Study Guide
Gendered and Sexualized Bodies in Hong Kong Cinema
Text / Siu Heng
Table of Content
4.1 Mary Shuk-han Wong, "Patrick Tam's Exploration: Creating a 'New Woman' Image Twenty Years Ago".
- Representation of "New Woman" in contemporary Chinese culture
- Superficial "New Woman" inscribed within patriarchy
- More in-depth portrayal of "New Woman"
4.2 Julian Stringer, "Your Tender Smiles Give Me Strength: Paradigms of Masculinity in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow and The Killer"
- Contextualization of cinematic heroic figures
- Heroes with contradictory masculinity
- A hybrid genre of male melodrama
- Music in male melodrama
- The ambiguous male bond
- The ambivalent position of identification
- Theoretical approaches in reading John Woo's films
4.3 Helen Hok-sze Leung, "Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema"
- Queerscape as a space in flux
- The ambivalence of queerscape
- Queerscape as nostalgic reconstruction
- Queerscape as political allegories
- Queerscape to suggest new models of relationships
- Insights from queerscapes in Hong Kong cinema
4.4 Cui Shuqin, "Stanley Kwan's Center Stage: The (Im)possible Engagement between Feminism and Postmodernism"
- The incompatibility between feminism and postmodernism
- A postmodern impulse in Hong Kong cinema
- The silencing effect of the male voice-over
- Destruction of female subjectivity in fragmentation
- Multiple representations fostered by self-reflexivity
- Mediation of history
Full text available online. [Link]
About the Study Guide
Editors: Esther Cheung, Emily Ko
Authors: Jean Sze, Michelle Kwok, Emily Luk, Siu Heng
The study guide of this book comprises of a summary of each article in this anthology, as well as suggested furthering readings, and further questions that go along with the articles. You can find the study guide here, and the hyperlinks to specific chapters may be found below.
- Chapter 1: Globalization and Hong Kong Film Industry (by Jean Sze) [Link]
- Chapter 2: The Politics of Home, Memory, and Diaspora (by Michelle Kwok) [Link]
- Chapter 3: Cinema and the City at a Moment of Danger (by Emily Luk) [Link]
- Chapter 4: Gendered and Sexualized Bodies in Hong Kong Cinema (by Siu Heng) [Link]
About the Book
This present volume of essays anthologizes a recent body of critical works written in English on the cinema of Hong Kong in the midst of the phenomenal rise of Hong Kong cinema as a worthy object of academic study. It is also an effort to give the cinema a name. The analytical category is the 'crisis cinema' which is not only thematically linked with the other two categories, namely 'national' and 'transnational' cinemas, but also shares their critical concerns. To put it figuratively by invoking the key trope in the book title Between Home and World, this volume suggests that any departure from 'home' engenders a 'crisis' - threat to our ontological security. What underlines the concern is how the aesthetics of film corresponds directly and indirectly to the politics of identity in a transitory moment and space, one that is between 'home' and 'world'.
(Source: Inside cover of the book)
《越界光影：香港電影讀本》簡介
正當香港電影開始晉身成為學術研究對象之際，本年出版的《越界光影：香港電影讀本》挑選了近年多篇以英文討論香港電影的文章輯錄成書，同時亦嘗試梳理出香港電影的脈絡。
2004年8月1日《明報》對本書的評介指出：「香港電影如這城市上流散的人口，游離於本土和全球化市場之間﹔她的設計和製作、表述和想像，不單跨越國界，更周遊於對家的回憶和向世界的前往……」
本書採用了「危機電影」 (Crisis Cinema) 的這個概念來分析香港電影。誠如書名「越界」二字所言，越過家門，危機四伏；香港人身處轉變中的時間和空間，其實經已跨過家國界限，踏足江湖。此時此刻，香港電影的美學怎樣直接或間接地回應箇中複雜的身份政治？
與《越界光影：香港電影讀本》平行推出的有網上「學習指導」，提供書中收錄文章的要點，還附以思考問題和延伸閱讀。
《越界光影：香港電影讀本》由研究香港電影的資深學者張美君及朱耀偉主編，由牛津大學出版社出版。