Lean In or Bend Over? Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and Hong Kong's Wonder Women

Abstract

In “Lean In or Bend Over” Marchetti explores emergent feminisms within Hong Kong’s media landscape, uniquely situated “between Hollywood and China.” She draws on the case study of filmmaker Barbara Wong and her 2007 film Wonder Women in order to demonstrate how postfeminist discourses popular in the West, exemplified by Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013), infiltrate Hong Kong media. In Wong’s film, “lean in,” neoliberal, American-inflected individualism competes with mainland Chinese post-socialism and Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan self-image against the backdrop of an emerging Hong Kong feminist identity. On screen, Hong Kong women struggle in new economic, social, cultural, and political circumstances in the years following the territory’s 1997 change in sovereignty from a British colony to a “special administrative region” (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China. A transnational feminist approach to the film reveals a geopolitical dimension to the fortunes of director Wong’s female characters, and how they must bend in order not to break in twenty-first century Asia.