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2. Spies, Vamps and Women Warriors: Translating the Exotic into the Technics of Chinese Femininity
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
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Spies, Vamps and Women Warriors 69 She was so encrusted with mythology as to seem almost inhuman. Even by then she was an ornament, a kind of oriental fiction. Nuns’ tears and press coverage did nothing to humanise her. It was after all a set of stories so elaborately delicious: a whorish traitor, seen variously on the arms of monocled aristocrats, decorated generals, wealthy merchants and assorted handsome and altogether indecipherable foreigners (she was nothing if not heterogeneous in the enactment of her desires), a woman who exposed her buttocks, and more, to the astonished gaze of audiences (who could barely endure the sexual vertigo induced by her wild cavortings and so mimed, as aesthetes will, mere scandalised delight), a dancer, an artiste, who performed generic Asia with every gesture of her body (since she was hot, glistening and steamily sub-tropical and wore a ruby in her belly to signify fabulous authenticity) — in short she was a vamp, she was a femme fatale. And she was tried and found guilty of the betrayal of a larger feminine mystique, the indefeasible mother country, la belle France. Twelve bullet holes inscribed the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Mata Hari, it must be said, was the spy they loved to hate. – Gail Jones, Fetish Lives The previous chapter examined how the Chinese exotic travels as a fold — a trope of movement that can potentialise a shift from object to subject positions within diasporic contexts in the West. In this chapter I explore the movement of two popular Hong Kong film stars, Maggie Cheung and 2 Spies, Vamps and Women Warriors: Translating the Exotic into the Technics of Chinese Femininity 70 Cross Over Michelle Yeoh, from film industries in Asia to those of the West, to examine issues in cross-cultural spectatorship. Cheung and Yeoh were two of the biggest stars of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, and their popularity has now reached beyond Hong Kong to the rest of Asia and the West, if not globally. This chapter focuses on how these two stars have translated or ‘crossed over’ from Hong Kong cinema into the institutional sites of French art house cinema (Cheung in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep), and Hollywood (Yeoh in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies). Maggie Cheung has made over eighty films in the past twenty years: from action films to dramas and comedies. Her role in Irma Vep is her first outside Asia. Tomorrow Never Dies is Michelle Yeoh’s first Hollywood feature; she has made numerous action and martial arts films such as Wing Chun, Police Story 3 and 4, The Heroic Trio, The Executioners, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. By examining the movement of these two actresses across industries with different histories, distribution networks and audience bases, it is possible to construct alternative ways of viewing diasporic Chinese femininity in its modern, technologised form. While Hong Kong directors as well as stars have crossed over into the West, here I will focus only on the cross over of stars in order to characterise their bodily representation or ‘appearance’ on the screen. I furthermore concentrate only on female stars since I am particularly interested in how this body becomes feminised upon its entry into the West. As a more recent representation in cross over action, the appearance of the diasporic Chinese female body is still relatively under-theorised; conversely, much has been written on Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, for example. However, where the feminisation of male bodies is relevant, this will also be addressed. The Chinese exotic is constructed through its star images as contradictory; these images represent traditional stereotypes of Chinese femininity at the same time as they portray diaspora China as modern and technological. In his important early text Stars, Richard Dyer examines the circulation of various discourses surrounding stars and celebrities, as well as how audiences respond to stars in terms of the contradictions they raise. Dyer calls these multiple meanings a star’s “structured polysemy”.1 The cross-cultural consumption of stars, as another sphere of potential contradictions, is however, an area within star theories and theories of spectatorship that has not yet been adequately theorised.2 This lack is particularly noticeable as the contemporary Hong Kong (and Hollywood) film industries are based heavily on a starsystem . Existing theories of the star system focus on aspects of fantasy, desire and identification: what happens to these processes when stars signify alternative visualities? How are the politics of identification...