Gender Imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Wuxia World Rong Cai Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s creative trajectory exemplifies the growing trend of cross-cultural transmission. The most successful example of Lee’s border crossing in the era of globalization is without a doubt Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his first martial arts film. Only four months after it opened in December 2000, Crouching Tiger had grossed nearly $120 million and received almost universally enthusiastic reviews.1 It created a sensation at Cannes, claimed two awards at the Golden Globes, and eventually made a sweep at the Academy Awards for best cinematography, best original score, best art direction, and best foreign film. Much of the film’s attraction and visual pleasure comes from its female characters—Yu Xiulian (Yu Shu Lien), Yu Jiaolong (Jen Yu), and Jade Fox—whose interactions constitute the dramatic core of the plot, with each action sequence involving at least one of the trio. The “indomitable,” “fierce and relentless” fighters, to borrow a few of the critics’ epithets, are indeed positions 13:2 © 2005 by Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/13/2/441/459970/06-Cai.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON user on 25 November 2018 positions 13:2 Fall 2005 442 spectacular: they run up walls, glide across water, and fly over rooftops; they jump, kick, and punch—viewers get an eyeful. Audiences familiar with the martial arts genre readily recognize these women as mirror images of the fighting females in the Hong Kong martial arts movies exported in large quantities to Southeast Asia and widely available through the video mar- ket in the West. However, despite the kung fu craze of the 1970s, in the United States the influence of Hong Kong martial arts cinema was lim- ited mainly to marginalized audiences in inner-city theaters, such as blacks, Chinese-speaking viewers in Chinatowns, and restless adolescents. Well- known directors and actors from Hong Kong developed cult followings both at home and abroad,2 but it was not until the late 1980s that the genre gained the interest and respect of the mainstream and Hollywood began appropriating Hong Kong talent and action in its productions.3 The success of the Disney animated feature Mulan (1998) further popularized the image of the Chinese woman warrior, turning it into a profitable commodity.4 Pre- cisely because the fighting woman and the martial arts genre that sets her off from traditional femininity have become broadly consumed signs in global circulation, a case of a native particular made universal (as Roland Robertson would say about globalization), it is all the more important that we interpret unorthodox expressions delivered across cultural barriers.5 In what has become a canonical text in feminist criticism, Laura Mulvey argues that the cinematic experience is a voyeuristic activity producing erotic pleasure, and the pleasure in looking occurs in cinema, as in real life, between the active/male and the passive/female. The projection of phallic desire, the beautiful woman onscreen takes on an exhibitionist role as a display, a spectacle, and a sign of sexual difference “coded for strong visual and erotic impact.”6 Although her focus on sexual difference has ruptured the nongendered metapsychology of cinema propounded by some film theorists, the unitary vision embedded in Mulvey’s premise has itself become an issue of dissension. Bell hooks raises poignant questions about the homogeneity assumed by the Mulveyan paradigm, which was built on the roles of middle- class white women in classic Hollywood films: “Despite feminist critical interventions aimed at deconstructing the category ‘woman’ which highlight the significance of race, many feminist film critics continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks about ‘women’ when in actuality it speaks Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/13/2/441/459970/06-Cai.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON user on 25 November 2018 Cai Gender Imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 443 only about white women.”7 The orthodox theorization of sexual difference, many also point out, excludes options that seek to explore the distinctions in alternative dimensions, such as social class, age, and sexual preference, as practiced in black and queer cinemas.8 The attention to the ethnic other in transnational representations yields yet more approaches to the female difference. In her critique of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor, ReyChowmaintainsthatthedirector’sfilmicstrategiesinportrayingChina’s last feudal ruler, Pu Yi, are similar to those adopted by early Hollywood in representing the female. The “aroused, caressing strokes” of Bertolucci’s camera “eroticize” and “feminize” China-as-spectacle.9 The fragmentation and re-visions introduced by the postmodernist and postcolonial positions identify multiple sites where the female as a discursive image can be theorized and