28
Homosexuality and Queer
Aesthetics
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
Copyright © 2012. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Introduction: The New Queer Chinese Cinema
The designation “New Queer Chinese Cinema” has entered the lexicon of film
festival programming as well as film scholarship since the late 1990s. I first noticed
it in a festival catalogue in which Tony Rayns (2002) claims that Enter the Clowns
(Cui Zi’en, 2002) “inaugurates a new Queer Chinese Cinema.” Not only have
many Chinese-language films been labeled “of queer interest” in major international film festivals, many are also directly programmed, and some have won
major awards, in queer film festivals worldwide. Increasing scholarship on the
subject, including the recent publication of several book-length studies (S. Lim
2006; Leung 2008; Martin 2010), has also reinforced the notion that there is a newly
emergent “queer cinema” in the Chinese language. It is likely that the average
filmgoer understands “queer cinema” to mean, simply, films with gay characters.
Yet, if presented with a list of Chinese-language films that have been programmed
or studied as “queer cinema,” many would surely be stunned by their diversity.
These films span every genre and style: from gritty, low-budget underground
films, to highly commercialized genre films, to esoteric arthouse fare. Some may
also be puzzled by the fact that many of these films – such as Hold You Tight (Stanley
Kwan, 1998) and I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2006) – do not appear
to have readily recognizable gay characters at all. What draws all these different
films together under the rubric of “queer cinema” is much more – and much more
interesting – than the mere fact of gay representation. As I will show in this chapter,
this body of films is considered a “queer cinema” not only, or even primarily,
because they portray lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender characters, but
A Companion to Chinese Cinema, First Edition. Edited by Yingjin Zhang.
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Homosexuality and Queer Aesthetics
519
more often because they unsettle the parameters of heterosexuality and its kinship
structure; confound expectations of coherence between gender identity, gender
expression, and the sexed body; expand the possible configurations of sexual and
emotional bonds; and subvert the aesthetic conventions and heterocentric presuppositions of mainstream cinema. Ironically, while it is debatable whether a “gay
cinema” actually exists in the Chinese language, there should be much less doubt
that a “queer cinema” clearly does.
The putative “newness” of this queer cinema can be a somewhat misleading
description. Cui Zi’en’s (b. 1958) films did not “inaugurate” a queer Chinese
cinema so much as they represent an important, recent strand of it. As shown in
Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (Stanley Kwan, 1996), a cinematic essay that is
at once an example of the queer Chinese cinema and one of the most important
commentaries on it, covert undercurrents of homoeroticism as well as overt play
of cross-gender expressions have appeared frequently in Chinese-language films
since the early beginning of cinema itself. One may even say that queerness
has always existed in Chinese cinema. What is “new” is our understanding of them
as a body of work, as a “queer cinema.”
Wittingly or unwittingly, the term “New Queer Chinese Cinema” also invokes
the legacy of “New Queer Cinema,” the name given to a wave of queer
independent American films that emerged in the early 1990s. What characterizes
this cinematic movement is not only the films’ bold and unapologetic portrayal of
gay characters, but more importantly their radical oppositional queer politics.
Michele Aaron (2004: 3) sums up the spirit of New Queer Cinema with one word:
defiance. Aaron (2004: 7) further explains that this defiance is “leveled at
mainstream homophobic society but also at the ‘tasteful and tolerated’ gay culture
that cohabits with it.” The queerness of New Queer Cinema thus lies with its
resistance to not only normative gender and sexual expressions, but also any
tendency within gay culture to assimilate. It is a cinema that shows indifference to
positive image, fixed identity, and mainstream acceptance. It thrives on provocation, ambiguity, and strangeness. Historically, New Queer Cinema was intimately
rooted in the direct action politics of AIDS activism (Pearl 2004). It was also the
beneficiary of the independent tradition that emerged from the New American
Cinema of the 1960s (Pramaggiore 1997). As those historical moments passed
with the waning of AIDS activism in the United States and Hollywood’s effective
co-optation of independent filmmaking, this cinematic wave also seems to have
run its course. B. Ruby Rich, who coined the name “New Queer Cinema” (Rich
1992), documented its development, and later sounded its death knell (Rich 2000),
has remarked that Asian cinema – along with transgender cinema, documentaries, and the visual arts – represents the most exciting current developments in
queer cinema (Rich 2007). As one of the most diverse and thriving among the
various Asian cinemas, Chinese cinema seems poised to receive such a mantle.
However, the contexts of production and reception, thematic concerns, and
aesthetic directions of Chinese films are remarkably different from that of New
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520
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
Queer Cinema. At the same time, not unlike New Queer Cinema, these films
pose challenges not only to the supposed “normality” of heterosexuality but also
to conventional understanding of gay sexuality and identity.
