Natalia Siu-hung Chan
The year 2003 was the dark age of Hong Kong popular culture: two superstars, Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui, suddenly ended their lives in April and December respectively. Born in 1956, Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing was the youngest son of a Hong Kong tailor who made suits for William Holden and Alfred Hitchcock. After a year studying textile management at the University of Leeds, he returned to Hong Kong and later won first runner-up in ATV’s Asian Music Contest in 1976. He pursued a career as a TV actor from 1978 to 1985 on local programs, and released his album Restless Breeze in 1983, which launched his career as one of the most popular singers in Hong Kong. Although Cheung started his film career in the late 1970s, he did not receive much public attention until 1987 when he starred in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987). He was awarded Best Actor at the Golden Film Festival in Hong Kong for his brilliant performance in Wong Kar-wai’s art film Days of Being Wild in 1990. He gained international recognition later when Chen Kaige’s gay opera film Farewell My Concubine (1993) was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Picture. As a Canto-pop singer, Cheung distinguished his stage performance by his seductive image of a dandy in the 1980s and his crossover style in the 1990s. As an actor, he presented his charm, tenderness, and elegance in such films as Rouge and A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu-tung, 1987) and his gay femininity in Farewell My Concubine, He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (Peter Chan, 1994) and Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997). He put an end to his glamorous life at the age of 46 when he leapt to his death from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on April 1, 2003. Cheung’s suicide became the top story in Hong Kong as well as other Asian cities, for he represents a queer figure of gender-crossing unprecedented in the history of Hong Kong popular culture.
In contrast to Leslie Cheung’s film-aristocratic background, Anita Mui Yim-fong was born into a lower-class family in 1963. She started her singing career in lounges and street-side gigs with her elder sister at the age of four in order to support her family. A precocious child without any happy memories of her childhood and family life, Mui trained herself as a professional singer before entering show business proper. She won The New Talent Singing Award held by the local television station TVB in 1982 when she was 19. Collaboration with the well-known image consultant Eddie Lau helped Mui to transform herself into a stylish pop icon and earn the reputation as “The Madonna of the East” during the 1980s. Her songs, albums, music videos, concerts, and stage performances, including Debts of Love, Breaking the Icy Mountain, Bad Girls, Stand by Me, Sunset Melody, Elegance of the Lost World, not only gained her worldwide recognition, but also represented the public memory of the city, thanks to her stylized costumes and powerful showmanship. In addition, Mui also showed brilliant skill in acting when she starred as a female ghost in Stanley Kwan’s nostalgia film Rouge in 1987, for which she won the Best Actress at The Golden Horse Award in Taiwan and the Hong Kong Film Award. As the Ever-Changing Queen of Pop, Anita Mui’s presented multiple images ranging from bad girl, tomboy, fair lady, femme fatale, and goddess in popular music to ghost, mother and wife, women’s warrior, and male impersonator in films. She displayed her female (bi)sexuality and lesbianism in her songs, notably “Two Women,” “Single Woman,” and “Eve, Eve.” On the other hand, she exhibited her female masculinity, gender-crossing, and androgynous appeal in such movies as The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 1993), Executioners (Ching Siu-tung and Johnnie To, 1993), Kawashina Yoshiko (Eddie Ling-ching Fong, 1990), Rouge, and Wu Yen (Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai, 2001). Sadly, Mui died of cancer at the age of 40.
Engaging the discourse of body politics, and the theory of sexuality, my paper interrogates Cheung and Mui’s gender performativity in Hong Kong popular culture. I will examine first Cheung’s cross-gender identity and intersexuality in music videos, his androgynous dressing and make-up in concerts as well as the multiple images of his male/gay femininity in films. Then, I will discuss Mui’s female masculinity, and her gender representation as a cross-dresser in filmmaking. My purpose is to investigate the body politics, the sexual identity, and the gender performativity of Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui as a queer subject of position as well as the cultural memory of the city.
The early Leslie Cheung, in both his everyday attire and costumes for album covers, displays a chic style and a radically innovating aesthetics, highlighting how his acute sense of fashion lay way ahead of his contemporaries. Not only did it reveal a sensibility to Western popular music and the vogues in fashion, it also exemplified Cheung’s tendency to surpass and challenge conventional norms. Leslie Cheung in his early days assumed the stylized outfits of the French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier in his everyday dress, cementing the foundation of their future collaboration; apart from that, he was also a fan of the Giorgio Armani suit, and was one of those rare men who could look suave in it despite their modest build. From the mid-1980s, Cheung’s image shifted decisively to a more casual one, from a stately elegance to a more energized and dynamic style, matching the vibrant design of Gianni Versace and Romeo Giogli. In the early 1990s, Leslie reverted to a more stately and elegant style, like a nobleman with a sense of dignified maturity. Later, clothing became a reconstruction of Leslie’s sexual identity and also a re-articulation of his personal feminine attributes. After the mid-1990s, his attire became an effective articulation of emotions and identity; on stage, he displayed the image of “embodying femininity within a male body,” and in his songs and music videos, he demonstrated the possibility of mutual liberation between body and clothing. If sexual identity is akin to clothing, which can be changed, transformed, and misplaced at will, then the source of Leslie’s appeal and controversy lay in his endlessly varying image on stage which alternated between masculinity and femininity. By compelling the audience to reflect upon the intricate connection between clothing and sexual identity, Leslie’s performance marked an unprecedented paradigm in the history of Hong Kong performing arts and popular music. At the same time it also touched upon various social taboos and sexual prejudices; all these converged to create his unique, legendary allure. Through exploring Leslie’s cross-dressing on stage and the representation of an androgynous image in his music videos, this section aims to open up space for discussion on the discourse of sexuality.
