Mother, murder and matricide in China's uneven modernity

Abstract

This paper will examine matricide and the mother-as-murderer in an acclaimed Chinese film of the late twentieth-century to probe the emergent connections between discourse of law and the neoliberal subject in postsocialist modernity. THE DAY THE SUN TURNED COLD (Yim Ho, 1995) as an art film departs from the self-exoticizing rural narratives in Chinese cinema in which female infidelity serves as a locus for visual and affective seduction of global spectators. While drawing certain recurrent features from these rural narratives, this film raises the specter of male fantasy of female infidelity and female criminality as the problematic basis of law in a neoliberal economy. Taking a post-nationalist approach that contextualizes the film in the uneven conditions of modernity, this paper will examine the paradox of criminal (m)other and matricentricity in relation to its overt emphasis on the angst and dilemmas facing an ethical subject of natural, social and state law in China. Zhang Yimou’s STORY OF QIU JU (1993) has told the tale of a stubborn but naïve rural woman in pursuit of justice by negotiating a state system of arbitration and the courts that are beyond her understanding. The DAY THE SUN TURNED COLD enacts domestic violence and its aftermath for the mother-son relationship instead to consciously probe the inter-generational, social and legal implications of amoral motherhood. Drawing certain components from the narratives of primitive passion, this film has adopted a memory framework, an ancient gong-an fiction (legal case fiction) inflected with Freudian overtones, a migrant’s trauma of underdevelopment, and an unsentimental approach to problematize the link between matricide and law. My discussion will consider the limits of gendered evil and the film’s self-conscious questioning of law and matricide. It will relate this questioning to the current controversies in the realm of law-mediated contestation of abuse of everyday rights.