Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions

4. Fighting Female Masculinity: Modernity and Antagonism in Woman Warrior Films

107 CHAPTER 4 Fighting Female Masculinity Modernity and Antagonism in Woman Warrior Films Does maleness automatically produce masculinity? Apparently not. Is there a kind of masculinity independent from the biological male? The female transvestite already demonstrates that she can reproduce masculinity, mock it, and criticize it. Can the women who kill in action cinema occupy a position that has been historically thought of as exclusively masculine? If they were able to, but by doing what men do in an almost hyperbolic manner, would they also produce a kind of excess—an excessive masculinity? To what extent can the women warrior films offer possibilities of liberation? In Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam argues that a certain lesbian group identifies themselves as masculine females. Rather than a simple derivative , imitation, or impersonation of male masculinity, “female masculinity,” according to her study, is actually a specific gender with its own cultural history.1 Trying to destigmatize female masculinity and lend it an empowering image and identity that could give masculine-identified women a sense of pride and strength, she contends that the connection between homosexual woman and masculinity is by no means pathological. Halberstam’s argument urges us to rethink the general presumption that there is always an essential relationship between masculinities and men, and her work also proves that analysis of masculinity is not necessarily done at the expense of women. The ideological implications of masculinity can be radically reexamined not simply by looking at men exclusively but also by mapping and recognizing the culture of a certain female type. Scrutinizing the female sex may sometimes better reveal the nature of masculinity than would focus only on the male. Though challenging the conventional perceptions of masculinity and subversively alienating it from the biological male, Halberstam’s analysis continues to see masculinity as a real and substantial thing that is symbiotically tied to power.  108 Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions Multiplying or pluralizing masculinity in different alternative versions (as with the multiplication of modernity) even by inventing “female masculinity ” for women, I would say, does not really pose a significant challenge to the established notion, which is fundamentally left unquestioned. Indeed, multiplicity or pluralization only helps make the ideology of masculinity even stronger and more powerful, turning it into a stable origin or foundation exempted from any radical deconstruction. A gay masculine female, by patriarchal standards, is far less intimating and repulsive than a straight feminized male, since the former diverges far less from the mainstream notion of masculinity.2 Although Halberstam nicely dissociates maleness from masculinity with reference to Judith Butler’s concepts of gender performativity and constructivism, to my surprise, she fails to examine that masculinity may not be inborn with males as given, as is already well in evidence in many popular cultural products—especially action movies. Rather, it is a “Thing” that a male must strive hard to gain in order to become or to prove himself to be a “real man.” It becomes a ritual for the hero, or sometimes the heroine, in action adventure films to demonstrate that masculinity does not necessarily correspond to the sexed being; instead, it is the kernel of the unique identity that he (or she) must strive for. Hence, masculinity could exist in the absence of males, as it is never naturally apposite to biological males (otherwise all the male characters, including “weak” ones, in action movies would have things too easy) but comes from beyond to justify and legitimize the principles of inter- and intrasexual hierarchy and subordination, and to assert the sexual division of labor under the patriarchal order. A man with so-called masculinity is always more respected and admired than a biological male without it or with relatively little of it—that is, the sissy. However, having or not having “it” can by no means be consistently and objectively gauged. Representations of masculinity are already reduced to sites of contest. To some extent, masculinity is an elusive entity that gives plenitude to the lives of men (and of some women in action genres) and organizes sexual identification. Perhaps, masculinity, as with the “Woman” in Lacan’s notorious statement “there is no such thing as woman,” is an imaginary thing that does not exist in itself but only is insisted upon in various forms of ideology or fantasy, which patriarchal society invents and develops to make sense of human lives.3 Ideas of what men or women should be like are built around the hegemonic notion of masculinity...