Speaking of a New Queer Chinese Cinema in the singular runs the risk of
obscuring the regional differences as well as overlaps and crossovers between
cinematic practices in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. How queerness
appears on screen is influenced and constrained by each region’s different social,
political, and cultural climate. In mainland China the coexistence of strict censorship measures against homosexual representations on the one hand and a vibrant
underground cinema movement on the other means that queer themes are mostly
found in the works of independent filmmakers like Zhang Yuan, Li Yu, and Cui
Zi’en who work primarily outside the studio system. In Hong Kong, by contrast,
queer themes appear predominantly in genre films such as romantic comedies,
melodrama, and martial arts or gangster action films. There are also a handful of
queer-identified independent filmmakers like Yau Ching Scud (Yun Xiang, b. 1966),
Kit Hung (Hong Rongjie), and Simon Chung (Zhong Desheng), while experimentation with queer aesthetics can be found in the works of mainstream directors
such as Stanley Kwan and Yonfan (Yang Fan, b. 1947). In Taiwan, a more socially
visible lesbian and gay movement, a less intolerant political climate, and a niche
market of queer-friendly viewers have resulted in a more diverse range of queer
films, including commercial pleasers like Formula 17 (Chen Yin-jung, 2004), smaller
festival films like Blue Gate Crossings (Chih-Yen Yee, 2002), and the works of auteurs
Tsai Ming-liang and Zero Chou, who have consciously developed complex queer
themes and a distinctive queer aesthetic over a substantial body of works.
Despite these differences, however, there are frequent coproductions and
wide dissemination of films across the three regions, leading to interesting
and unpredictable results. Exemplifying this phenomenon is Lanyu (Stanley
Kwan, 2001), a film based on an anonymously published Internet novel, Beijing
Story, that has enjoyed a large cult following in mainland China. The novel,
known for its melodramatic plotlines and explicit gay sexual content, caught the
attention of producer Zhang Yongning, who convinced Stanley Kwan and
screenwriter Jimmy Ngai, both from Hong Kong, to adapt it for the screen. Yet,
unlike many of the star-studded productions Kwan was known for in the past,
Lanyu was shot underground on a very modest budget in Beijing without official
permission or a big-name cast. It was banned in mainland China (although still
readily available through pirated DVDs and on peer-to-peer networks online)
but achieved critical acclaim as well as commercial success in Hong Kong and
especially in Taiwan, where it swept the Golden Horse Awards and spawned
a big fan following. It also propelled its relatively unknown mainland actors
Hu Jun and Liu Ye into major stardom. The film can be partly credited for
starting a subsequent wave of Taiwanese films that feature beautiful young stars
in queer plots. As a queer film Lanyu reaps from a confluence of specific
influences from all three regions: queer Internet subculture and underground
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Homosexuality and Queer Aesthetics
521
production methods in mainland China, commercial filmmaking talents from
Hong Kong, and a popular market for queer drama in Taiwan. The film reminds
us that even as we conceive of a singular Queer Chinese Cinema, we can only
understand its dynamics by paying attention to the distinctiveness and mutual
influences across various Chinese cinemas.
Copyright © 2012. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Queer Mainstreaming
Critical writings on queer cinema rarely refer to the “mainstream” without
derogative connotations. Mainstream cinema’s treatment of queer characters and
plots tends to be viewed negatively by critics, as homophobic stereotyping (Russo
1987), the co-optation of queer sexuality by capitalism (Hennessy 2000), or the
recuperation of a heteronormative gaze (Halberstam 2005). Scholars on Chinese
cinema have also launched similar lines of critique (Chou 1995; A. Yue 2000b;
C. Yau 2005). Such criticism is important and necessary as it exposes the ideological workings of normative culture, particularly its capacity to tame and recuperate
potentially subversive images and narratives. It cautions queer communities
against any simplistic celebration of inclusion while also calling for an uncompromising queer cinema that is independent in spirit and radical in its politics. However,
this suspicion of mainstream representations can sometimes lead to reluctance to
account for, and even less to honor, the affection queer audiences feel for many
mainstream films despite their supposed political failings. Considering the fact that
the majority of queer Chinese-language films, particularly those produced in
Hong Kong and Taiwan, are “mainstream” whether in terms of their production
method and personnel, target audience, or thematic and aesthetic conventions, it
becomes all the more important not to approach these films only as examples of
an “insufficiently” queer cinema. Rather, we can seek to understand how they
instigate a specific kind of queer pleasure. While most of these films are clearly
not characterized by a spirit of defiance, they also offer much more than mere
ideological capitulation.
In contrast to the reception of Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) in the United
States, which, despite the film’s immense popularity, was characterized by a great
deal of uneasiness around the “queering” of a genre known for its stalwart
heterosexuality, few in the world of Chinese-language cinema seem to have been
scandalized by queer treatments of genre films. It may be that the “mainstream”
quality of these films – i.e., the adherence to, rather than departure from, genre
conventions – gives audiences a sense of familiarity despite the decidedly unfamiliar
presence of queerness. At the same time, it is precisely this sense of familiarity that
exposes the latent queer potential of the particular genre itself. Several examples
can be gleaned from Hong Kong cinema during the 1990s. This period saw the
recent decriminalization of male homosexuality and the emergence of a f ledgling
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522
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
gay rights movement. Under this generally more receptive cultural climate for
exploring issues of gender and sexuality, queer themes periodically appeared,
without much fanfare, in many popular genres films. One common characteristic
shared by these films is the absence of gay identity narratives. A Queer Story (Shu
Kei, 1998), which dramatizes the negative consequences of a gay man’s closeted
life through a romantic comedy, is the exception that proves the rule. In contrast to
A Queer Story, none of the other queer-themed films of this period are concerned
with the reality of gay lives or with homophobic oppression. Instead, they take
familiar generic motifs – such as the ambition of martial arts practitioners, the
masculine bond of loyalty between triad gangsters, the comedic effects of situational misunderstanding, or the nostalgic longing for the past in melodrama – and
recalibrate the ways in which these themes are gendered and sexualized. Let me
illustrate with several examples.
