Another post from Penn Asian Review:

If you’re looking for an old Chinese film to watch, I have four to share with you. On October 6, 2008, I attended an interesting CEAS Humanities Colloquium, entitled “Love and Politics in Chinese Film.” In this fascinating cinema studies presentation, Stanford Professor Ban Wang spoke about four films: Nie er, Zhao chun er yue, Fu rong zheng, and Wo do fu qin mu qin.

Professor Wang notes that, during the time periods for several of these films, the public realm is reserved for nationalism, patriotism, and political activity. A cynical construction of love in the early days of the PRC would suggest that a person has a duty to procreate to expand the party. This mechanical construction would repress the individual in favor of the party. Though early films served propagandistic functions and were subject to strict censorship, the expression of private desire becomes a way to poke holes in the system’s limitations. As love becomes subterranean, confined to the private realm, Prof. Wang suggests that the explosion of restricted passion in reaction becomes a way to access the sublime. The degree to which the represented love can sublimate contrasts from film to film, as the turbulent political climates of different decades react against each other. Among these factors, Prof. Wang also examined the different representations of gender.

In the first section of his talk, entitled “Love and Patriotism,” he showed a clip from Nie er, about the composer of China’s national anthem. To celebrate the young nation, the movie was made in 1959, the decade anniversary of the PRC. Interestingly, the woman leads the way in this scene. With the 1930 invasion of the Japanese in this clip’s background, Nie er and his more mature girlfriend’s political passion about the Communist movement legitimizes the expression of their romantic passion (similarly, in the Spanish-language film El crimen del padre Amaro (2002), a priest and his lover couch their physical passion in terms of religious passion). As the camera panning includes the entire surrounding landscape, the Chinese filmmaker invests the scene with a wider scope that embraces patriotism as a form of sublimation. Prof. Wang links the intertwining of personal and political love here with how personal the Beijing Olympics ceremony feels to the Chinese citizenry. In both cases, the expectation that one should love one’s country as one loves himself invests patriotism with personal stakes.

In the second section, entitled “Love and Idealism” he showed a clip from the 1964 film Zhao chun er yue, which refers to ‘early spring in February.’ It takes place after the second revolution’s failure in the 1920s. As the idea of democracy takes hold, the film rejects old society in favor of sublimating movement into the modern world. Here, we see an image of New Youth, the magazine for the new China. The scene closes as a man, shaking his finger in an instructional manner, stands high above a woman.

In the third section, entitled “Love in Bad Times,” he showed a clip from Fu rong zheng, or ‘hibiscus tower.’ This film is from 1986, a time when the Chinese felt as if released from a bad dream. As the figures in the clip sweep in a labor camp, the love contained in this small space is not sublimating. Nonetheless, as relief from this political mayhem, romantic love is presented as a redeeming form of grace.

In the fourth section, entitled “Love and the schoolmaster,” he showed a clip from Zhang Yimou’s 1999 film Wo de fu qin mu qin, or ‘my father and my mother.’ Relying heavily on primary colors, this clip comes from a time when China has been trying to reclaim older cultural values. This is the demonstrated through the sacred Confucian shrine in the scene. Just as Confucius is loved as a teacher, so is the man in the clip. Love is represented in a sublimating way here because the source of the love is his role as a teacher, not for his own personal subjectivity as a man.

I found this presentation interesting as I often look at representations of romantic love in medieval English and French literature, in which tropes of religious love are mapped onto romantic love (also, the female lover idealized as doctor, teacher, etc.). However, where the analogy in medieval writings is between human love and God, the analogy in these 20th-century Chinese films seems to be between human love and the state. In each, love becomes an external projection of a larger ideal onto another person.

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During a meeting of the Fword board this evening, the board members discussed a view of feminism that is inclusive of women as sexual beings, countering the stereotype that feminists seek to be desexualized. I understand the logic that it’s not pro-woman to expect others to  suppress the very attributes that define womanhood for them. However, the point of feminism is also to question a narrow definition of femininity, especially when no one lives up to an exact feminine ideal. In widening our definition of feminism, we have to be careful not to narrow our definition of femininity. When we make an emphatic point of including a particular expression of feminism, it is hard not to make that come across as an implicit exclusion of others, even if that is not the intention. In defining what a feminist is, are we also defining what a feminist isn’t? If so, how are we defining that? Is a definition meaningful without a clear articulation of its opposite? And what would someone who is not a feminist look like?

Ultimately, how a feminist looks is secondary to the substantive issues he or she stands for. Ideally, feminism is about liberation—making people feel as if they are not confined to prescribed social roles. I think of the e. e. cummings quote, “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” Feminism should serve the function of freeing individuals to actualize themselves in ways that society otherwise restricts them from doing. It should, in fact, fill a void by giving individuals the strength not to conform to the world. By empowering individuals to make more difficult choices, it would make room for broader expressions of femininity.

As important as it is for feminism to acknowledge the validity of women’s sexual self-expression, I think that that is something that society already validates. In a society that already sexualizes the performance of femininity, it requires greater strength for a woman to deviate from that paradigm. If a feminist community does not make room for that, then where is there room?

I am reminded of a new play I saw at the Royal Court in London this past winter. Entitled Shades, the play is written by a young British Muslim woman. Though the main character, Sabrina, seeks liberation from Islamic strictures in secular mores, Islam or religious conservatism appear to have a more refreshing potential in the course of the play.  Although her love interest, Reza, refrains from drinking, clubbing, and sex, thus initially suggesting that he is more repressed, he ultimately comes across as the more liberated individual.  In behaving within religious constraints he in fact liberates himself from mainstream social pressure.   Sab and Reza’s relationship is charmingly unburdened by sexual pressure. While religion is often seen as making impositions upon gender roles and sexual relations, its potential to provide an alternative from accepted social roles can make it, perhaps paradoxically, a “law of liberty” (James 1:25). Maybe in some cases, sexual self-expression can both be something that liberates, and something to be liberated from.

For example, at our submissions meeting last fall a former board member posited that sexualized Halloween costumes empower women to use their self-expression to achieve a specific objective; other board members felt that they did not need to share this same objective in order to don the same attire, and still others suggested that sharing that objective did not require a stereotypically sexual display.  When another senior announced that she herself just ended up dressing up as a toilet-paper mummy, the reaction from the others seemed to imply that doing so required extra courage, as if it defied Penn social norm. Their reactions struck me as odd at the time.  But what does it say about Penn when a girl dressing as a toilet-paper mummy for Halloween is read as a deviation from the norm?

Posted in Feminism @ Penn, This is what a feminist looks like | No Comments »