I think the pinnacle of achievement for an artist is the embodiment of the two sexes in one person. Art itself is asexual.
Leslie Cheung’s stage performances and musical videos throughout his career testify to this artistic vision, one that blends the male and female bodies: the use of clothing as a medium to transgress gender boundaries and challenge conventional norms, the establishing of a new fluidity of sexuality, the lasciviously glamorous looks of the drag queen on stage, or the fleeting images of androgyny in music videos – all bestow upon the Hong Kong entertainment industry an unprecedented and groundbreaking paradigm. The acclaim and controversy that his performances evoked reflected and tested the accepted boundaries of the city. During Leslie Cheung Live in Concert 97, he gave a dazzling cross-dressing performance when singing the song Red, written by Lin Xi. In glittering black trousers and red high-heeled shoes, and wearing red lipstick, he performed a sensuous and provocative dance with half-naked male dancers. Eventually he became the talk of the town. Leslie’s drag performance on this occasion moves away from the constructed diegetic space in films to the theatrical stage, a drag performance of a male impersonating a female.
As Garber (1992) points out in her discussion of male cross-dressing, the sexual meaning of “drag” lies in the way in which, through the discourse of clothes and display of the body, it deconstructs the social norm of sexuality as inborn and innate. Garber’s discussion of “drag” encompasses several forms and levels: it can be incongruous, for instance; it can be in a mixed form, for instance, only wearing partial feminine costume, including accessories such as earrings, lipstick, and high-heeled shoes. Another level of drag is the integration of contradictions, for instance, while the cross-dresser sports a feminine outfit, at the same time he intentionally emphasizes his masculine traits, such as a coarse voice and a flat chest, to construct an androgynous image. If we try to analyze Leslie’s cross-dressing through Garber’s theory, we can see that his performance at this concert differed saliently from his performance in Farewell my Concubine. On the Peking Opera stage in the film, he is at pains to perform the role/identity of a female/female character in order to convince the audience within the diegesis of the film that he can be an effeminate woman. In the narrative of the film, the audience is acutely aware of the fact that the Yuji (Consort Yu) on the Peking Opera stage is played by a man; in the opera, the Yuji is a woman, the last woman, remaining at Xiang Yu’s side as he faces his imminent demise. Thus the crux of the performance of Dieyi/Leslie Cheung is to enact the role of this woman, so his representation on the Peking Opera stage is wholly female, including the dubbing of a female voice. In contrast, at his own'concerts, Leslie’s drag performance represents a combined mode that denies a full identification with a male or female. On one hand he is wearing a pair of bewitching high heels, puts on a glossy red lipstick and poses in feminine and seductive gestures; at the same time, this feminine image is only partial since he also partially projects maleness; for instance, he does not put on a wig or wear a dress, and his black clothing speckled with glitter is, relatively speaking, a gender-neutral style. Furthermore, his hairstyle and voice remain masculine. This intricate mixing of masculine and feminine attributes exemplifies the androgynous form.
The cross-dressing performance of Leslie at his concert was androgynous in nature. What the audience saw was actually a performance of a male singer impersonating a female, as his male identity remained apparent in terms of attire and posture; however, his feminine dressing and style rendered it difficult for the audience to wholly identify with him as a male. This ambivalent sexuality, which affirms the cross-dresser as both male and female and simultaneously denies him as such, clearly manifests a gender transgression, creating for the audience a double reading of sexual difference and gender roles. Seen from this perspective, the body of Leslie Cheung at this concert became a tool to display sexual difference: through the displacement of sexual difference, it subverted conventional, fixed assumptions and parameters of sexual difference. This echoes the point made earlier with reference to Garber’s theory, namely the way in which clothes epitomize a form of text, and the way that the interchangeability between male and female attire which represents a form of intertextuality, concomitantly, represents a stage of intersexuality. In particular, the Live in Concert camera incessantly provided close-ups of Leslie’s costume from various angles, dissecting fixed sexual formation into fragments, and capturing the way that, through the imaginative allure of the stage, the audience was able to reconstruct sexuality as an androgynous, organic whole. At another level, Leslie’s drag performance also embodied his ambiguous sexual assertion, in particular the seductive dancing with half-naked models, the provocative gesture of touching his crotch – all these indicated his sexual/gender orientation: the form of his cross-dressing constructs the content of the cross-dressing, that is, a feminine man – one who is inclined toward homosexual love – epitomizing a form of male femininity. His elegant gait on the stage may represent a coming-out statement.