Swordsman 2 (Ching Siu-tung, Stanley Tong, 1992) crafts a story around Dongfang
Bubai, a villain from a popular novel who undergoes castration in order to practice
a powerful form of martial arts. While the character is portrayed in a monstrous
light in the novel, the film’s unexpected casting of Brigitte Lin, an actress known
for her great beauty, transforms the fictional depiction of monstrosity into
enigmatic femininity on screen. In effect, Swordsman 2 has “queered” three familiar
themes in martial arts film. First, it approaches the transformative effect of martial
arts on the gendered body as a form of transsexuality. Yet, unlike in the novel, the
result from this practice is not portrayed as mutilated monstrosity but instead a
perfectly crafted body that is both beautiful and unassailable. Second, the film
superimposes two stock relationship types onto its two main characters: the
attraction between Dongfang Bubai and the hero Linghu Chong, played by Jet Li,
resembles both the free-spirited camaraderie and mutual admiration between men
and the heterosexually coded eroticism between the hero and his love interest.
Third, when faced with scenes of coy flirtation between the two, the audience is
made to see double: their nondiegetic recognition of the stars leads to a sighting of
familiar heterosexuality which, within the diegesis, actually signifies the attraction
a man feels for a transsexual woman. The film does not allow the audience to “tell
the difference” between the two, thus disturbing the boundaries that are supposed
to demarcate heterosexuality categorically from queer attraction.
A similar manipulation of gendered relations is carried out in Portland Street
Blues (Yip Wai-Man, 1998). A spin-off from the Young and Dangerous series, the
film is a stylish and clever reworking of the triad gangster genre known for
its flaunting of heroic masculinity and intense bonds between men. The film
introduces a twist to this formula by replacing the conventional hero with Sister
Thirteen, a lesbian character played to great effect by a dashing Sandra Ng who
embodies every aspect of conventional heroic masculinity, including not only
dressing style and mannerisms but also sexist attitudes toward women and
unflinching loyalty to other men. Through the development of Sister Thirteen as
a generic masculine hero, the film manages to queer two genre conventions. First,
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Homosexuality and Queer Aesthetics
523
its visual presentation of Sandra Ng as Sister Thirteen shows that heroic masculinity
can be successfully and attractively embodied by a woman. Second, its placement
of a female character into intense masculine friendships with other men has a
startling effect: it shows that the emotional attachment between a masculine
woman and other men does not resemble heterosexuality so much as it reenacts
the homosocial bonding between men that is so commonplace in the genre.
The ways in which genre conventions are queered in Swordsman 2 and Portland
Street Blues reveal that a character’s sexed body and his/her gender presentation
may not always align as expected. As this alignment shifts in unexpected directions,
so too does the emotional and erotic relation between characters. In fact, this
insight has long been exploited on screen, particularly through cross-dressing, to
achieve comedic effects. Chris Straayer (1996) has analyzed the many uses of the
“transvestite disguise” in American cinema. During the 1990s, Hong Kong
comedies took this generic convention further to explore explicitly and, sometimes self-reflexively, the relation between gender presentation and sexual
attraction. In the popular comedy He’s a Woman She’s a Man (Peter Chan, 1992),
actor Leslie Cheung plays a homophobic straight man, Sam, who starts to question
his own sexuality when he becomes attracted to Wing, a young man whom he
plans to nurture as the next big recording star. As is predictable in the genre, Wing
turns out to be a cross-dressing woman, thus resolving Sam’s sexual identity crisis.
What makes this film more interesting than its contemporary Hollywood
counterparts that deploy such “functional” transvestite disguises – i.e., characters
cross-dressing in order to achieve a purpose, like in Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
or Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993), rather than as a form of personal gender
expression – is the film’s various subtexts. The intense off-screen speculation at
that time around Leslie Cheung’s homosexuality, which local audiences at the
time would have been aware of, adds a layer of irony to the film’s heteronormative resolution. In the famous last scene which takes place in an elevator where
Sam confusedly confronts Wing, dressed now in feminine clothing, with the
bisexual declaration: “I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, I love you!” Within
the film’s diegesis, the ending’s heterosexual coupling tames and eclipses the statement’s bisexual connotations. Yet, through the audience’s awareness of the gossip
surrounding Cheung’s homosexuality, the film also hints at the other possibility
of Sam’s declaration, thereby restoring the bisexual implications of the statement.
Furthermore, the film acknowledges its own influence from a long tradition of
cross-dressing both on the theatrical stage and on the cinematic screen by pointing
the audience toward a long queer heritage. In a further twist that is developed in
the film’s sequel, Who’s the Woman Who’s the Man (Peter Chan, 1994), Wing, still
presenting herself as a young man, becomes attracted to, and subsequently
seduces, an actress named Fong who is known for impersonating male roles on
screen. Through this latter character, the film pays homage to the stardom of
Chinese actresses like Yam Kim-fai and Chan Po-chu, whose cross-dressing roles
on screen and rumored bisexuality off screen are iconic and legendary.
