Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema

7. Subjected Body and Gendered Identity: Female Impersonation in Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine

Chapter Seven Subjected Body and Gendered Identity Female Impersonation in Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine A DEPARTURE FROM HIS EARLY films, which were highbrow excursions into philosophical subjects and allegorical forms, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine has attracted both critical and popular interest. The film’s self-reflexive form of opera-within-the-film and visual mise-en-scène have prompted several readings. Farewell has been taken to exemplify a range of issues: film as history, gender and homosexuality, transnational film production, nationalistic expression, and international audiences. Pauline Chen cites the failure of film critics to see the importance of sociohistorical context to narrative construction in Farewell. According to Chen, the film “clothes the fresh bitterness of China’s recent struggles in the dimmer tragedy of its ancient history.”1 Jenny Lau sees Farewell as a product of three Chinas, where mainland China’s culture and cinematic resources combine with the capital and commercial enterprise of Hong Kong and Taiwan to create a transnational film. In Lau’s view, the film uses a blend of melodrama and Orientalism to satisfy both national and international audiences.2 I will also address issues of history and art, but from the perspective of the construction of gender, especially as played out in the phenomenon of female impersonation. A central premise of Farewell holds that one’s gender—or sexual identity—is neither a natural given nor a matter of free choice, but that institutional and social forces interact with the self to shape identity. This process operates on a subjected body: the body-self formed under the pressure of severe training to carry out assigned tasks. In the case of Farewell, three metaphors—symbolic castration, corporal punishment, and costuming—mark the transformation of a biological male, Dieyi, into a cultural female, the opera figure Yuji. Each of these narrative elements situates the body as the pivotal site upon which power produces knowledge and force transforms identity. This constructed self, a female impersonator, enforced through physical canings and sexual humiliations, ironically enables Dieyi to fully immerse himself in the art of opera. In addition to the question of how sociocultural norms rely on bodily practices to mold gendered identities, I want to address the significance of the feminized male— the elaborate attention the film gives to the masking of male subjectivity. The melodrama Farewell My Concubine represents the life sagas of three characters in relation to the opera during a period of national upheavals. The movie spans more than fifty years in China’s history: from the feudalist ruthlessness of the warlord reign to the imperialist invasion by Japan, and subsequently from the transition to a national government to the triumph of the communist regime. The Cultural Revolution brings the SUBJECTED BODY AND GENDERED IDENTITY 151 Farewell My Concubine, 1993 most shocking episodes. In spatial terms the drama unfolds on and off the opera stage: in the form of the classic opera Farewell My Concubine and in the off-stage lives of the characters.3 The story begins when a prostitute, unable to raise her nine-year-old son, Xiao Douzi, in a brothel, takes him to an opera school. When the schoolmaster rejects Xiao Douzi because the boy has six fingers on his left hand, the mother chops off the extra digit with a meat cleaver. His traumatic entry into the school inspires the sympathy of another schoolboy, Xiao Shitou. From that moment, they become lifelong brothers. Everyday life and training in the opera school includes acrobatics, martial arts, and singing. Master Guan enforces the rule of discipline; he and the trainers resort to the cane. Teachers and students accept corporal punishment because they believe that to rise above others, one must learn to suffer. Years pass in the school, and Xiao Shitou, the stronger and more masculinelooking of the two friends, assumes the role of sheng (male lead), playing the King of Chu. Xiao Douzi, slighter and delicate-featured, is groomed to become a dan (female lead), playing the king’s concubine, Yuji. From then on, the opera Farewell My Concubine comes to dominate their lives. By the time they become stars, the powerful Xiao Shitou has become known as Duan Xiaolou and the delicate Xiao Douzi as Cheng Dieyi. The film dramatizes their complicated bond through the contrast between their on-stage roles as inseparable lovers and their off-stage lives as companions pulled...