Leslie’s red heels performance pertains to Susan Sontag’s discussion of camp: grandiose, vulgar, connoting a sense of decadence and fetishism. As Sontag points out in her “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1983), camp is a sensibility, a style, even a form of aestheticism; it belongs to an ornamental outlook on life, replete with vulgarity, excess, and self-degradation. Although Sontag’s discussion focuses on Western art and literature between the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it provides a pivot to interrogate contemporary postmodern popular culture and performative art. For instance, Sontag argues that androgyny is the most prominent image in camp sensibility, it symbolizes a form of perfection and seduction that results from the blending of the sexes. Both feminine man and masculine woman, through their baroque and transgressive sexual performance, perfectly exemplify the unique camp sensibility, at the same time circumventing and supplementing the shortcomings of a mono sex; this androgynous state often involves mimicry, parody, and theatricality, and uses elaborate materials to construct a grandiose, vulgar, grotesque form of aesthetic style and sensibility, often with a tinge of parody and nobility taste (Sontag 1983: 103–119). Sontag’s delineation illuminates Leslie’s style on stage: glamorous and flamboyant clothing, exaggerated facial expression and body language of the actors, the voyeuristic camera angle, seductive lyrics and the singer’s provocative tone, all contribute to creating a world of materialistic desires, an arena for feminine man to meander in and relish the articulation of sexual mobility. Leslie’s performance thus demonstrated the multifarious possibilities of sexuality; at the same time, he was also challenging his audience’s vision and senses. His camp style embodied the aristocratic aura associated with his original personality, and also included a sense of decadence and lasciviousness through a deliberate process of fabrication, thus bringing Sontag’s discussion of androgyny into the realm of the sexuality of feminine man.
As Sontag points out at the end of her essay, camp culture is closely related to homosexuality. She is not arguing that all homosexuals have camp taste, but that most homosexuals embody the potentiality that the camp style displays (Sontag 1983: 118). Although Sontag does not explicitly state the centrality of queer in camp culture, we can actually glean traces of discussion that hint at the inextricability of camp and queer. The connection between the grotesque in camp and queer indicates not a process of transformation but rather an intersection of styles. This exemplifies how camp culture already embodies queerness, especially when Sontag argues dandyism is a form of camp by citing the gay English writer Oscar Wilde as the prime example. Thus dandyism is an extravagant and stylish form of self-positioning, which foregrounds one’s excessive sensitivity to their external outlook; and camp culture brings this nineteenth-century ornamental vogue into modern mass media, displaying a fetishist and vulgar tendency (Sontag 1983: 116–117). Seen from this perspective, the queerness in camp lies in its association with dandyism: the reflection of a modern dandy, the vulgar eroticism of the grandiose aristocrat, the gaudy attire of Leslie Cheung, the seductive and alluring looks of his gaze.
The way I act Chan Chen-pang in Rouge and Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine both contain traces of my acting method. I am me, every performance contains shadows of myself.
Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine represents Leslie’s most substantial cross-dressing performance. Originally, the director intended John Lone, who has Peking Opera training and international recognition, to play the role of Cheng Dieyi; Leslie came in as a replacement when negotiations with John Lone failed. During this process of casting and negotiation, Leslie deliberately posed for a series of feminine photographs for City Magazine to demonstrate his plausibility and potentiality in acting a feminine role. Why did Leslie exert himself to fight for the role of Cheng Dieyi? What significance did Cheng Dieyi’s cross-dressing performance have for him? From the perspective of a stage performer’s self-projection, how did Leslie’s cross-dressing subvert the latent homophobia within the film?
When critics discuss Farewell My Concubine, they tend to approach it through the prism of nationalism and cultural identity, and rarely touch upon the theme of homosexuality and cross-dressing. A critic has even argued the crux of the film is its instigation of a series of identifications highlighted through the character Consort Yu: Cheng Dieyi → Consort Yu → Peking Opera → Chinese culture → China, which signifies an empty, imaginary China. These interpretations lead to two pitfalls: first, critics have neglected the original novel from which the film is adapted – the book presents a more natural and open attitude toward homosexuality. Second, in the series of identifications delineated above, how should we situate and understand Leslie’s subjectivity in his cross-dressing performance? As Leslie said, “The way I act Chan Chen-pang in Rouge and Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine both contain traces of my acting method. I am me, every performance contains shadows of myself.” What Leslie meant is that the relationship between performer and character is a process of identification; in other words, in reading Leslie’s cross-dressing performance in the film, as Consort Yu, Yang Guifei on the Peking Opera stage, we must connect these performances to Leslie’s subjectivity as a cross-dresser. From his self-projection acting method, we can see how these feminine characters embody the performer’s gender identity.