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Helen Hok-Sze Leung
While many conventions in these popular genres – bodily transformation,
masculine bonding, and cross-dressing – seem particularly amenable to queering,
the thematic elements as well as affective structure of melodrama have in turn
wielded considerable influence on how contemporary queer subjects represent
themselves. Fran Martin’s (2010) meticulous study of female same-sex attraction
in Chinese culture during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries shows that
such desire has primarily been articulated in a “memorial mode”: a “backward
glance” that grieves the impossibility of queer female relationships in the heteromarital present. This perpetual longing for the past, and the emotional intensity it
entails, perfectly fit the narrative and emotional arc of melodrama (Teo 2006). In
fact, films like Twin Bracelets (Huang Yu-shan, 1991), The Intimates ( Jacob Cheung,
1998), and Butterfly (Yan Yan Mak, 2004) barely register as unconventional even
when they portray attraction between women. Thematic elements such as the
suffering of women, intimate female bonds, and intense nostalgic sentiments so
closely follow generic conventions that when the films add an erotic dimension
to the emotional intimacy between women, it appears like a logical development,
rather than a rupture, of the genre. What is intriguing about these narratives of
female same-sex intimacy, so well articulated within melodramatic conventions, is
their difference from the temporal and the spatial narratives of lesbian identity in
the West. In contrast to what Biddy Martin (1998: 387) has characterized as the
lesbian “coming out narrative,” which moves from adolescent repression to adult
liberation, usually accompanied by the movement from small town or countryside
to the city (Halberstam 2005: 35), the story of queer female desire found in these
films locates erotic intensity between women both in the past and in rural or
small-town settings. The Intimates, cross-cutting between two temporalities,
actually contrasts the idealized love between two women that is located in the past
and in a rural context with the faithlessness and fickleness of heterosexual relations
in the urban present. In this way, the melodramatic mode of expressing female
same-sex desire also presents a historically and culturally specific alternative to the
globalized narrative of lesbian identity.
Besides the queering of various genres, an equally interesting phenomenon is
the recent development, predominantly in Taiwan, of a subgenre of youth films
(qingchun pian) that is premised on ambivalent queer sexual entanglements among
young people. Critics (B. Hu 2004) have noticed this trend since the release of the
surprise hit Formula 17. However, not everyone views the development in a positive
light. Hong Kong critic Tong Ching-Siu names this subgenre the “gay mystique
film” (tongxinglian yiyun pian), citing Blue Gate Crossing, Eternal Summer (Lester
Chen, 2006) and Miao Miao (Cheng Hsiao-tse, 2008) as examples. In Tong’s (2008)
view, these films provide a “pretentious distortion” of youth by emphasizing erotic
intrigue over the “innocence” of friendship. Criticism like Tong’s betrays unease
not only with the films’ queer erotics, but even more so with their ambivalent
resolutions. In these films, the erotic tension is not resolved, as is conventionally
the case, with either the restoration of heteronormativity or the development of
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Homosexuality and Queer Aesthetics
525
gay identity. Instead, the surprise “twists” of these films’ romance narrative
complicate matters further. Blue Gate Crossing, at first sight, seems to be telling a
conventional story of a heteronormative love triangle: a young girl has a crush on
her best female friend who only has eyes for another boy. Yet, at the very end, the
film reveals that the boy is in fact in love with the young lesbian and hopes that in
the future she may find attraction for boys like him. Eternal Summer essentially tells
the same story while reversing the gender roles and placing a girl in the middle of
two boys, one of whom secretly harbors sexual attraction toward his best friend.
The film ends with the exposure of the secret but not each character’s reactions to
the exposure. By deliberately withholding these reactions, the film leaves the
possibilities of how the relations will develop to the audience’s imagination. Miao
Miao also appears to duplicate the triangular plot of Blue Gate Crossing but with two
additional twists. First, we are shown in flashbacks that the boy – and the object of
one of the girls’ crush – has a queer past in which he has been emotionally and,
perhaps, also sexually intimate with a young gay man. Second, the film’s ending
makes clear that the girl knows that her best female friend is in love with her, but
leaves it ambivalent how she actually feels about it.
In their refusal to reduce adolescent sexuality into narratives of sexual identity,
these films blur the boundary between not only heterosexuality and homosexuality, but also between friendship and sexual attraction. They do not resolve
these youthful desires either with the heteronormative dismissal of them as “mere
phases” or with the “coming out” certainty of gay identity. These films present a
universe in which there are multiple ways in which desire can be configured among
gendered bodies, while erotic energy flows fluidly without the constraints of
sexual identity. In this regard, the queer intrigue in these films accentuates the
themes of growing pains, adolescent uncertainty, and young romance, all of which
are commonplace in youth films. And despite the hostility of critics like Tong, this
subgenre has proven to be both critically and commercially successful, especially
in Taiwan. There are several possible reasons for this receptive climate. First,
compared to other Chinese-speaking regions, the development of the gay and
lesbian civil rights movement – organized under the banner of tongzhi – in Taiwan
has been much more visible. It has at times even been exploited by mainstream
politicians who support some of the movement’s initiatives in order to appear
more “progressive” than their opponents (W. Chu 2003). Furthermore, from the
time of the movement’s inception, there has been a concurrent effort among a
group of theorists and creative writers to experiment with queer aesthetics
(Chih and Hung 1997; H. Chang 2000). Working with the notions of ku’er and
guaitai as local articulations of “queer,” these writers deconstruct boundaries of
normality while exploring the polymorphous nature of both gender and sexual
expressions. Both of these factors – the mainstream presence of the lesbian and
gay civil rights movement and the ongoing intellectual and artistic experimentations with queer aesthetics – likely contribute to a degree of acceptance for
the kind of “pomosexual” sentiments that fuel this subgenre of youth films.
