What is it about?
How to articulate queer voice and circumvent the state censorship in Chinese cinema? How can a queer voice express female desire beyond an individual’s here and now? This article discusses the development of queer voice(over) – a queer feminist aesthetic achievement that subverts and perverts the heteropatriarchal suppression of women’s desire – in Chinese director Ning Ying’s 2006 film wuqiongdong (Perpetual Motion). I argue, through queer voice(over), Perpetual Motion expands its theme beyond the issue of infidelity in a heterosexual marriage, develops a cinematic critique to the twentieth-century Chinese feminist movements and articulates female desires from multiple registers of senses, psychology and historical subjectivity.
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Why is it important?
In Chinese cinema where queer voices are usually marginalized, Ning’s queer voice(over) establishes a mutually referent relation between queer and heteronormative storylines, circumventing the state censorship and adding queerness into Chinese-language feminist debates and cinematic expression.
Perspectives
In the article, I focus on the ways queer voice(over) interacts with other cinematic forms to produce new forms and expressions that articulate queer feminist desires against the marginalization of middle-aged female bodies in contemporary Chinese pop culture, the state censorship and male-centred historiography of Chinese feminist movements. My article joins the film and invites both spectators and readers into a female homosocial space to hear the tensions and problematics of Chinese feminisms, the past and the present, the concealed and the revealed.
Xuefei Ma
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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This page is a summary of: Queer voice(over): Reassembling female desire in Chinese cinema, Asian Cinema, April 2023, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/ac_00065_1.
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