Farewell My Concubine delineates the turbulent relationship a Dan actor, Cheng Dieyi, has with his fellow Jing performer Duan Xiaolou (played by Zhang Fengyi), echoing the political turmoil of contemporary China. Cheng perceives the stage as the center of his life, and even harbors a wish to be coupled with Duan Xiaolou, as in their roles on stage. Lamentably, Xiaolou is fixated on Juxian (played by Gong Li) and Cheng Dieyi’s unrequited love compels him to relish and cherish every transient moment on stage to immortalize the love legend between him and Duan Xiaolou. Seen from this perspective of homosexual love, we can see Dieyi’s Dan identity not merely as a theatrical role, but, more crucially, an embodiment of his own sexual orientation, Immersing himself in the roles of ancient female characters like Consort Yu, every cross-dressing performance of Cheng Dieyi epitomizes his/her devotion and love toward Duan Xiaolou; in the words of Yuan Shiqing (played by Ge You), Cheng Dieyi “is both masculine and feminine, and knows no boundaries between life and stage.” In fact, Dieyi’s obsession with the stage has reached the penultimate state of art – delirious, maniacal, and dedicating his whole life to the stage without the slightest tinge of regret. For Dieyi, there is no demarcation between life and stage: life is a stage, and the stage is his life. Because of this, Dieyi is heedless of the restrictions in reality, the drastic social changes, and the tumultuous political turmoil; and dedicates himself wholly to performing and perfecting the role of Consort Yu on stage, accompanying his beloved Xiang Yu (Duan Xiaolou). When this love becomes unattainable, Dieyi can only choose to commit suicide by sword, like Consort Yu, thus bringing his stage-life to its most consummating and perfect ending. Of course, Cheng Dieyi’s tragedy lies in his confusion between life and stage, and his inability to grasp the unreliability of love in the rushing tide of time, but his artistic triumph also lies in this obsession, a sublimation of art that fuses life and theater. Every gesture of cross-dressing represents his own identity, and his identity is also reflected in the fleeting images of Consort Yu and Yang Guifei on stage. Leslie’s lascivious performance – be it the insouciant glances, the delicate tenderness in his body movement, or melancholic meditation – brings to life the agitated emotions of these female characters, and a self-projection that blurs the boundaries between life and stage. We, as the audience, are seeing Cheng Dieyi’s cross-dressing performance, and at the same time also bearing witness to Leslie’s embodiment of a different sexuality. Cheng Dieyi and Leslie fuse into one organic whole: it seems as if Leslie is destined to be Dieyi, and Dieyi is rejuvenated through Leslie. Lillian Lee once said that she had written two characters exclusively for Leslie, one of them is Chan Chen-pang in Rouge, the other Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine. This tailor-made character image further exemplifies Cheng-Dieyi-and-Leslie-Cheung as an inextricable artistic creation. Chen Kaige also said there was no other actor who could play the role of Cheng Dieyi except Leslie Cheung. So, the “blurring of life and stage and the attainment of androgyny” is not only a reflection of Cheng Dieyi’s life, it also underscores the relationship with Leslie as a mirror image, and embodies the most sublime form of artistic accomplishment.
Leslie confessed in an interview in Stanley Kwan’s Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema (1996) that he embodies a feminine and narcissist character, that one of his distinguishing characteristics is his sensitivity, in particular a sensitivity towards love, and that the audience recognizes his delicate and tender qualities. Stanley Kwan responded by posing an important reflection: in Leslie’s cross-dressing films, do these cross-dressing characters effectuate Leslie; or does Leslie effectuate these cross-dressing characters? This dialogue between Leslie and Stanley perchance connotes the inextricability and blurring of life and stage. In fact, if Leslie had not been cast, had John Lone been cast instead, I believe that the on-stage and off-stage cross-dressing performances in Farewell My Concubine would not have been so tenderly touching. Leslie’s lugubrious looks, his lingering dedication to love, and his demure tenderness cannot be articulated by an actor who does not identify with feminine traits; in other words, it is Leslie’s identification with a feminine identity that allows him to articulate his feminine qualities through his cross-dressing performance. The relationship between the two is akin to two sides of the same coin, the cross-dresser and the character are integrated as a whole, like a bright reflection in a mirror, illuminating each other.
Yet, interestingly, the liberal and humane attitude toward homosexuality in Lillian Lee’s original novel is radically transformed in Chen Kaige’s adaptation into an extreme form of homophobia, distorting the independence and freedom of choice in homosexual relationships. I have posed this question to Leslie in person: as a man who is keen to traverse the boundaries of sexuality, how does he confront the film’s homophobia? Leslie said he understood Chen Kaige’s political background and market pressure; he felt that, as an actor, the most important thing was to utilize his personal subjectivity to materialize Cheng Dieyi’s complicated personality. Within the accepted parameters of the film, he presented Dieyi’s unwavering homosexual love in the most delicate and poignant manner to the 'audience. Leslie also pointed out that the ending of the film was conceived out of a joint creative effort with Zhang Fengyi. As the plot development in the film differs saliently from that of the novel, they thought the focus should be on the changing relationship between the two protagonists, and that Dieyi’s obsessive love for Xiaolou must end and sublimate as death in order for it to become heart-rending for the audience. Unfortunately, Chen Kaige did not want to expatiate upon the relationship between the two men, and included Gong Li to counterbalance the homosexual plot. Leslie even reckoned if the film could have remained faithful to the original novel and elevated the homosexual element, it could have become a more remarkable queer film than Happy Together, which he acted in a few years later. This allows us to realize how Leslie’s cross-dressing performance and his perspicacious interpretation of Cheng Dieyi subverted the latent homophobia of the film. We only have to look at Leslie’s individual performance within the film to discern his self-performativity on stage. Luckily, the young Cheng Dieyi, who suffers a symbolic castration and sexual distortion in the earlier part of the film, is played by a child actor, which allows Leslie’s performance to exist independently beyond the director’s homophobia, especially in the way Leslie brings to life Cheng Dieyi’s steadfast persistence in pursuing his homosexual love. Thus Leslie’s cross-dressing performance creates a subversiveness, which emblematizes an irony to the film/director.
Anita Mui is a legendary woman, whose legendary status is inextricably linked to her early experience of being a destitute child singer, her omnifarious image throughout her artistic career, and her drawn-out struggle against illness. Both her on-screen and off-screen personae were associated with chivalric tenacity and effeminate tenderness, endowing her with an androgynous aura. On stage she can be the meandering singing Bad Girl, Black Widow, Capone Girl, Cleopatra, and elegant gentlewoman; her cinematic image comprises a wide range of characters – female ghost, chivalric knight, and male impersonator. Ever since she was young, she was a forerunner of the fashion vogue, displaying a dazzling array of costumes (sharp lounge suit, military costume, qipao, miniskirt), heavy-metal accessories and make-up; but always radiating a sense of enthralling aloofness.
