together 19, 23, 47, 197 Haraway, Donna 28n102 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri 27 Harris, Daniel 218 He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Father 189 He and She 196, 197n266 He Is A Woman, She Is A Man 23-24, 196 He, Xiaopei (and Yuan Yuan) 10, 16f, 30, 269, 271-272 Health Warning 181-182 Hee, Wai Siam 15n15, 93n205, 269n66 Heinrich, Ari Larissa 10, 18n27, 45 Her Fatal Way (series) 177-178 Hershatter, Gail 116n62 Hibiscus Town 100, 109 Ho, Loretta Wing Wah 249n6 Ho, Petula Sik Ying 145, 201n6 Ho, Sam 168 Ho, Szu-ying 217 Ho Yuk: Let’s Love Hong Kong 23, 197n266 Hocus Pocus 188 Hold You Tight 23, 197 The Hole 22, 29, 34, 199, 207, 230-242, 243 Holzman, Donald 48 Hong, Guo-juin 10, 21, 22n56, 53n82 Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival 14, 201 Honig, Emily 133, 250n9 Hou, Chi-jan 61n123 Hou, Hsiao-hsien 59-60, 69n142, 76 The House of 72 Tenants 144, 170 House of Flying Daggers 179 Hsia, C.T. 56 Hsiau, A-chin 20n42, 51-52, 55, 56n96, 228n121 Hu, Brian 96n212 Hu-Du-Men 197 Hu, Hsien Chin 212

Index

Hu, Yu-ying 211n63 Huang, Ana 10, 270 Huang, Cui-hua 10, 14n9 Huang, Hans Tao-ming 85 Huang, Hui-chen 211n64 Huang, Kassey 10, 305n4 Huang, Ren 20n33, 21n46, 54, 59n115 Huang, Yi-guan 20 Huang, Zhi-hua 171n172 Hui, Ann 156n74, 181, 188, 197n267 Hui Brothers Comedies 25, 169-175, 187, 195-196, 227; see also Chicken and Duck Talk, The Contract, Games Gamblers Play, Happy Ding Dong, The Last Message, The Private Eyes, Security Unlimited Hui Brothers Show (TV show) 169, 172, 187 Hui, Michael 169-172, 174-175, 195n260, 227 Hui, Ricky 169, 171, 172n173, 174, 184, 195n260, 196n263 Hui, Sam 169-172, 174, 195n260 Hulbert, Ann 259 The Human Comedy 205n30 Hume, Kathryn 169n160 Hung, Kit 10, 30, 197n267, 227n116 Hung, Lucifer Ling 205 Hung, Sammo 185, 187-188 Hunt, Leon 186 Hwang, Kwang-kuo 211, 212n66 I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone 22n56, 95 I Have a Date with Spring 189 I Love Hong Kong (film series) 194 I Wanna Be Your Man! 197 In Our Time 59 Institute for Tongzhi Studies (ITS) 9, 15-16 Intimates 197 It’s A Wonderful Life 196n263 It’s Always Spring 201 It’s Not So Simple (TV series) 177 The Iron-fisted Monk 185 Jager, Siegfried 31 Jameson, Fredric 27n91, 190-191 Jamieson, Lynn 287 Jeffreys, Elaine 216n90 Jian, Jia-xin 212n70 Jiang, Xun 81, 92n201 Jing, Xiang 58 Jones, Kent 21n48 Juhasz, Alexandra 30, 269n64 Justice, My Foot 195 Kam, Kwok-leung (Gan Guo-liang) 156n77, 189 Kam, Lucetta Y.L. 10, 176n178, 212n70, 255n29, 262n48, 269n66, 270-271 Kang, Wenqing 275n6 Kao, Ying-chao 10, 97n215 Kaplan, Caren 274, 290 Karl, Rebecca E. 9, 49, 116n62, 135