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Helen Hok-Sze Leung
Another factor that has likely contributed to the favorable reception of these
youth films is the popularity of the Boys’ Love (BL) – also known as danmei in
Chinese – subculture. Originating from Japanese girls’ comics (shojo manga)
and popularized throughout various parts of Asia, BL denotes a subculture of
stories, images, and music about male–male erotic relationships that are
created and consumed by young heterosexual women. In Chinese-speaking
regions, the phenomenon has developed and flourished in Taiwan (Y. Chen
2008) as well as Hong Kong and Mainland China (T. Liu 2009) during the 1990s.
While this particular subcultural representation of male homosexuality has
invited criticism from some feminists and gay men for its lack of realism or
supposed (hetero)sexism and homophobia (Lunsing 2006), its influence on
youth films in Chinese-language cinema has borne more complex results. In an
article analyzing the Asian influences in Brokeback Mountain, Chris Berry argues
that the deployment of BL aesthetics can be considered the film’s “Chinese
characteristic.” Berry also notes the commercial success of Chinese-language
films that present homosexuality in a similar style and the significant
participation of women in the production and consumption of these films
(Berry 2007a: 35–6). It is worth noting that all of Berry’s examples of
BL-influenced films indicate significant gay male involvement as well. For
instance, even though Berry doubts that Lanyu was made primarily for a gay
audience and points out that the original Internet novel was written by
a woman, it is also true that the film’s director and screenwriter are both out
gay men, while the sexual explicitness of the Internet novel has long enjoyed a
large gay male following in China. The 2003 hit TV series Crystal Boys, adapted
from one of the earliest and most influential novels by a gay writer in the
Chinese language, is also cited by Berry as an example of BL aesthetics and
a precursor to the subsequent queer youth films, many of which star actors
from the series. Although there are marked generational differences between
the original novel and the TV adaptation in their respective understandings of
gay identity, community, shame, and pride, the series’ relevance to gay male
culture is undeniable, no matter how much crossover appeal it has to
mainstream female viewers (H. Huang 2006). In other words, unlike the
primarily heterosexual female focus of BL subculture, films that have been
associated with its aesthetics are, by contrast, far more entangled with gay
culture, whether in their production or consumption. In that sense, these films
cannot be thought of, as BL subculture often is, as a strictly heterosexual female
phenomenon. Furthermore, even though the first wave of youth films
following in the footsteps of Lanyu and Crystal Boys are centered on beautiful
young men, later films in the subgenre like Miao Miao and Candy Rain change
their focus to erotic entanglements among girls and young women. Thus,
while the enthusiastic reception of queer youth films is likely made possible
in part by the already existent subcultural appreciation of BL, the films
themselves are developing in other, indeed queerer, directions.
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527
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Queer Auteurs
While most of the mainstream films discussed in the last section were made by
heterosexual directors, there are also a number of openly gay and lesbian
filmmakers active in the various Chinese film industries who are known for the
queer contents of their works. What, however, is the relation between a filmmaker’s sexual identity and their authorship in queer cinema? This is by no
means a simple or self-evident question. Song Hwee Lim (2006:153–79) approaches
Stanley Kwan as a “gay director” and analyzes the “queer poetics” of Tsai
Ming-liang’s films (2006: 126–52). At the same time, Lim takes issue with Richard
Dyer’s claim that lesbian and gay directors have exclusive access to sign-systems
that best represent lesbian and gay lives. Such a claim, Lim argues, constructs
lesbian and gay discourse to be insular and exclusive while ruling out any possibilities for cross-cultural exchanges. Furthermore, Lim (2006: 126, 178) notes the
ambivalence of both Stanley Kwan and Tsai Ming-liang, who strongly resist
assuming the burden of representation and the categorization of their works as
“gay films.” In a subsequent discussion on the relevance of auteur theory in the
study of Chinese cinemas, Lim cautions against approaching “auteur” as a selfevident category of analysis. Instead, Lim analyzes how an “author function” is
produced, for whom, and to what effect. Using Tsai Ming-liang as an example, he
shows how Tsai’s filmmaking practices enable a specific kind of spectatorial
pleasure that derives from, and in turn concretizes, a recognition of Tsai as an
auteur (S. Lim 2007). My own approach to “queer auteurs” in this section is
indebted to Lim’s formulations. My emphasis is not so much on identifying
openly lesbian or gay filmmakers but rather on the various and particular ways in
which certain filmmakers produce an “author function” through a discursive
construction of queerness. And since inspired and detailed studies of established
filmmakers like Tsai and Kwan already exist in abundance, I will keep my focus
on younger filmmakers whose works have received less attention.
Although Stanley Kwan is the most famous Chinese-speaking filmmaker to
have publicly declared his gay identity, when examples of “gay directors” are
brought up in more recent publications on Hong Kong’s film industry, the much
less well-known names of three young independent directors – Scud, Kit Hung,
and Simon Chung – are more frequently mentioned (Pong 2009). Compared to an
established and prolific filmmaker like Kwan, these younger directors appear less
resistant to the label and more forthcoming about their sexual identity, politics,
and relation to queer cinema. Their relatively young résumés, each consisting of
less than a handful of features to date, all deal with gay themes that coincide with
the directors’ publicly available biographical narratives. Scud’s upbringing in mainland China, ambition as a filmmaker of “art films,” and dramatic erotic encounters
are all recounted, literally by himself on the voice-over, in Permanent Residence
(Scud, 2009). Simon Chung sets his first feature Innocent (2005) in Toronto where
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528
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
a young man from Hong Kong struggles with immigrant life and the racialized
dynamics of his relationship with an older white man, a narrative that echoes his
own family’s history of migration to Canada (Collett 2009a). The portrayal in
Soundless Wind Chime (Kit Hung, 2009) of an interracial relationship and a young
Chinese man’s diasporic experience in Europe parallels Hung’s own account of his
relationship with a Swiss boyfriend and experience of studying in Europe and
North America (Collett 2009b).