While there are multiple pivots and perspectives from which to explore the complexity of Anita Mui, in this section I aim to limit my discussion to her cross-dressing performance and queer image in a variety of genre films, such as the masculine and militant image in Kawashima Yoshiko and A Better Tomorrow 3: Love & Death in Saigon (Tsui Hark, 1989), and the figure of the cross-dresser in Wu Yen. We will look into the ways Anita employs a camp, queer body and performativity to construct a multilayered space which allows the audience to imagine the mobile flows of desire within and beyond the screen.
When a female impersonates as a male, she is simultaneously not male and male, and at the same time not female and female, traversing and maneuvering between the endless possibilities in the mutation of sexuality. When Rebecca Bell-Metereau explicated male impersonation in Hollywood Androgyny (1993), she used Garbo as an example of how an actress can embody two different sexual modes: feminine male and masculine female. These androgynous modes are not performed by two actors, but stem from an actress’s self-fissuring performance. It is a form of magical transformative power that functions through the deployment of gesture, voice and, deportment, so that when an actress assumes male attire a tough, alluring aura is radiated; and when she is seen in female attire she is characterized by a graceful and placid litheness. This flexible duality allowed Anita to maneuver around, across and through dalliance and relationships between male and female within and beyond the camera (Bell-Metereau 1993: 74–75). Her films best exemplify this duality of androgyny; in situating the characters within the diegesis of a film, she could always infuse her own charisma into the roles. From the macho-suit look in A Better Tomorrow 3 to the ancient chivalric figure in The Magic Crane (Benny Chan, 1993), she always embodied this effeminate chivalry, where she used her superb martial prowess and deft abilities to fight her way to safety alongside actors like Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung Chiu-wai.
For instance, in A Better Tomorrow 3, Anita plays the role of a gangster who adopts a masculine name “Chau Yingjie,” which already creates a misrecognition of her sexual identity before her appearance; after that, she appears in a white overcoat, brandishing two guns in her hands and maneuvering her way decisively amidst the blazing fire of the Vietnamese forces. Set against the exquisite product design of William Chang and through the hero-building camera lens of Tsui Hark, Anita’s heroic image overshadows that of Chow Yun-fat. The film, which served as a sort of prequel to the Mark Gor legend, also immortalized Anita: the heroic endeavor of Mark Gor is actually inspired by a woman he met in an early phase in his life. If Chow Yun-fat’s Mark Gor figure comes to represent a “Great Brother” image in the realm of Hong Kong action cinema, then the audacious Anita epitomizes a “Great Sister” image, to the extent that it is difficult to envisage another actress being able to portray this hero who is well aware of the debasement of the world yet remains steadfastly courageous at heart.
In The Magic Crane, Anita plays the role of an ill-fated princess, and consequently impersonates as a male and enters the jianghu beleaguered by rancor and intrigues between different families and martial arts factions. Although the film is adapted from a wuxia novel, the plot is weak and fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions; luckily the scriptwriter Tsui Hark and director Benny Chan are astute enough to utilize Anita’s androgynous image to create affecting visual aesthetics. For instance, when Anita descends from the sky in the magic crane, with her white robe dancing and gliding in the wind, the use of slow motion and editing fleetingly captures her lissom figure. At the same time, the use of close-ups foregrounds the charmingly feminine features of Anita’s face, like her full lips, her enticing departing glances. These fluidly captivating scenes create an elegant sense of otherworldliness, highlighting that Anita’s chivalric image embodies both the masculine and feminine body, an instance of the perfect blending of the masculine and the feminine which bewitches the male protagonist (played by Tony Leung) and confounds the audience beyond the screen.
For those who grew up with Anita’s music, her remarkable cross-dressing performances in various music videos will never be forgotten. However, the most remarkable example of her versatility in ever-changing costumes is her performance in Eddie Fong’s Kawashima Yoshiko. Born as the fourteenth daughter to Prince Su in the late Qing dynasty and originally named Aisin Gioro Xianyu, the historical Yoshiko Kawashima is a legendary figure: she was sent to Japan to receive military training at the age of six and changed her name to Yoshiko. Thereafter she cross-dressed as a male spy and was involved in political events like the Manchurian Incident and the establishment of the Manchukuo, with her life situation fluctuating concurrently with the political torrent of her era, shrouded in endless adventures and enigmas. In 1948 she was executed as a traitor; however, speculations and uncertainties concerning her alleged death persist. Casting Anita, who experienced similar shifting tides of fortune in life, as such a character naturally inspired a more poignant significance and implications. In fact, the director, Eddie Fong, and scriptwriter, Lillian Lee, specifically designed several outfits for Anita to befit the dazzling variety of the names and pseudonyms she bears in the film – the names Aisin Gioro and Yoshiko Kawashima, and pseudonyms like Jin Bihui and Yue Ming: from kimono, western suit, and wedding dress to military uniform, qipao, and mandarin jacket, all these converge to foreground her dazzling, shifting, ambivalent identity between a Manchu, Chinese, Japanese, male, female, spy, mistress, and commander. Of course, these ever-changing identities play an important role in the diegesis of the film to delineate the tragic story of Yoshiko’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to use her female identity and power to navigate through the political turmoil dominated by powerful males. Beyond the diegesis of the film, Anita’s cross-dressing performances, which can dramatically shift from a noble lasciviousness to a commander of imposing decisiveness, naturally attracted audiences’ gazes and provoked their desires. In short, Anita in Kawashima Yoshiko epitomized a dazzling and multifarious possibility of the intersection of masculinity and femininity. Yet despite this rich visual imagery and cross-dressing performance, it is difficult to mask the banality of the script and the film’s fragmented nature; in a way this is similar to Anita or Yoshiko under the camera: despite the visual splendor of her attire, the character remains insipid, empty, and shallow. For instance, apart from functioning as a mere showcase, the intention and emotions behind each cross-dressing act remains unclear, thus rendering the character lifeless; putting aside Anita’s personal charismatic performance, the loose structure of the film and its vague focus make it difficult for audiences to ascertain the director and scriptwriter’s understanding of this complex historical figure. These defects also foreground a monotonous form of exoticization and flamboyance, concomitantly exposing the film’s inability to explore and probe the complex connection between sexuality and politics. However, of all Anita’s cross-dressing acts, the most contentious one, in terms of sexual politics, is her cross-dressing in military uniform. The image of a dominant female military officer in a world of male hegemony offers us a glimpse of how an actress can, through her personal charisma and acting skills, subvert male authority within the film and transcend the limitation of the script to project a particular version of her own subjectivity on screen.