407 Kiang, Mai 9, 16, 17n18 Killer Clans 163-164 Kipnis, Andrew 210n60, 212 Knockabout 187 Kleinhans, Chuck 151 Klinger, Barbara 34, 147, 154-158, 160, 164, 167 Knapp, Keith 48 Ko, Dorothy 132 Kong, Travis S.K. 10, 196, 212n70, 255n29, 262n48 ku’er 15 Kutcher, Norman 48-49 Kwan, Stanley 23-24, 117, 189, 197, 202n13, 227n116 Lady Bond 168 “Lady White Snake” 204-206, 213, 243 Lai, Cheng-che 68 Lai, Chiu-han Linda 189n231, 193-194 lala 17, 249, 266, 268-269, 270n68, 271-272; see also Lazi Lam, Edward (a.k.a Lin Yihua) 14, 176n177, 189n229, 193n251, 201 Lam, Michael (a.k.a. Mai Ke) 14, 30, 124n69, 127, 178, 182n203 Lan Yu 23, 227n116 Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis 28, 223 Lau, Jeff 191-192, 194, 196n263 Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah 18 Lau Kar-leung 183n209, 185-186, 188 Lau, Shing-hon 162n113 The Last Message 174-175 Law, Kar 29n113, 161, 162n114, 166, 181, 182n203, 184 Lazi (as character, or lazi in reference to lesbian) 213, 244, 249n6 Leaving in Sorrow 197n267 Lee, Kang-sheng 76, 230-231, 232n129, 233, 235, 243 Lee, Leo Ou-fan 186n223 Lee, Quentin 10, 306 Lee Rock 189 Lee, Vivian 22n56, 243 Lesage, Julia 269n64 Leung, Hok-Sze Helen 10, 22-23, 28n98, 179n191, 196 Leung, Ping-kwan 189 Li, Bihua 205 Li, Cheuk-to 156, 163n125, 182n203, 187, 189, 192, 193n252 Li, Han-hsiang 124n69, 169 Li, Ming-cong 69 Li, Siu-leung 124n69 Li, Tian-duo 21n47, 51, 52n72, 55n94 Li, Xin-jia 171, 186n180 Li, Yinhe 120n67, 132n82, 257 Li, You-xin 10, 30, 77-78, 204-205, 226n113 Li, Yong-quan 21n47, 58n113

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QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Li, Zhao-xing 156 Li, Zhi-qiang 228 Lian, Anthony 10, 94 Liang, Kuan 162n116, 163n122 “Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai” (“Liang Zhu”) 123-125, 137 Liang, Wei-yi, and Rao Xinling 202 The Life of Silence 98, 205n31 Lim, Song Hwee 10, 21n50, 22n56, 23, 25n76, 197n267, 200, 231n127, 238 Lin, Brigitte Qing-xia 157, 178-179, 184-185, 192 Lin, Dennis Chwen-der 228n123 Lin, Ke-huan 201 Lin, Hwai-min 58, 204 Lin, Wen-chi 76 Lin, Xing-hong 204n22 “Lin, Ya-zhen” (character) 176-178, 195 Ling, Zong-kui 73 Liou, Liang-ya 10, 20n32, 21n44, 75, 203, 213n72 Liu, Lydia H. 31, 266 Liu, Petrus 184n216, 257n34 Liu, Shu-yong 157, 167n144 Liu, Tian-ci 169 Liu, Wen 10, 16, 214, 217 Liu, Yung Hao 205n31 Lo, Kwai-cheung 18, 28n94 Logan, Bey 170 Lonely Hearts Club 91-92 Lorde, Andre 102, 131-132 Love Eterne 124n69 Love, Heather 216, 218 Love Me If You Can 94 Lu, Feii 21, 52n72, 55n94, 58-59, 60n121 Lu, Jian-xiong 15n17 Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng 13, 18 Lu, Xinyu 26, 254 Lu, Xun 49, 106, 113 Lui, Tai-lok 159n96, 160-161 Luo, Feng see Natalia Chan Luo, Jing-yao 204n22 Luo, Man-fei 233 Ma, Jean 22, 238 Ma, Ning 100 Ma, Sheng-mei 228n121 Mackerras, Colin 103 Madame 26, 274 The Magic Blade 163 Maiden Rose 118n66 The Maiden Thief 168 Make Up 98 Mama Rainbow 262 Manalansan IV, Martin F. 44, 95 Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 50, 135 The Map of Sex and Love 197n267 Marchetti, Gina 22n56, 23, 78n161, 101, 105-106, 197n267 Marks, Laura 31n128

