Screen Feminisms with Hong Kong Characteristics

Abstract

In the years after the 1997 change of sovereignty of Hong Kong, the territo­ry's women have faced momentous economic, political, social, and cultural vicissitudes, and a range of feminist responses to these changes have emerged as a result. This presentation focuses on the importance of a radi­cal, transnational, cinematic vision to the ways in which Hong Kong women filmmakers have depicted feminist movements, women's issues, and sexual politics on screen since 1997. In Mayfair Yang's groundbreaking anthology Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China, several of the contributors consid­ered cinema to be a vital part of the feminist public sphere in transnational China, and I expand on that aspect of Yang's project. The subtitle of Lingzhen Wang's anthology, Chinese Women's Cinema: Transnational Con­texts, notes the crucial role cross-border networks play in the careers of women filmmakers, and Hong Kong women have particularly robust global connections. Wang draws on Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan's call for a 'transnational' feminism in order to 'scatter' the hegemony exerted by Euro-American feminism in theory and political. Editors at Public Culture have gestured in a similar direction by theorizing a cosmopolitan feminism that merges feminism's political plurality with cosmopolitanism's view to a world beyond the nation. Many of these filmmakers deal with issues that resonate within and beyond the HKSAR, including the impact of neoliberal policies on women's lives, cross-border migration, families divided within the Chinese diaspora, sex work, sexual harassment and violence, gender discrimination in the workplace, LGBTQ issues, and women's basic political rights such as suffrage and representation in government. Drawing on a range of examples from women's film and media arts, the radical perspec­tive of Hong Kong's women and their contribution to Chinese-language screen feminisms with specifically Hong Kong characteristics comes into sharp focus.