The coincidences between the filmmakers’ self-representation and the
thematics of their works certainly contribute to their reception as “gay directors,”
but there are also other elements at work that shed a more complex light on the
relation between authorship, gay lives, and queer cinema. Scud has invited
controversy not only in the mainstream reception of his films but also among
gay audiences. Most obviously provocative is the display of male frontal nudity
and intense homoerotic desire between men that is present in all three of his
feature films. Moreover, this homoerotic explicitness is not kept contained within
the filmic diegesis. Instead, as a signature move, Scud continually plays with the
boundaries between on-screen fiction and off-screen reality. He casts nonprofessional actors who are actual baseball players to play themselves (and pose nude in
certain scenes) in City Without Baseball (Lawrence Lau, Scud, 2008). The release
of Permanent Residence was accompanied by a photo book in which the director
inserted himself in the shoot to “exchange roles” with the actors so they could
“turn the camera back on him posing nude.” These tactics tease audiences into
blurring the line between the sensationalist fictional representations on screen
and the context of everyday life. Despite this commitment to increasing the
visibility of gay erotics, however, Scud’s personae as a “gay director” sometimes
goes against the expectations of activist discourse in Hong Kong. City Without
Baseball has surprisingly invited more vocal criticism from gay activist organizations than even antigay religious groups (Editorial 2008). This fall out, which
included a threat from several prominent gay activists to boycott the film, was
in part caused by Scud’s perceived reluctance to condemn one of his actors,
baseball player Leung Yu-Chung who, despite his willingness to participate in the
film, expressed hostility to homosexuality during his appearance with Scud on
gay DJ Brian Leung’s radio show “We Are Family,” which has a large gay following. The aftermath of the incident prompted a heated but ultimately useful
discussion among gay and lesbian activists on the nature of freedom of speech
and tactics toward homophobic expressions (C. Yau 2008). Scud’s subsequent
films Permanent Residence and Amphetamine (2010) (see Figure 28.1) deal with difficult subject matters – gay men’s obsessive desire for straight men, drug use, the
cult of masculinity – that do not readily endear the director to gay audiences.
Scud’s self-construction as a “gay director” is thus premised not only on his
openly gay identity or play with homoerotic explicitness on and off screen, but
paradoxically also on his penchant for pushing against the acceptable boundaries
of gay self-representation in Hong Kong.
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Figure 28.1 A tangled love relationship in Amphetamine (dir. Scud, Artwalker, 2010),
a queer exploration of sexuality and addiction.
Outside of Hong Kong, the most notable young filmmakers of queer cinema are
undoubtedly Beijing-based author, film studies professor, and director Cui Zi’en
and Taiwanese filmmaker Zero Chou. In contrast to the young filmmakers from
Hong Kong, the queer authorship of Cui and Chou is not primarily constructed on
autobiographical interpretations of their films. Instead, their prolific output articulates a coherent aesthetic and political vision that contributes to their profiles as
queer auteurs. Their films also offer a specific form of spectatorial pleasure that
derives from what Song Hwee Lim (2007: 226–9) has theorized as “intratextual”
practices. Lim develops this notion to explain the “serial” (although nonlinear)
character of Tsai Ming-liang’s films and the pleasure afforded by a recognition of
the intricate referentiality that links elements of one film to another. While the
intratextuality of Cui’s and Chou’s films does not approach the complexity and
nuance of Tsai’s, the notion is useful to illustrate how Cui’s and Chou’s films invite
audiences to read them as a body of work rather than as single films in isolation
and, in so doing, consolidate the queer authorship of the filmmakers.
In an introduction to Cui Zi’en’s early works, Chris Berry (2004b: 196) suggests
that Cui’s films are animated by “an unholy trinity of themes: the sacred, the
profane, and the domestic.” As it turns out, Berry’s pithy characterization quite
accurately describes Cui’s subsequent output, all of which tackle the triangulated
themes of religion, sexuality, and kinship relations. While same-sex relations
between men are present in all of his films, Cui’s interest in sexuality goes far
beyond homosexuality. His films are inhabited by queer characters who are bisexual
and polyamorous (Old Testament, 2002), transgender (Enter the Clowns, 2002), sex
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530
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
workers (Ayaya Feeding Boys, 2003), or simply sexually curious (Star Appeal, 2004).
Queer sexuality is never an identity issue but more symbolically a vehicle for Cui
to deconstruct the twin pillars that underpin social “normality”: the respective
discourse of morality (daode) and of kinship (lunli). Cui’s Catholic upbringing,
which he mentions frequently in interviews, likely influences him to express
“morality” in religious language, such as the use of biblical allusions in Old
Testament and the exploration of “redemption” in Ayaya Feeding Boys. Kinship
structure and familial dynamics are also a dominant preoccupation: parental or
sibling relations are daringly explored as incestuous entanglements in Cui’s Enter
the Clowns, Night Scene (2004), Withered in a Blossoming Season (2005), and My Fair
Son (2007). Rather than disavowing religious morality and kinship relations as
oppressive normalizing structures, queer sexuality is articulated through religious
language and kinship relations. Such a scandalous tactic arguably provides a more
radical critique than what is possible in simpler portrayals of oppression.
