Purity and Precarity: China's Female Migrants on the World's Festival Screens

Abstract

An increasing visibility of migrants and refugees in world cinema has echoed the ways in which image flows and dislocation are everyday features of cultural globalization. As migrants and refugees experience hardships of surviving as strangers in uncertain and often demeaning conditions, notable in the survival narratives is their silence that points to an (un)documented status, a lack of resources, subordinate position, and an indifferent or hostile environment. Many films of the migrant cinema are social problem films, or are seen through the lens of social realism. Less critical attention has been paid to the referencing of globalized popular culture in films that situate the migrants in postmodern simulation and fabrications. With a selective focus on young migrant women on screen, this paper attends to two independent features that depict the silence and survival tactics as shaped by and colluding with the culture of simulation. My main examples are drawn from two festival acclaimed films, A TOUCH OF SIN (2013) and ANGELS WEAR WHITE (2017) which have enacted globalized popular cultural references. Aside from examining the abuse of power and the precarity of young migrant women, the latter film pinpoints a transcultural patriarchal obsession with women’s virgin purity and a setting in which simulations and fabrications include such (im)material aspects as hymen clinics and police investigation results. My discussion engages recent scholarship on precarity to examine the films’ cultural adaptive tactics as they seek circulation beyond a restrictive national context.