Class, Gender, and Generation through the Lens of Hong Kong Women Filmmakers: Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011) and Flora Lau’s Bends (2013)

Abstract

From its genesis at Birmingham and Open University, Cultural Studies has taken 'class' as a major component of any analysis of social formations involving gender and generational differences. Moving away from England, the United States, and Western Europe, Chen Kuan-Hsing takes class analysis to the Pacific Rim in a call for 'Asia as method.' This presentation uses films made by two Hong Kong women directors to probe the ways in which class operates in relation to gender, generation, and the Chinese border. A Simple Life and Bends provide telling portraits of women at polar extremes in the territory’s social hierarchy. In narrating these women’s stories, directors Ann Hui and Flora Lau vividly present the class extremes that confront Hong Kong as it grapples with its transformation in the second decade of its change in sovereignty from British colony to Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.