Martin, Fran 18-19, 20n32, 22, 23n65, 25n76, 29, 60n122, 78n161, 88, 90n199, 96n213, 212n69, 213 Maxu, Weibang 182 Mayne, Judith 29 Mazu 70 McCracken, Allison 290n40 McGrath, Jason 169n160, 248 Medhurst, Andy 148-149, 151, 165n135 Mei, Chia-ling 20n32, 63, 69n142 Mei, Lanfang 286 Mei Mei 26, 35, 273-275, 288-300 melodrama and the May Fourth critical legacy 100, 108-109 gender vis-à-vis class in socialist China 110-112, 114-118, 120 political melodrama 33, 99-102, 107-114, 117, 121, 138-139, 302 in Two Stage Sisters 101-102, 105, 110-114, 117, 121, 138-139, 302 wenyi (wenyi melodrama) 101 “Xie Jin model” 100 Men and Women 25 Meng, Yue 115 Meyer, Moe 147-148, 153, 202n12 Miao Miao 96 Miller, D.A. 147-148, 203, 217-218 Min, Anchee 132n82 Ming Ming see Shi Tou Miracle Fighters 188 Miss Jin Xing 26, 274 Miss Kicki 95 Modern Romance 197 modernist literary movement (Taiwan) 21, 33, 47, 54-58, 60, 93n204 Mon Mon Mon Monsters 97n214 Money Crazy 172n173 Moon, Jennifer 210 Mou, Tun-fei 47n47 Mr. Vampire (film series) 188 Mulvey, Laura 115 Mui, Anita 202, 299n67 Muñoz, Jose Esteban 9, 28, 208-209, 214n80 Munt, Sally 210 My Kingdom for a Husband 193 My New Friends 85 My Rice Noodle Shop 118n66 Nanchu 132n82 nativist literary movement (Taiwan) 21, 33, 47-48, 54-56, 60, 68, 93, 228 New Park 61, 65-69, 85, 219, 226 Newton, Esther 148-150, 203, 208, 224, 232 Ng, Ho 137, 168n152 Nguyen, Tan Hoang 10, 44-45, 95 Nichols, Bill 252, 254, 282 Night Scene 25 No Biz Like Show Biz (TV series) 189

Index

No. 1 Chung Ying Street 190n238 Noah Noah 305n4 Notes of a Crocodile (novel) 213, 243-244, 249n6 Oh! My Three Guys 157, 197 The Old Testament 25 Ong, Aihwa 28, 297 Our Love 26 Our Marriages: When Lesbians Marry Gay Men 269-272 The Outcasts 19, 20, 33, 39, 47, 58, 60-76, 85, 90-91, 94 Pai, Hsien-yung 19, 33, 36, 48, 54n85, 56n103, 57-58, 64-70, 75n155, 93n204 Palmer, Augusta Lee 9, 169n160, 180, 189n231 Paltridge, Brian 30, 145 Pan, Guo-ling 156, 176n178 Pang, Laikwan 115 Pau, Ellen 305 Peking Opera Blues 184 Peng, Rui-jin 21n44, 52n71, 55 The Peony Pavilion 92-93 Perez, Hiram 210 performativity familial performativity 89-90, 303 gender performativity 29, 89, 177, 214, 284-286 queer performativity 29, 30, 209, 267-268, 285-287, 291 vs. performance 285-286 Pickowicz, Paul G. 100-101, 108-110, 272 Pink Dads 262 Plain Jane to the Rescue 177 Portland Street Blues 24 Prince of Tears 94 Prince of Thieves 193 Princess Chang Ping 187 The Private Eyes 170, 195 Probyn, Elspeth 210 Prosperity of Family 54 Protégé de la Rose Noire 194 Puar, Jasbir K. 44 Qian, Facheng 103 qing (affect, feeling) 33, 93, 99, 102, 124-126, 131-133, 137-139, 143, 204, 211 as life-force 33, 93, 102, 132, 136 continuum of qing between women 132-133 the cult of qing in the seventeenth-century Jiangnan region 132 in Peony Pavilion 93 renqing (human feelings, doing favor) 111, 211-212, 215 shuqing (expressing feeling) 137 transformation of qing through Two Stage Sisters and Yueju 132-139 “zhen qing shi yi” 125-126

