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5. Queering the Patriarchy: The Wedding Banquet, Toc Storee, and Dirty Laundry
- Temple University Press
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5 A s David L. Eng has pointed out in his book Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America,1 Chinese males have been coded within American racial discourse as outside the norms of white heterosexuality. In Hollywood Orientalism, this has manifested as the twin extremes of the asexual or effeminate eunuch and the potent but perverse rapacious villain. In other words, Chinese masculinity always seems to be out of bounds. Even though Chow Yun-Fat has had romantic liaisons in some of his transnational productions , the reticence of Hollywood to place its Chinese martial arts stars, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, in fully realized sexual unions follows a pattern that seems deeply entrenched, as shown in Chapters 2 and 3. Moreover, Chinese films, as early as the silent era, feature cross-dressing from the Chinese opera tradition and, thus, deal with gender-bending and implicitly homosexual themes. Within the diaspora, then, Hollywood norms and Chinese conventions intermingle to create what Rey Chow might call a “feminized space”2 that cordons off traditional Confucian patriarchal relations and heterosexual norms. Given the enormous changes that have taken place globally involving LGBTQ politics and cultural representations, it seems apposite that the intersection between the Chinese diaspora and the transnational flow of queer desires should provide fertile ground for New Queer Cinema involving ethnic Chinese themes. Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) did just this and opened up screen discourses involving issues of Chinese culture, nationality , ethnicity, and homosexuality at a time when the political concerns of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals were emerging as part of an international queer cinema. Although Chinese filmmakers around the world had dealt with queer subject matter before Lee’s film, The Wedding Banquet The Wedding Banquet, Toc Storee, and Dirty Laundry Queering the Patriarchy 106 Chapter 5 brought issues of gay life within the Chinese diaspora to a much larger and more varied audience. Increasingly, films emerged from Singapore, Canada, the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as the PRC, that placed a Chinese queer sensibility within global cinema culture.3 As Chris Berry notes, “The limited but nonetheless international circulation of cinema and video from East Asia enables these emergent gay and other queer identities to participate in the constitution of an increasingly globalized gay culture.”4 Some, but not all, of these films are part of what has been called the New Queer Cinema by B. Ruby Rich.5 Alex Doty defines the phenomenon as follows: What tied these films together and set them apart from others, aside from their independent production status, was how they directly addressed a non-straight audience, as well as how they presented material that was sexually explicit, unconcerned with “positive images,” and more generally “politically incorrect.” Some saw these characteristics, in part, as responses to the AIDS crisis, pornography, and anti-censorship debates, and in-your-face AIDS and gay and lesbian activism (ACT UP!, Outrage, Queer Nation).6 The New Queer Cinema also has an important Asian (American) pedigree. In fact, the New Queer Cinema and the Asian American independent feature have created a number of healthy hybrids, including Quentin Lee and Justin Lin’s Shopping for Fangs (1997)7 as well as the work of Gregg Araki, among others. These New Queer Asian American features are also connected to a history of Asian American gay and lesbian filmmaking and the work of documentary and experimental film and video artists such as Canada’s Midi Onodera, Paul Lee, and Richard Fung, as well as Arthur Dong, Shu Lea Cheang, Nguyen Tan Hong, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Michael Magnaye, Ming-Yuen S. Ma, among many others, in the United States. Quentin Lee, for example, made several short films that circulated at Asian American and gay/lesbian film festivals before making his first narrative feature. In her essay, “Bad Asians: New Film and Video by Queer Asian American Artists,” Eve Oishi observes a generational split among queer Asian American media artists: While many younger Asian American artists are clearly affected by the work of filmmakers whose work deals with the experiences, contradictions , and pleasures of being queer and a person of color, the most recent work by new artists shows a movement away from film and video rooted in such overt identity politics in favor of an experimental aesthetic that responds to the more general influences of popular culture, American and international cinema, and queer culture in the age of AIDS.8 [44.193...