Research Essay: Portrayal of China in Western Media

Orientalism, Gender, Sexuality (Trans Film M. Butterfly)

COM304 Week 3

Delivered by Dr. Zhen Troy CHEN Prepared by Dr. Jamie J. ZHAO

19 March, 2020

Some updates

• Video links have been upload to compensate for ‘film screening” • You could also try to download the whole film online from legal outlets • Changes in the order of delivery • Fridays 2-4pm as office hour since students start to ask for consultations about essays • Group allocation

Some updates

Orientalism vs. Occidentalism • Orientalism:

Ø East vs. West: as two “absolutely different” social systems “in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time”

------Edward Said (1978) Opera examples: The French adaptation of The Orphan of the House of Zhao in the early 18th century

Ø in the opera, the Chinese emperor was “crowned with a cluster of colorful feather and dressed in pieces of cloth and beast fur … [bearing] an iron sword one side on his waist and [holding] in the other hand an impressively mighty bow”

Orientalism vs. Occidentalism

Ø Contemporary media examples of orientalism:

1. Western tourists in China: https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzgxNDE5N Tg3Mg==.html

2. Katy Perry’s 2013 AMA performance of the song “Unconditionally:

https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjgwODM2 MTAyMA==.html

Orientalism vs. Occidentalism • The Orient was positioned “schematically on a

theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe” (Said 1978).

• Self-orientalism: Ø “is not simply the autonomous creation of the West, but rather

the Orient itself participates in its construction, reinforcement and circulation”

Ø “essentially a reconfiguration and, in many ways, an extension of Orientalism”

------Yan and Santos (2009)

•Occidentalism

•Chinese-specific forms:

Ø Official Occidentalism

Ø Anti-official Occidentalism

• Chinese official Occidentalism is a dominant discourse in which “the Western other is construed by a Chinese imagination, not for the purpose of dominating it, but in order to discipline, and ultimately to dominate, the Chinese self at home”

• Anti-official Occidentalism is a counter-discourse of “dissenting intellectuals” who strategically assert that “the Western other was in fact superior to the Chinese self” in order to “strengthen their anti-official status”.

------Chen Xiaomei (2002)

• The creation of an anti-official Occidentalism … was preconditioned by the parameters of Maoist political discourse, which categorized anything opposed to its political dominance as “Western” or “Westernized.” … [T]he adoption of an Occidentalist discourse was a strategic move by dissenting intellectuals. Accused of being “Western” both by virtue of their cultural status and their political sympathies, they had little choice but to assert that the Western Other was in fact superior to the Chinese Self. By thus accepting the inevitable official critique raised against them, whether or not it was “factually” always the case, they strengthened their anti-official status.

------ Chen Xiaomei (1992)

The Adaptation of ‘Jasmine Flower’ in/across the East and the West

• Folk song in late Qing dynasty

• Puccini’s Turandot

• Zhang Yimou’s Turandot

Sinoglossia by Howard Chiang

• Heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1934)

• Heterotopia (Foucault 1970)

Sinoglossia by Howard Chiang • Heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1934)

• The term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single "language" (in Greek: hetero- "different" and glōssa "tongue, language"). In this way the term translates the Russian разноречие [raznorechie] (literally "different-speech-ness"), which was introduced by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе [Slovo v romane], published in English as "Discourse in the Novel."Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in the coexistence of, and conflict between, different types of speech: the speech of characters, the speech of narrators, and even the speech of the author. He defines heteroglossia as "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way." Bakhtin identifies the direct narrative of the author, rather than dialogue between characters, as the primary location of this conflict.

Sinoglossia by Howard Chiang

• Heterotopia (Foucault 1970) • Of other spaces • Additional reading • Chen, Zhen Troy (2018) Poetic prosumption of animation, comic, game and novel in China: A case of a popular video-sharing social media Bilibili as heterotopia. Journal of Consumer Culture, OnlineFirst, pp. 1-21. Available at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14695 40518787574

Examples of Trans Chinese Media Images v trans performances and

representations:

1. Li Yugang’s 李玉刚 “The New Drunken Concubine” 新贵妃醉酒: https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzQ1Mj g5Mjk2.html

2. Leslie Cheung 张国荣as Cheng Dieyi 程 蝶衣 in Farewell, My Concubine (1993)： https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzM4NTE 4MDgwOA==.html

3. Zhou Shen 周深 in reality show 蒙面唱将 猜猜猜 Mask Singer

Swordsman II • Adapted from Jin Yong’s 1963 novel, The

Smiling, Proud Wanderer

• Casting Brigitte Lin 林青霞 as the Invincible East 东方不败

• “By intimately linking Dongfang Bubai’s will to dominate the world with the transformation of her body from male to female, the film has displaced anxiety about totalitarian rule onto the sex-changed body, which it portrays to be both dangerously seductive and violently destructive” (Leung, 2012, p. 188)

Adaptation of M. Butterfly

1. Madama Butterfly: An opera written by Italian opera writer Puccini in the early 1900s.

2. M. Butterfly: A modern play by David Henry Hwang in 1988.

3. The film M. Butterfly 蝴蝶君：a film adapted from Hwang’s play, directed by David Cronenberg in 1993.

Screening: M. Butterfly (dir. David Cronenberg, 1993) • https://www.miguvideo.com/wap/resourc e/pc/detail/miguplay.jsp?cid=624311529