dissected, engaging both the study of gender politics and the politics of gender studies. An investigation of the woman and difference must be anchored in the cultural, historical, and discursive contexts that make these categories signify.10 The Chinese female warrior, for example, presents a unique problematic. She falls largely outside the paradigms charted by the approaches I have described. The martial arts (wuxia) discourse often marginalizes, or makes inadequate or irrelevant, the loci in which many feminist readings contest the inscriptions of the female and difference—namely, romance, home, maternity, family, sexuality, sexual preference, class, race, and age. Its genre conventions short-circuit familiar critical currents, displacing women from the recognized realms, allowing them to fight alongside men and to possess as much physical prowess as their male counterparts in a fictitious world. The wuxia imagination is radically different in its representation of women, but is it free of gender considera- tions? In other words, how do gender and sexual transgressions signify in the iconoclastic wuxia world? When the traditional paradigms of domestic- ity and female sexuality no longer apply, in what terms do we address these issues? To approach gender images in martial arts discourse, we must pay at- tention to the cultural and representational traditions that informed their construction. Crouching Tiger, like many movies in the genre, is an adapta- tion of martial arts fiction and owes much to its predecessors in Hong Kong cinema.11 The representational traditions we should consider in our study Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/13/2/441/459970/06-Cai.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON user on 25 November 2018 positions 13:2 Fall 2005 444 of the woman warrior and gender sensibility in martial arts discourse thus include (at least) two signifying practices: cinema and literature. Attention to the ideological and formal priorities in these traditions will help us situate the martial arts imagination properly in its discursive histories, locating our critique in a thematic matrix most pertinent to the practices that shaped its production, and will alert us to the discursive means that enable these practices to signify and impose meanings. Because of the rich tradition and colorful practices of martial arts rep- resentations, a comprehensive study is beyond the scope of this article. I ground my investigation of the gender imaginations in the genre in three instances. I start with the female knight in early texts, analyzing how classic Tang (618–907) chivalric tales mask and rationalize the transgressions of the female knight to diffuse gender tensions, thereby identifying the character- istics of the woman warrior. I then examine the female image in Crouching Tiger. Unlike the sexualized beauties in the classic Hollywood films studied by early feminist critics, the Chinese woman warrior, I point out, is a specta- cle of misplaced ambitions and problematic desires. Identifying the female desire in the film as a gender trespass, a usurpation of male power and male authority, I discuss how it acquires an outside and, thereby, meaning as a set of visual images to be appropriated by the audience. The last section centers on gender with a twist—the imaging of deviancy—in martial arts representation. Focusing on the gender-bending characters in two Hong Kong films, The Bride with White Hair (1993) and The East Is Red (1993), I explore the politics in the encoding of the monstrous body that exists outside gender categories. I argue that the construction of deviancy reveals a deep anxiety in the social imagination over the uncertain, nefarious space be- tween the sexes. The strategy of accentuating the cultural specificities of the woman-warrior-as-spectacle in Chinese tradition and subjecting the martial arts imagination to close scrutiny will, I hope, call our attention to the gender significations in cross-cultural transmissions, increasing our awareness and power as spectators in a global cinema. The Wuxia World and the Female Knight The woman warrior and her representational model, the knight-errant, are stock images in the martial arts (wuxia) world, a prominent part of China’s Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/13/2/441/459970/06-Cai.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON user on 25 November 2018 Cai Gender Imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 445 literary tradition dating back to the writings of Han Fei (280–233 BC) and Sima Qian (186–145 BC). Wu refers to a person’s physical prowess and mastery of martial arts. Xia stands for a chivalrous hero who defies legal and social conventions in his quest for justice, honor, and personal ambitions.12 The knight-errant, popularized over the centuries in a variety of art forms (most notably fiction and drama), became a glamorized cultural icon, a larger-than-life hero who could right wrongs when the law failed to protect people from injustice and the abuse of power.