Feminist activism in the first person: an analysis of Nanfu Wang's Hooligan Sparrow (2016)

Abstract

Hooligan Sparrow (2016) serves as a first-person account of the director Nanfu Wang's struggle to produce a film deemed politically sensitive in mainland China, including her encounters with various official and undercover security forces attempting to suppress feminist activist Ye Haiyan (Hooligan Sparrow)'s quest for justice for underage victims of sexual abuse in China. This article explores the roots of Wang's approach to feminist, first-person documentary practice, its value for understanding women's activism in China and the implications of Wang's decision to address her audience in English rather than Chinese. The significance of the nature of the first-person address to a viewership outside of China becomes an integral part of this examination of the encounter between personal filmmaking and transnational feminist activism. The construction of the woman filmmaker as a protagonist in feminist documentary practice intersects with the role of first-person narration within ‘accented’ and diasporic filmmaking traditions in Hooligan Sparrow. The political implications of including the filmmaker as a narrator in telling the stories of others and the ways in which transnational feminist connections arise through stories told by women within and outside the People's Republic of China complicate the politics of first-person documentary filmmaking for women in Asia.