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Unbecomings in East Asian Women’s Cinema: Naomi Kawase, Yim Soon-rye, and Li Yu

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The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways East Asian women filmmakers Naomi Kawase, Yim soon-rye, and Li Yu envisage conditions of possibility for indecorous femininities to breach patriarchal expectation. Generating images of corporeal disobedience, Kawase, Yim, and Li negotiate representations of girlhood and womanhood against Confucianist, neoliberal, and male-directed images of women, revealing femininity in multiplicity as well as the implications of unbecoming women in the global age. In addition to producing novel representations of indecent girlhood and womanhood, Kawase, Yim, and Li also resist clarity, linearity, and expected cinematic pleasures—opting to produce uncooperative authorships and disobedient film forms. Through structures of aggression, comic unruliness, and generic allegory, the films of Kawase, Yim, and Li demonstrate the ways contemporary East Asian women’s cinema can offer new kinds of being-in-the-world and modes of engagement with cinematic un-femininities. Sharing a politics of discontent and an anti-social aesthetics of negative affects and formal insubordination, all three filmmakers seek to destabilize gendered sociality and heteronormativity.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Mila Zuo

Authors
  1. Mila Zuo
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Correspondence to Mila Zuo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park

  2. School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Gina Marchetti

  3. University of Macau, Macau, Singapore

    See Kam Tan

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Zuo, M. (2018). Unbecomings in East Asian Women’s Cinema: Naomi Kawase, Yim Soon-rye, and Li Yu. In: Magnan-Park, A., Marchetti, G., Tan, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95822-1_26

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