409 Qiu, Miaojin 213, 243-244, 249n6 Qiu, Shi-wen 159, 160n101 Qu, Yuan 200-201, 204, 243 Queer China, “Comrade” China 25, 256, 305 A Queer Story 197 Raise the Umbrellas 176n178 Ray, Robert 135, 166 Rebels of the Neon God 22, 76-87, 89-91, 231 The Red Detachment of Women 100-101, 108 Refrain 305n4 Remembrance 233n135 Reynaud, Berenice 23n64 Rice Rhapsody 305 Rich, B. Ruby 22 The River 22, 76-77, 78n161, 86, 89-91, 231-232, 238, 241 Robertson, Pamela 151 Robinson, Luke 10, 25, 251, 256, 266n55 Rodriquez, Hector 180, 184, 185n218 Rofel, Lisa 10, 26-27, 248n4, 259, 265n52, 266, 293, 298 Rojas, Carlos 78, 80, 84 Romance of Book and Sword 164 Rose Rose I Love You 192, 194 Ross, Andrew 146, 150, 156 Rouge 189-190 Royal Tramp 195 Russo, Vito 148, 149n35 Safran, William 40 Said, Edward 31n130, 153 The Sandwich Man 59 Sang, Tze-lan D. 15, 18, 117n65, 132, 202, 206, 255 Sangren, P. Steven 70, 81-82 Saving Face 95 Scars on Memory 220n105 Schafer, R. Murray 222 Scott, Joan W. 28 The Secret 156n74, 181 The Secret Book (film series) 193 Security Unlimited 195 Sedgwick, Eve K. 30, 101, 209, 218, 267, 285 Sek, Kai 170, 181n199, 186, 188, 194 sensibility camp as a sensibility  146-147, 154 camp as a “new sensibility” 155, 159, 163 camp sensibility and Cantopop stars 175176, 201-202 gay sensibility 34, 149, 199, 203, 206-207 as a “structure of feeling” 207-209 and gay shame 209-213 and gay melancholy 213-216 and temporal dimension 216-218 Sentimental Journey 9, 305n4, cover Sex for Sale 22 The Shadow Boxing 188 Shangguan, Lingfeng 179 Shaonian wu meng 97

410 

QUEER REPRESENTATIONS IN CHINESE-L ANGUAGE FILM & CULTUR AL L ANDSCAPE

Shiau, Hong-chi 10, 96n213 Shih, Ming-huai 204n22 Shih, Shu-mei 10, 18, 32n130, 44-45 Shitou and That Nana 248n4 Shi, Tou, and Ming Ming 10, 26, 30, 35, 247-254, 256, 263-265, 267-268, 305 Shohat, Ella 30n121, 31n130, 151 Shu, Kei 197, 201 Siao, Josephine (Xiao Fang-fang) 168, 177, 181, 196n263 The Silent Thrush 93 Silvio, Teri 93 Sinfield, Alan 42-44, 46, 95 Sing, Song-yong 21n50, 243 Six Million Dollar Man 165n134 Small Talk 211n64 Snake Boy 274 Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow 185-186 Sobchack, Vivian 31n128 Song of the Goddess 305n4 Sontag, Susan 146-150, 154-156, 181-182, 202-203, 206 sound/voice 9, 17, 19, 29, 34, 46, 61n123, 67, 69, 75, 84, 122, 134, 165, 171n172, 172, 174, 179, 181, 184, 187-188, 191-192, 199, 220, 222-227, 229, 231, 234, 238-239, 254, 259, 274, 277, 290-291, 299 disembodied voice 226, 234 dubbing 29, 165, 173-174, 179, 181, 184 erasure of voice 254, 261 falsetto 224, 274, 290 “the grain of the voice” 239 intonation 156 lip-synching 224, 234-235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 275 pronunciation 225 soundtrack 9, 122, 187-188, 223, 226, 259, 277, 279 sound bridge 223, 226, 234, 279 sound-image discrepancy 165, 174, 179, 181, 184 soundperson 278 soundscape 29, 61n123, 222-223, 226 vocal performance/style 69, 134, 172, 174-175, 179, 191-192, 223-225, 227, 229, 235, 237-239, 259, 274, 279, 290-291, 299 voiceover 75, 220, 222-223 Soundless Wind Chime 197n266, 227n116 Spence, Jonathan 50 Spider Lilies 230, 266 The Spiritual Boxer 185 Spivak, Gayatri 285 Splendid Float 34, 98, 199, 207, 219, 226-230, 233, 243 The Spooky Bunch 181, 188 Stam, Robert 9, 17, 29, 30n121, 31n130, 151, 281-282 Star Appeal 25 The Story of Wong Fei-hong 185n218 Straayer, Chris 9, 29, 120n67, 285 Stray Dogs 232