Cui’s films also display a deliberate indifference to representational realism and
aesthetic conventions. Until his most recent documentary Queer China, “Comrade”
China (2009), which represents a break from this stylistic commitment and the first
of Cui’s films that is clearly intended for mainstream audiences, all of Cui’s
previous films have adhered to his principal concern with “deconstructing all the
traditions in filmmaking” (Q. Wang 2004: 193) or, as the director puts it more
starkly in Chinese, “raping cinema” with a “rigid, rough, sharp, tedious cinematic
language” (Z. Cui 2003). This aesthetically violent language is evident in Cui’s
fondness for long shots with little depth of field, abrupt and rapid panning shots in
place of cuts, and muted and claustrophobic lighting, as well as episodic and
disjointed narrative structure. This visually demanding and, indeed, displeasing
aesthetic has become Cui’s authorial signature. He further accentuates his authorship with the recurrent character Xiao Bo, which Cui plants in virtually all of his
films as the one stable element in his (literally and metaphorically) destabilizing
style. Not unlike Tsai Ming-liang’s famously recurrent character Xiao Kang, Xiao
Bo is not a coherent character but a marker used to highlight the intratextual
connections within a body of films. In addition, Cui’s starring and producing
credits in other films, a substantial output of fiction and theoretical writings, and
an active history of organizing underground queer film and cultural events in
Beijing have established him to be more than a queer auteur, but a queer public
intellectual with considerable visibility and social impact.
Contemporaneous to Cui and similarly prolific, Taiwanese director Zero Chou
establishes herself as a queer auteur in a far less self-conscious, yet equally
significant, way. In a scene halfway through the film Drifting Flowers (Zero Chou,
2008) (see Figure 28.2), an aging gay man walks despondently down a street when
he notices a row of movie posters on the wall. He caresses the poster, lingering on
the image of two men about to kiss. The title of the movie on the poster is Spider
Lilies and the small imprint of the Teddy Award (the award for best queer film at
the Berlin International Film Festival) is visible on the corner. This scene would
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Homosexuality and Queer Aesthetics
531
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Figure 28.2 Sitting at the railway station in Drifting Flowers (dir. Zero Chou, The Third
Vision Films, 2008), a film exploring the dynamics of queer friendship.
have been unremarkable for any audience unless they are familiar with the director’s career, in which case it would likely elicit laughter and delight. Spider Lilies
(Zero Chou, 2007), which indeed won the Teddy Award and gave Chou her first
international recognition as a queer director, is a film about an erotic involvement
between two young women. The fake poster in Drifting Flowers, which replaces the
women in the original poster with two men, is a sly intratextual joke that also,
more seriously, captures the inclusive spirit of Chou’s queer vision. In numerous
interviews Chou has described her ambition to produce a “six-color rainbow cinema,” matching each of her first three features to a color on the rainbow which
she sees as a symbol of LGBT communities (Diwu Tiefeng 2008; M. Lo 2008: 1).
More than just a symbolic exposition, Chou’s films can be likened to the rainbow also because they explore gay men and lesbians of all stripes, as well as the
interactions and friendship between them. Already in an early documentary,
Corner’s (2001), Chou interweaves reportage about the closing of a gay male bar in
Taipei with lyrical depictions of lesbian eroticism. Working against autobiographical expectations for a lesbian director, Chou made Splendid Float (2004), which is
about a gay male Daoist priest who holds funeral rites by day and performs as a
drag queen in a dance troupe at night. Chou has mentioned that she subsequently
made Spider Lilies partly to satisfy lesbian viewers who lamented that she had not
yet made a film about her own community (M. Lo 2008: 2). The fake poster in
Drifting Flowers, which switches the images of lesbians with gay men, is especially
appropriate as the film itself explores, with great originality and nuance, friendship between queer men and women. Divided into three distinct time periods, the
film shows vignettes from the lives of two lesbian women, Diego and Lily, and
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532
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
a gay man named Yan. Diego and Yan were best friends in their youth, while Yan
and Lily had married for appearance’s sake during their twenties, but did not see
each other again until old age. The film pays close attention to the role gender
plays in the dynamics of queer friendship.
Two scenes, one at the end of the second section and the other at the beginning
of the third, illustrate this rarely explored theme. The first scene is set in the
twilight years of the character when an aging Lily is suffering from Alzheimer’s
and Yan is being treated for HIV. In her illness, Lily has misrecognized Yan to be her
late lover and insists on dressing him like a woman, for fear that “a woman looking
too butch would invite trouble.” After initial resistance, Yan eventually complies
with the request, as he has decided to take care of Lily like a life partner would.
This section of the film closes with a shot of a rainbow in the sky, followed by a
long shot of the couple, both dressed in women’s clothing, sitting contentedly
together, framed by the stone pillars on the station platform and the shoreline
behind them. This beautiful portrait of the “couple” illustrates a friendship that is
based not on sexual attraction but on compassion, mutual dependence, and a
shared experience of living queer lives. The film jumps back in time after this scene
to begin the last section, which is set in the characters’ youth, when a teenage Yan
and Diego, a young butch, are horsing around by the shore. The scene starts with
Yan leaning toward Diego, feigning a kiss. The two then discuss why they are such
good friends, with Diego claiming it is because Yan “is so much like a girl,” while
Yan looks at Diego wistfully and wonders how good it would be if Diego “really
was a boy.” This scene provides a nuanced and finely tuned portrayal of the
complex dynamics between two queer friends. While Yan is attracted to Diego’s
boyishness, Diego is in turn drawn to Yan’s femininity. In other words, they each
appreciate the other’s queer gender presentation – precisely what would have been
considered inappropriate or transgressive in the heteronormative world. This
appreciation does not, however, lead to sexual involvement, remaining only as
sparks of attraction in what is primarily a friendship bond. Such pitch-perfect
evocation of the everyday context of queer lives is in fact very rare in any queer
cinema, which tends to be focused on the sexual lives of a single group of
queer people, such as gay men only.