The famous English film scholar Stella Bruzzi (1997) argues that, historically, when women go to the frontline in military uniform, it not only reflects the disorderly and chaotic nature of the period, but also represents an attempt by women to use cross-dressing as a tactic to advocate subversion and revolution in tandem with constructing a new world structure and sexual order that challenge the hegemonic male presence in the military sphere. Furthermore, as a symbol of order, system, and hierarchy, military uniform represents masculinity, bureaucracy, conservatism, and subservience; but, once it is assumed by females, it comes to connote a sense of irony, subversion, and intrusion. In other words, the female body transforms the meaning of the military uniform and endows it with a degree of ambivalence as the political dimension inherent in the notion of the military is tinged with the idea of sexual politics elucidating how the female body under the military uniform resembles a reversal and subversion (Bruzzi 1997: 148–150). Bell-Metereau also points out, in terms of its historical and cultural significance, military uniform represents conquer and conquest, which connotes sexual violence, torture, and manslaughter; yet at the same time, it also highlights patriotism and contribution to one’s nation. Therefore, it is more congenial for particular types of female cross-dresser to adopt military uniform: those with an aloof aura, tough figure lines, and an indifference to pain and human suffering; in contradistinction, a female who is too feminine and delicate, with a weak figure, will be incapable of carrying off the deportment required to bear convincingly a military uniform (Bell-Metereau 1993: 108–109). Actually, the “feminine military uniform” is also the most pertinent performance of androgyny: when the female body is enclosed within the masculine attire of the military uniform, it diffuses a special aura of devilish seductiveness; so, as a female military commander and female spy, Yoshiko is dubbed the “Eastern Female Devil”; the pertinence of this label is also reflected in the absurd and mysterious rumors that surround her. The military uniform functions as a mask, it is a masquerade and also a metaphor, shrouding the “truth” behind the mask in an endless enigma. Furthermore, a female exercising military power inspires awe and, at the same time, a desire to subjugate her, thus embodying a very contradictory sexual form: her “virility” arouses exaltation but also poses a threat, so seducing her becomes an enthralling yet dangerous game. Anita’s Yoshiko marked an exceptional landmark in the history of Hong Kong cinema for her ability to tease all these vivid and complex associations out of the image of military uniform. In the film, Anita, in the identity of Jin Bihui, intervenes in the scheming political intrigues between the opposing forces, and all of her presences are marked by a sense of imposing manner and cool-headed composure. For her, the “military uniform” is a tool and mask to manipulate others and further her political aims, so she will seduce the Empress Jung (played by Idy Chan Yuk-lin) in her male attire; but when she meets the man she fancies (played by Andy Lau), she will display a radically different form of femininity. Thus, her different outfits mark a clear demarcation between the battlefields of warfare and love. Male attire (which includes the military uniform, suit, and mandarin overcoat) is an instrument for her to gain distinction in the battlefield and further her political ends, whereas female attire (such as the qipao, evening dress, kimono, and wedding dress) are tools to manipulate men; unfortunately both means fail her: the Yoshiko who successfully alternates between masculine and feminine identity is ultimately, a pawn beguiled by monarchy and patriarchy; this is the inexorable fate that Yoshiko, despite her shrewdness and intelligence, cannot escape from. This is the predetermined course of event that the historical and filmic Yoshiko cannot overturn, yet Anita’s personal performance brings in a transformative aura to the role: all the scenes and shots that portray her shimmer with dazzling brilliance and endow the character with a profound depth.
Anita’s military uniform does not only demonstrate the possibility of androgyny, but also creates a queer landscape of “male–male” and “female–female” relationships – when “she” confronts Hung (played by Derek Yee) or Commander Tanaka Takayoshi (played by Patrick Tse Yin), it represents a struggle between two men in terms of political and sexual power; when “she” lingers on the bed with Empress Jung, it represents a sexual intimacy between two women – this endless transformation in attires reflects the corporeal permeability between masculinity and femininity, and also the two-way flow of sexuality. Yoshiko’s sexuality can vary according to different situations, thus the permeability between male and female seems to resemble a magic trick which regulates her own body and manipulate others, exemplifying what Bruzzi articulates as the “mise-en-scène of desire”: the allocation, amplification and magnification of “desire” as the locus of the screen, which guides audiences to reflect and search for one’s own position and angle of identification. What the notion of “androgyny” encompasses is a state of ambivalence, ambiguity, and opaqueness, which differs saliently from a traditional full cross-dresser, as there is no inclination for one sex to totally dominate over the other. This allows us to contemplate the relationship between the two sexes, how it can be both concrete and abstract, corporeal and imaginary, a body and also a metaphor, creating an indecisiveness in our gaze (Bell-Metereau 1993: 175–176). As an object of desire, Anita embodies a compelling subjectivity, both within and beyond the screen. In other words, she is not a mere passive object of gaze for the characters and the audiences, but an active agent who uses her mixed form of sexual representation to stimulate and allure characters and audiences into the domain of desire, demonstrating the myriad flows of desire and the indefinite permeability between sexuality, and also attesting to the most enigmatic power of androgyny.
