Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities on 20/11/2019 available online: https://www.routledge.com/Film-and-the-Chinese-Medical-Humanities/Lo-Berry-Liping/p/book/9781138580299
Accepted author manuscript, 314 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review
}
TY - CHAP
T1 - Sentiments like Water
T2 - Unsettling Pathologies of Homosexual and Sadomasochistic Desire
AU - Hird, Derek
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities on 20/11/2019 available online: https://www.routledge.com/Film-and-the-Chinese-Medical-Humanities/Lo-Berry-Liping/p/book/9781138580299
PY - 2019/11/20
Y1 - 2019/11/20
N2 - East Palace West Palace (Donggong Xigong 东宫西宫; dir. Zhang Yuan, 1996), was the first explicitly gay film produced in the People’s Republic of China. The film speaks to key concerns of the medical humanities, including gender and sexual identities, patient narratives, power dynamics between authority figures and ordinary people, and cultural histories of medical discourse. Uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence suffuse its fluid depictions of subjectivities and social hierarchies. East Palace West Palace thus illuminates the potential of queer identities and practices to undermine taken-for-granted gender and sexual norms and the power relations through which they are constructed. From a masculinities perspective, the film shows the intertwining of historical and contemporary notions of male sexuality. Its feminisation of the younger male within a same-sex erotic relationship reveals the channelling of homosexual desire through an embedded framework of nannü 男女 (literally ‘man woman’) relations, one of the foundational mechanisms through which power relations have been constructed in China, regardless of the ‘sex’ of the bodies involved. Through the prisms of masculinity, modernity and cultural production, this chapter explores the film’s vision of how modern Chinese manhood is contested, negotiated, and reshaped in a dynamic dance of power between the Chinese state and people.
AB - East Palace West Palace (Donggong Xigong 东宫西宫; dir. Zhang Yuan, 1996), was the first explicitly gay film produced in the People’s Republic of China. The film speaks to key concerns of the medical humanities, including gender and sexual identities, patient narratives, power dynamics between authority figures and ordinary people, and cultural histories of medical discourse. Uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence suffuse its fluid depictions of subjectivities and social hierarchies. East Palace West Palace thus illuminates the potential of queer identities and practices to undermine taken-for-granted gender and sexual norms and the power relations through which they are constructed. From a masculinities perspective, the film shows the intertwining of historical and contemporary notions of male sexuality. Its feminisation of the younger male within a same-sex erotic relationship reveals the channelling of homosexual desire through an embedded framework of nannü 男女 (literally ‘man woman’) relations, one of the foundational mechanisms through which power relations have been constructed in China, regardless of the ‘sex’ of the bodies involved. Through the prisms of masculinity, modernity and cultural production, this chapter explores the film’s vision of how modern Chinese manhood is contested, negotiated, and reshaped in a dynamic dance of power between the Chinese state and people.
KW - homosexuality
KW - sadomasochism
KW - cross-dressing
KW - masculinity
KW - femininity
KW - desire
KW - power
KW - wen
KW - wu
KW - yin-yang
KW - nannü
KW - Zhang Yuan
KW - Wang Xiaobo
M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)
SN - 9781138580299
T3 - Routledge Advances in Asia-Pacific Studies
SP - 66
EP - 80
BT - Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities
A2 - Lo, Vivienne
A2 - Berry, Chris
A2 - Guo, Liping
PB - Routledge
CY - Abingdon, Oxon
ER -