Stringer, Julian 24-25 Stryker, Susan 273n2 Suk Suk 197n267, 306 Sun, Yat-sen 36, 50-52 Supercop 196n263 suzhi 259 Swordsman II 23-24, 34, 143, 157, 178-179, 184-185 T/P roleplays 29, 68n141, 120, 176-177, 197, 270 “T” Is for Tomboy 269-270, 272 “tai” or “tai-ke” 228 Taiwan New Cinema 21, 33, 58-60, 68, 76 Tale of the Lost Boys 96, 303 Tam, Enoch Yee-lok 10, 197n267 Tam, Roman 176 Tan, E.K. 10, 45n41, 305n6 Tan, Jia 10 Tan, See Kam 10, 18, 124n69 Tang, Denis Tse-shang 10, 176n178, 197n267, 221 Tang Tang 26, 35, 273-288, 291-292, 294, 296-300 Tay, William (Zheng Shu-sen) 13n3, 59n118 Thanatos, Drunk 98 The Tenants Downstairs 94 Teo, Stephen 168, 171, 182n203, 184, 190, 194 The Thrill Is Gone 61n123 Tian Qi-yuan 204-205 Tidal 98 Tinkcom, Matthew 240-241 To Be Number One 189 Tom, Dick, and Hairy 196 Tomorrow Comes Today 95 Tong, Ge 305 Tong, Tik-sang 192 tongzhi discourse 13-15, 230, 255 my use of “tongzhi/queer” 15 A Touch of Zen 179 Tozer, Warren 52 Tracey 197n267 Trinh, Minh-ha 283 Tsai, Ming-liang 10, 20, 21-22, 29-30, 33-34, 36, 47, 54, 76-91, 94-95, 98, 199, 205n31, 207, 231-244, 303; see also The Hole, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, My New Friends, Rebels of the Neon God, The River, Stray Dogs, Vive L’amour, The Wayward Cloud, What Time Is It There? Tsang, Steve 161 Tsao, Jui-yuan 97 Tsoi, Wing-mui 134n94 Tsui, Hark 36, 157, 178, 180-185, 205 Twinkle Twinkle Little Star 181, 182-183 Two Stage Sisters (or Stage Sisters) 33, 99-131, 133, 135, 138-139, 302 The Umbrella Story 189 Unfilial Daughter/Ninü (TV series) 97, 265 unisex 159, 173, 175, 177, 196