From a female chivalric figure to a militant lady, Anita’s sexual representation traverses the realm of masculinity and femininity, but her performance in Wu Yen marks an outright cross-dressing, no longer “a female impersonating a male” but “performing as a man.” Wu Yen – a collaborative effort of Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai which merges the wuxia, qixu, and comedy genre – mocks and subverts the traditional notion of cross-dressing. Anita plays the male lead role of Emperor Qi instead of Wu Yen, and flirts and banters with the female protagonists, emblematizing a form of subversive and enigmatic romantic and sexual landscape. The film deliberately uses an “all-female” cast, with Sammi Cheng and Cecilia Cheung cast as Wu Yen and Yinchun/Enchantress respectively, constructing a love-triangle relationship between these three women. The design and casting of the characters already indicate a divergence from the framework of this traditional folklore; also, by endowing the characters with a gender/sexual fluidity, the film creates a boundless and mobile flow of sexuality between all sexes. As Johnnie To stated in an interview with Film Biweekly, the concept of Wu Yen came from old Mandarin films and Cantonese Opera cinema, and also the cross-dressing image of Yam Kim-fai: “Films with cross-dressing elements have an interesting point, in that the film represents an all-female world, for instance, Yam also plays the male role; it is a world from which men have to evacuate.” Also, To emphasizes, as Wu Yen is a romantic comedy, casting an actor as the lewd Emperor Qi may not seem to be that humorous; on the contrary, casting an actress as a lascivious male may create an additional and unexpected comedic effect. To’s remarks highlight three important ideas: first, although Wu Yen subverts the traditional framework of the story (for instance, the emphasis on the formal rigor of qixu and the grotesque facial disfigurement of Wu Yen) and transforms it into a modern vernacular comedy, in essence it retains the aesthetics of the cross-dressing performance in Cantonese Opera, especially as the casting of females as both male and female leading roles evokes the glamor of “women films.” Second, casting a woman to act the role of an unfavorable character like Emperor Qi helps to avert audiences’ aversion and distaste. When the lewdness and ineptitude of this “man” is performed by a charming actress, even if her performance is too exaggerated, it achieves a comical effect but not repugnance or repulsion. However, if it is performed by a real/straight man, it is difficult to maintain this nuanced balance and may accrue the problem of overacting. Third, the idea of “woman being a man” must appear in the form of a comedy for it to be accepted; seen from this perspective, comedy is also a “mask,” a humorous and light-hearted way to resolve the subversiveness and threat of “female impersonating a male” and render it approachable and acceptable to both a male and female audience.
As Alice A. Kuzniar, a scholar who specializes in gender theory in cinema, points out, the aim of transvestite comedy lies not in emphasizing sexual differences and their constructed cultural significance; instead, through exercising the choice of a non-traditional alternative form of desire, transvestite comedy presents an attempt to highlight the interfusion and indeterminacy of the sexes and blur the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality; and capitalizing upon the deception and misrecognition then the camouflage entails, conceals the latent queer imagination (Kuzniar 2000: 22). In Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s Wu Yen, there are three distinctive features of their fantastical and absurd interchange of male and female impersonation. First, it highlights Anita’s personal impersonating skills. Her lithe figure and clear facial features render her strikingly effective in impersonating as a male; at times when she plays the role of ancient emperor she is able to perform it with a sense of grandeur and grace. Emperor Qi is not a virtuous emperor but an inept one, which renders his character unlikeable in essence; but Anita is able, through the use of comical expressions, exaggerated physical gestures, and the delivery of her lines in a childish tone, to attune to the ambience of the comedy, bringing to life Emperor Qi’s lewdness and prurience. As she stated, in performing the role of Emperor Qi, she consulted and referred to the comical styles of preceding actors such as Leung Sing-bor, Sun Ma Sze Tsang, and Deng Jichen. In particular Deng’s version, in which he first acts a woman then acts as a man, gave her great inspiration. In my view, Anita’s comical cross-dressing performance does not only encompass Leung’s ludicrous and giddy style and Sun Ma Sze Tsang and Deng’s mimicry of working-class people’s gestures, but also demonstrates the aura of the classic “female man mou sang” (the scholar-warrior in Cantonese Opera), Yam Kim-fai. For instance, Anita’s hunched gait, which signifies the character’s prankish tendency to evade responsibilities, and her exaggerated expression of astonishment, both stem from Yam’s signature style which connotes a sense of gentility and elegance, thus avoiding the vulgarity that could arise if it was performed by a real/straight man. Also, to complement Anita’s impersonation, all the male government officials and military commanders revolving around Emperor Qi are represented as “cissies” in terms of their deportment, speech, and gestures. Their awkward incompetence serves as a foil to the “masculine” image of Anita performing the role of Emperor Qi. If the director had employed a group of macho actors instead, it would have been difficult for Anita to manifest her “masculinity,” thus diminishing the comic effect of the scenes and characterization. The second point concerns the complicated sexual mis-identification within the film. For instance, despite the fluidity in shifting his/her gender/sexual identity, the “enchantress” is actually a man! And the purpose of “his” scheme of transforming into Yinchun to seduce Emperor Qi is to gain the love of Wu Yen. Wu