As Normal As Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong

9 Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Post-socialist China

9 Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Post-socialist China1 Shi-Yan Chao Inthe1980sandearly1990sthePeople’sRepublicofChinasawthefluorescence of independent documentary filmmaking. Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Zhang Yuan and Jiang Yue launched a wave of documentary filmmaking commonly referred to as the Chinese New Documentary Movement. The movement’s filmmakers generally reject the official tradition of newsreels and zhuanti pian (literally, special topic films), which are characterized by images compiled in accordance with pre-written scripts, and by directly addressing the audience from a grand, top-down angle (Berry 2007: 115–134). Rather, they highlight a sense of immediacy and an “unscripted spontaneity” (Berry 2007: 122), showing a deep concern for “civilian life” from a “personal standpoint” (Lu 2003: 14–15, 335). Distancing themselves from official discourses, they choose to document the lives of ordinary people, especially those on the margins of society, such as peasants, migrant workers, the homeless, the elderly, the homosexual, etc. Whereas lesbianism has been the focus of several films in the past few years,2 female impersonation, transvestism, and transgendering are also salient queer subjects in this wave of independent documentary filmmaking. This chapter examines two recent documentaries, Tang Tang (Zhang Hanzi 2004) and Mei Mei (Gao Tian 2005).3 Although each documentary centres around a female impersonator, they approach their subjects in distinct ways. Whilst Mei Mei portrays its subject with nuance and profuse emotional investment, TangTang lays special emphasis on formal experimentation. In the first of four sections in this paper, I employ the vantage points offered by the realist aesthetic of xianchang (literally, on the scene) and the device of reflexivity to examine the ways in which TangTang blends fiction into documentary. Positioning TangTang at the intersection of what I call the film’s “performing documentary” and the subject’s “performing gender”, I argue in the second section that the reflexivity permeating Tang Tang foregrounds the openness of the queer subjectivities it portrays. Shi-Yan Chao 152 While technologies of representation comprise the first focus of this chapter, my investigation looks beyond the textual. It aims at understanding each film’s subjects as human beings materialized in and through a matrix of social, political and economic conditions marked by spatial and temporal parameters. With such a matrix forming its second focus, this chapter, then, turns to Mei Mei. Casting the practice of cross-dressing in terms of geopolitics, the third section explores the multilayered significance of female impersonation as contingent upon the contexts of its expression. In the final section, I locate the cross-dressing subjects of both films at a time of social transition in order to highlight the ways in which gender-crossing performers negotiate their subjectivity in post-socialist China. Because of its dual focus, this chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach, tentatively weaving film studies into performance studies, sociology, economics and anthropology. A panoramic view on the films’ subjects hopefully comes through this. As for the naming of Tangtang’s and Meimei’s performances, “fanchuan” is the term preferred by the performers. Literally meaning “genderrole reversal” performance, fanchuan originally refers to the theatrical practice of female/male impersonation in Chinese opera. Even though their performances do not belong to the operatic stage, Tangtang and Meimei favour this terminology primarily due to its artistic connotation, while they strongly oppose the label “renyao” (literally “human prodigy”) for its pejorative denotation. If they likewise reject the English translation “drag”, I assume it has something to do with the term’s susceptibility to the stigma associated with renyao, and the implication that their performances are of less quality (as lip-synching is often the case in drag, but not in fanchuan, professionally). In the following I use cross-dressing, female impersonation and gender-crossing performance interchangeably to refer to the subjects’ fanchuan performances. A discussion of fanchuan vis-à-vis human agency also follows. Performing Documentary: “Xianchang” Aesthetic and Reflexivity Several elements of fiction are blended into Tang Tang. Revealed over the course of the film, they result in a curious parallel between the film’s “performing documentary” and the subject’s “performing gender”. The story of Tang Tang itself unfolds around its title character, a Beijing-based female impersonator. In nightclubs and large family-style restaurants across the city, Tangtang performs songs and dances in modern female attire (Figure 9.1). During the filming of this documentary, Tangtang meets a lesbian couple, Xun and Lily, who are mesmerized by his performance, and a friendship follows. At the same time, a romantic relationship develops between Tangtang and Xiaohui...