Index

Vanished Archive 190n238 Vive L’amour 19-22, 76-77, 84, 87-91, 231, 235 Wan, Marco 216 Wan, Yanhai 256-257 Wang, Ban 22n54 Wang, Chih-hung 20, 22n56 Wang, Chun-chi 10, 58n113, 97n216, 124n69 Wang, David Der-wei 52n71, 93n204 Wang, Gungwu 44, 46 Wang, Qi 10, 25, 249, 257n34 Wang, Tuo 56 Wang, Yiman 10, 32n130 Warner, Michael 209 Watney, Simon 41-44, 46, 61, 95 Waugh, Thomas 267n60, 268 The Way We Write 94, 303 The Wayward Cloud 22n56, 243 We Are Here 248n4 We Want to Get Married 248n4 We Are Going to Eat You 180-181 The Wedding Banquet 22, 47, 95, 121n68 Wei, Louisa Shiyu 10, 29 Wei, Shao-en 156 Wei, Xiaogang (a.k.a. Wei Jiangang) 10, 16f, 30, 256, 266, 305 Wen, Hai (a.k.a. Huang Wenhai) 273 What Time Is It There? 95, 205n31 Wen, Tien-hsiang 10, 20n34, 21n45, 22n56, 30, 36, 60n121, 78, 80, 85n187, 86, 205, 232n128, 235, 239n155 White, Patricia 10, 92 Wicks, James 21n47, 101n13 Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? 97, 303 Williams, Linda 100-101 Williams, Louise 25n76 Williams, Raymond 207-208 Williams, Tony 179n192 The Window of Desire 305n4 Wodak, Ruth 30n119 Woman Basketball Player No. 5 100 Women Fifty Minutes 248n4 Wonder Women 189n229 Wong, Alvin Ka Hin 10, 45n41, 205 Wong, Anthony 176 Wong, James (Huang Zhan) 171-172 Wong, Kar-wai 19, 23, 36, 47, 156n73, 189, 192, 197 Wood, Robin 241 Wu Feng 53 Wu, Jui-yuan 84-85 Wu, Jun-xiong 170n169 Wu, Tony Chun-hui 9-10, 30, 305 Wu, Tzuan 305n4 Wu, Wenguang 10, 247, 251, 254, 280 Xi, Song 58 Xiaomingxiong (a.k.a. Samshasha) 14n8, 20n33, 30, 199-202, 204

411 Xie, Jin 33, 99-101, 104, 108-109, 114n52, 117-118, 138-139 Xie, Yan 118n66 Xinjiang Girls 248n4, 305 Xu, Bin 10, 249n5, 256 Xu, Feng 179 Yam Kim-fai, and Pak Suet-sin 305n4 Yan, Geling 205 Yan, Yunxiang 210n60, 211n62 Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema 117-118 Yang, Edward 59-60 Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui 27, 115n57, 210n60, 211, 265n52, 297-299 Yang, Ya-che 97 Yau, Ching 10-11, 18n27, 23, 30, 189n229, 197 Yee, Chih-yen 91, 96 Yeh, Emilie Yueh-yu 10, 13, 58, 69n142, 100, 101n10, 195n262, 227, 228n121, 232 Yeh, Jonathan De-Hsuan 19n32, 60n122, 63-64, 203-204, 206 Ying, Cheng-ru 10, 30, 98, 205n31, 226n113 Ying, Weiwei (Echo Y. Windy) 10, 26, 35, 247-248, 250, 258, 261 Yip, June 55-56, 76n156 Yonfan 94, 197, 227n116 You Were Meant for Me 23 The Young Master 183, 187-188 Young, Pregnant, and Unmarried 194 Yu, Kan-ping 19, 33, 39, 47 Yu, Mo-wan 144n3, 185n218 Yuan, Xuefen 103n21, 106, 124, 138 Yuan, Yuan see He Xiaopei Yuen, Woo-ping 185-186, 188 Yue, Andrey 18, 25, 27, 257n34 Zeitlin, Judith T. 131-132, 275n6 Zeng, Xiu-ping 10, 19n32, 76n156 Zhang, Beichuan 257 Zhang, Che (Chang Cheh) 144, 164, 194n254, 201 Zhang, Hanzi 10, 26, 35, 273-274, 276, 278-279, 282 Zhang, Yingjin 101n13, 254 Zhang, Yuan 10, 19, 25-26, 247, 257, 274 Zhang, Yue-ai 159, 163 Zhang, Zhen 9, 28, 31, 100, 101n10, 179n190, 247-248, 268, 280-281, 295, 305 Zhao, Jamie J. 10, 266n54, 305 Zhao, Sam 10, 248n4, 256, 270 Zheng, Shu-sen see William Tay “Zheng Shuo-nan” (character) 177-178 Zheng, Ming-li 20n41, 51 Zhong, Bao-xian 163-164, 169n162 Zhou, Enlai 134-135, 138 Zhu, Dake 100n1 Zito, Angela 9, 28, 212-213 Žižek, Slavoj 28, 138 Zou, John 184n213