Yen (played by Sammi Cheng) throughout most of the film remains tomboyish in terms of her attire, de-emphasizing her femininity and reinforcing her boorish behavior. Her ugliness lies in her lack of femininity; therefore, while she remains invincible on the battlefield, she suffers from endless setbacks in the pursuit of love. All these female images contravene traditional characterization in qixu, and also create an ambiguous gender/sexual identity: a woman can suddenly transform into a man, and a man may be in fact a woman. At the same time, these permutations between different gender/sexual identities construct a queer eroticism: when Cecilia Cheung transforms into a man and falls in love with Wu Yen, and when Cecilia reverts back to a woman to embrace Emperor Qi who is played by the actress Anita Mui, do all these suggest a latent homoerotic desire in these apparent heterosexual courtships? As the “enchantress” who can transform into a man or woman at will, does his/her desire for both Emperor Qi and Wu Yen signify homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality? Furthermore, the latter part of the film takes up theme of “double cross-dressing” and sexual misrecognition. In his attempt to expose the real identity of the “enchantress,” Emperor Qi “impersonates a female” (the process of “double cross-dressing” can gleaned from the way that Anita “returns” to feminine dress) and becomes the “Northern Concubine;” in a bizarre turn of events, the traitor Ng Hei (played by Raymond Wong Ho-yin) falls for this “Northern Concubine” and instigates a coup in an attempt to set “her” free and win “her” favor. Thus the scenes in which the dress-clad Emperor Qi and Ng Hei engage in a ludicrous romance seem to borrow the female body of Anita Mui to display subtly a form of homosexual relationship which makes the audience uncertain as to laugh or cry in response, and also renders the demarcation between homosexuality and heterosexuality ambiguous. Kuzniar argues that the purpose of double cross-dressing is to create queer pairings, by casting actress into male roles and “re-transforming” them into women within the film through cross-dressing; it is a form of manipulation of double identity and double sexuality. This process of “double cross-dressing” creates a form of misrecognition which allows queer desires to be articulated. Yet the more crucial point is: how do the audiences see this? What can they see? When a double cross-dresser interacts with characters of the two sexes, the hetero/homo/bisexual relationships become myriad and fluid. Furthermore, it also demonstrates the inextricability between “mask” and “desire,” as the essence of “love” is to “masquerade” which serves as the precondition of mutual attraction; to avoid delusion one must never denude the façade of such masquerades (Kuzniar 2000: 45–46). Wu Yen’s cross-dressing undertaking also encompasses these queer aspects, which testifies to the creativity of Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai to utilize the complex relationship and identities of three protagonists – “the Beauty, the Ugly Woman, and the Inept Emperor” – to explore the issue of cross-dressing and the myriad and ceaseless flows of multiple sexual identities and queer desires. Yet, once sexual difference is fixated and the “masquerade” is exposed, everything reverts to the established order and hierarchy. Therefore, the ending of Wu Yen is inevitably conservative: when the originally sexually ambivalent “enchantress” fixes her sexual identity due to her pregnancy, her sexual duality becomes monotonous, and her sexual fluidity becomes congealed. In a similar vein, when the true identity of the “Northern Concubine” is revealed and the heartbroken Ng Hei is enlisted into the army, everything reverts back to the polygamous and heterosexual mode. These are fetters which a male director and scriptwriter are unable to break.
An artist has to be coquettish, charming, chic, haughty, and, both masculine and feminine, in order to be recognized as successful.
Leslie Cheung once said this in a concert. It can be read as Leslie’s embodiment of femininity within a male body and his androgyny; more importantly, it reflects his confidence and affirmation of his feminine qualities. Dyer, in his magnum opus Stars (2004), borrows Plato’s dictum of “life as theater and theater as life” to delineate the painstaking process of the construction of stars – as ordinary people, stars have similar attributes to us. Stars are real people, but through their multifarious images on screen they experience the vicissitudes of life. When these two forms of life interact, their talent and flair allow the stars to diffuse their aura on screen, and the characters and events within the films seem to enrich the life experiences of the stars, so that they can transcend their original status as ordinary people. Thus we as audiences are no longer able to distinguish the boundaries between “actor” and “character,” the “stage” becomes part of the stars’ existences, through a process of constructing, performing, and gradually evolving as “being” (Dyer 2004: 20–21). The point of citing Dyer’s theory is to use it as a pivot to explore the nature of Leslie and Anita’s star image, particularly when the two actors come close to the type which Dyer delineates as “character acting,” namely how the two can use their charismatic characters to personalize the characters within the films as part of their performative aesthetics. Of course this logic does not invalidate how certain directors or scriptwriters create tailor-made androgynous characters for the two based on their distinctive characteristics and life experiences. These characters have formed an inextricable reflective connection to Leslie and Anita, to the extent that we can no longer distinguish whether he/she is realizing these characters or these characters are endowing their star images with an extra level of significance? But we can decisively say that Leslie and Anita’s cinematic aura and artistic talents can surpass the constraints of the movie camera and written scripts, and turn the banal into the miraculous through their extraordinary star charisma.