Abstract
Autumn, 2001. While leafing through the catalogue of the Netherlands Transgender Film Festival, one of a handful of film festivals in the world with an explicit aim to “encourage visibility and positive representations of transgender issues,”1 I was surprised to find that Swordsmen 2, an old Hong Kong martial arts blockbuster starring Jet Li and Brigitte Lin, had made it into the program.2 The 1992 film was well known to me. The casting of actress Brigitte Lin as the indomitable Dongfang Bubai, a swordsman who practices a form of martial arts that requires self-castration, was considered to be a homophobic erasure of gay content in much of the burgeoning queer film criticism emerging in Hong Kong during the 1990s. The film’s inclusion in a transgender film festival almost 10 years after its release was certainly provocative. It prompted me to see that what seems problematic from gay/lesbian perspectives can have a significantly different meaning when viewed through a transgender lens.
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Notes
Peter A. Jackson, “Pre-Gay, Post-Queer: Thai Perspectives on Proliferating Gender/Sex Diversity in Asia,” Journal of Homosexuality 40, nos. 3–4 (2001): 1–25.
Song Hwee Lim, “Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transgender?” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5, no. 1 (2007): 39–52.
Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 67–68.
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 76–96.
John Phillips, Transgender on Screen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Nikki Sullivan, “Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s),” The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 552–564.
Robyn Emerton, “Finding a Voice, Fighting for Rights: The Emergence of the Transgender Movement in Hong Kong,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2006): 248–249.
My conception of queer auteurs is influenced by Song Hwee Lim’s provocative discussion in “Positioning Auteur Theory in Chinese Cinema Studies: Intratextuality, Intertextuality and Paratextuality in the films of Tsai Ming-liang,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, no. 3 (2007): 223–245.
Qi Wang, “The Ruin Is Already a New Outcome: An Interview with Cui Zi’en,” positions 12, no.1 (2004): 181–194, on 193.
Cui Zi’en, “Enter The Clowns Rapes Cinema into Uselessness” (《丑角登場》把電影強暴得一無是處), in Diyi guanzhong (第一觀眾) [First audience] (Xiandai chubanshe, 2003).
Zhang, Benzi, “Figures of Violence and Tropes of Homophobia: Reading Farewell My Concubine between East and West,” Journal of Popular Culture 33, no. 2 (1999): 101–109;
Sean Metzger, “Farewell My Fantasy,” The Journal of Homosexuality 39, nos. 3–4 (2000): 213–32.
Jenny Lau, “Farewell My Concubine: History, Melodrama, and Ideology in Contemporary Pan-Chinese Cinema,” Film Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1995): 16–27.
Yomi Braester, “Farewell My Concubine: National Myth and City Memories,” in Chinese Films In Focus: 25 New Takes, ed. Chris Berry (London: BFI, 2003), 89–96.
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Charmounix,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 244–256.
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© 2012 Howard Chiang
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Leung, H.HS. (2012). Trans on Screen. In: Chiang, H. (eds) Transgender China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137082503_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137082503_7
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