The far more complex, interactive, and inclusive queer universe depicted in
Chou’s films does not only serve as her authorial signature but also signals a highly
original direction in queer cinema globally. At the same time, Chou’s films are also
unmistakably local in their strong evocation of geographical and cultural
specificity. Her interest in Taiwan’s different locales is evident in her documentary
Poles Extremity (2001), which takes the camera to four extreme “points” on the
island of Taiwan in search of a specific cinematic language for each. This interest
in local contexts continues in her queer films, which construct locale-specific
details such as the Daoist funeral rites in Splendid Float, the traumatic memory of
Taiwan’s “912 earthquake” in Spider Lilies, and the waning tradition of the street
puppet theater in the port city of Kaohsiung during the 1960s in Drifting Flowers.
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The mixed Taiwanese and Mandarin dialogue in all the films is also carefully calibrated to reflect the linguistic specificity of a character according to his or her
background and the time period of the actions. In other words, not only is Chou
establishing herself as a queer auteur, she is more emphatically presenting herself
as a Taiwanese queer auteur.
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Queer Docs
I would like to conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of the documentary
genre, which may appear to be a rather peripheral part of queer Chinese cinemas.
Compared to the sheer quantity of dramatic features, the number of queer documentary films is slim indeed. There are however at least two reasons that warrant
more critical attention to the genre in the future. First, as DV technology becomes
widely available at very low cost and as instant dissemination is made possible by
peer-to-peer network and social media sites, it is very likely that we can look
forward to a proliferation of “micro-cinemas” that capture and archive queer
phenomena while bypassing censors and marketing considerations. The short
film, in this respect, has long served the important function of highlighting local
sites of queer community-building and ephemeral moments of queer activism.
For instance, the importance of Taipei’s Gin Gin Bookstore – one of the very few
bookstores in Asia devoted to the dissemination of LGBT books and media – as a
collective queer space is the subject in Welcome to My Queer Bookstore (Larry Tung,
2009). The “public action” of several lesbian and gay activists to perform same-sex
“weddings” on Valentine’s Day on the streets of Beijing is captured in New Beijing,
New Marriage (Fan Po Po, David Cheng, 2009). These short films may appear to be
of relevance only to a small local audience but, when viewed as parts of a larger
repository of queer shorts, their “snap shots” contribute to a valuable archive of
queer lives that rarely find representation in official or mainstream discourse.
Second, the documentary form provides many queer auteurs with an alternative
outlet to explore political and aesthetic concerns that may not fit into the purview
of their fiction films. When asked about the stylistic departure he made in his
documentary feature Queer China, “Comrade” China, Cui Zi’en mentions that he
has often “wavered between a gay rights perspective and a queer perspective”
(K. Zhao 2009). Indeed, while the deconstructive stance of Cui’s experimental
films is in perfect accord with queer theory, its role in the gay rights movement is
much more ambivalent. By contrast, the near-encyclopedic reach of Queer China,
“Comrade” China gives a comprehensive portrait of LGBT activism in mainland
China today. While its linear narrative and conventional “talking heads” format
clearly contradict the aesthetic vision Cui so persistently pursues in his fiction
films, the film is also far less demanding and intimidating for casual viewers, thus
increasing the exposure of its subject matter. In this way, the documentary form
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Helen Hok-Sze Leung
gives Cui a vehicle to balance out his political commitments without having to
compromise his aesthetic commitment in his fiction films.
We find a similar balancing act, but going in the opposition direction, in Stanley
Kwan’s intensely personal documentaries Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema
and Still Love You After All These (1997). While Kwan’s dramatic features never
stray, whether in theme or style, too far outside the parameters of the commercial
film industry, his documentaries allow him to experiment with intimate sexual
expression and artistic self-reflection. Both documentaries, one on the history of
Chinese cinema and the other on the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty,
interweave Kwan’s autobiographical explorations of his sexual and gender history
with reflections on history, politics, and his own cinematic practice. Likewise,
while Zero Chou has filmed all of her dramatic features around queer themes, her
documentaries have focused on other social justice issues, such as the trauma of
the 912 earthquake on children’s memory in 912 Rumors (2005), and the plight of
blind children in Vision of Darkness (2005). Paying attention to these oft-neglected
documentary works can show us alternative insights into their filmmakers’ queer
vision, while expanding our understanding of queer cinema in general.
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Conclusion
In examining various examples of the New Queer Chinese Cinema, it becomes
clear that the representation of homosexuality is, ironically, the least interesting
aspect of this cinema. Instead, we find films that expose the limits of the
heterosexual kinship structure, play with the fluidity between gender identity,
gender expression, and the sexed body, and chart the unpredictable paths of sexual
and emotional bonds. We also see filmmakers developing queer styles by deploying generic conventions in novel ways, making creative use of autobiographical
narratives, and writing authorial signature over a coherent body of works. It
is indisputable that there is a vibrant queer cinema in the Chinese language. Its
future development and potential impact on queer cinema globally deserves
our continual critical attention.
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