Research Essay: Portrayal of China in Western Media

85© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2017 X. Lin et al. (eds.), East Asian Men, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55634-9_6

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H. Chiang ( ) University of Waterloo , Waterloo , ON , Canada

Earlier versions of this essay were aired variously in 2014 at the “Sinoglossia: Taiwan, China, and Beyond” conference at the University of Texas, Austin, the 129th Modern Languages Association Annual Convention in Chicago, the “Chinese Films and the Medical Humanities” workshop at University College London, and the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. Questions and comments from the audiences have enabled me to clarify specifi c points. My discussion of how castration is represented in Sinophone fi lms, especially the Reign of Assassins , is adapted from Chiang and Wong ( 2016 ). Some of the ideas in this essay matured alongside my extensive conversations with Alvin K. Wong about queering regionalism. Helen Leung’s work on postcolonial queer Hong Kong cinema and Rey Chow’s reading of M. Butterfl y have been especially inspirational for my analysis. I thank Xiaodong Lin, Chris Haywood, and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill for their editorial suggestions, and Roberto Ignacio Diaz for germinating my fascination with Hwang’s original play. I am immensely indebted to Andrea Bachner, Yu-lin Lee, and Chien-hsin Tsai for stimulating dialogues on the conceptualization of Sinoglossia.

Sinoglossia Incarnate: The Entanglements of Castration across

the Pacifi c

Howard   Chiang

Introduction

Sinophone studies emerged in the early twenty-fi rst century as a long overdue analytical framework to overcome the disciplinary limitations of Chinese studies. According to Shu-mei Shih, whose work has pioneered the fi eld, the Sinophone world refers to Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside of China or on the margins of China and Chineseness

(Shih 2007 ). Conceived as such, the concept of the Sinophone disrupts the chain of equivalence—established since the rise of modern nation-states— between language, culture, ethnicity, and nationality. Th is innovative framework demands a rethinking of what the word “Chinese” encompasses and signifi es, which often goes unquestioned in Sinological, transnational, and diaspora studies (Chiang and Heinrich 2013 ; Shih et al. 2013 ; Yue and Khoo 2014 ). With an analytic calculus that is at once global and local in focus, Sinophone studies represent a systematic attempt in taking modern China seriously as a growing global superpower.

Th e theorization of the Sinophone concept has attracted various criticisms to date, but perhaps the two most popular strands concern its language-centrism and its apathy towards translation (or deferral of translational issues, challenges, and problems). In order to wrestle with these two sets of limitations, this essay proposes Sinoglossia as an alternative but complementary theory that is defi ned by culture in the way that the Sinophone is defi ned by language. 1 Th e con- cept of Sinoglossia thus combines a heteroglossiac and heterotopian approach to the critical study of mediated discourses of China and Chineseness (Bakhtin 1981 ; Foucault 1970 [1966] ). It is interesting to note at the outset that since both Sinoglossia and the Sinophone contain the prefi x “Sino,” for better or worse, one of the recurring motifs that cut across both theoretical frameworks is their consistent bind to, despite their resistance towards, the symbolic seduction of “Chinese.” As we will see, this motif brings to light the productive power of Sinoglossia as the site of transmedial possibility for translat- ing meanings of embodiment across diff erent language- based cultures. Th is essay exposes the heuristic appeal of Sinoglossia by situating a series of Sinophone martial arts ( wuxia ) fi lms and the Anglophone fi lm M. Butterfl y ( 1993 ) within a broader framework of “entangled analysis.” Th is comparison, or modular analysis as the case may be, is informed by Rey Chow’s ( 2012 ) recent work on “entanglements” as enmeshments of topics, and as partition and disparity rather than conjunction and similarity.

1 I fi rst embarked on the theorization of Sinoglossia together with Chien-hsin Tsai and Andrea Bachner in preparation for the conference in Austin in 2014.

86 H. Chiang

Specifi cally, I draw on transgender theory to examine the representa- tions and meanings of castration as a ground for comparing a body of works that tend to be considered separately. In Sinophone cinema, mar- tial arts prowess denotes a crucial marker of the resulting embodiment of castration, a specifi c narrative technique employed to distinguish the gender liminality of eunuchs. Because the immense physical power asso- ciated with eunuchs in these fi lms exceeds the actual physical strength of eunuchs in China’s past, this depiction of exceptional castrated corpo- reality reveals a highly original expression in queer Sinophone cultural formation, contrasting contemporary peripheral adaptations with histori- cal mainland Chinese culture. 2 On the other hand, whereas critics have tended to analyze M. Butterfl y from the viewpoints of Asian-American identity politics and, by extension, of anti-Orientalism, I resituate the fi lm in a global transfeminist framework by arguing that despite its popular reception, its ultimate object of critique is actually China. If M. Butterfl y is contextualized in the global politics of the 1960s, China emerges as the Lacanian phallus embodied by the supposed Oriental “Butterfl y”—as a phantom of the colonial project whose detachment from the French white man signals its own demise. Read in this way, the martial arts fi lms and M. Butterfl y loosen representational claims about China from earnest ties to Sinitic languages, scripts, or texts, make room for multi- and extra-linguistic comparisons across shifting parameters of translation, and strategically position Chinese culture at the center of the Sinoglossiac theoretical critique.

Monstrous Transmogrifi cation

In my previous work on Chinese transgender history, I posited a geneal- ogy of sex change: from the demise of eunuchism in the late Qing to the emergence of transsexuality in postwar Taiwan (Chiang 2011 ; Chiang forthcoming ). Th is narrative rests on the extinction of Chinese eunuchs in the last century. Indeed, the historical demise of eunuchism in the early twentieth century marked a transitional phase, when the castrated

2 On queer Sinophone production, see Chiang ( 2013 ).

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male body, women’s bound feet, and the leper’s crippled body all seemed out of sync with the Chinese body politic at large (Ko 2005 ; Leung 2009 ; Chiang 2012 ). Th e transcultural traffi c of these corporeal “types” culmi- nated from a longer historical process, whereby the Chinese empire and body came to be associated with a distinctively pathological identity, as captured in the label of “the Sick Man of Asia” that China appropriated from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century (Heinrich 2008 ). Th e last Chinese eunuch, Sun Yaoting, died in 1996, and his biogra- phy—translated into English in 2008—has made possible the global circulation of stories about the eunuchs of the last Chinese dynasty (Jia 2008 ). Despite the physical death of Qing eunuchs, castrated fi gures con- tinue to fascinate popular cultural producers and consumers, and con- temporary Sinophone cinema presents many examples of their cultural imagery, especially in wuxia fi lms. Focusing on some of the best-known Sinophone fi lms featuring castrated protagonists, this part of the essay utilizes transgender theory to analyze the representations and historicity of castration. By pinning extraordinary martial arts strength as a staple feature of castrated subjects, Sinophone fi lmic production features an innovative technique that enables the queer articulation of eunuchism in the Sinophone peripheries, even as the practice of castration itself has long disappeared from the center of Han Chinese culture.

In order to analyze the various bodily and subjective transformations in Sinophone fi lms, I fi nd the concept of “transmogrifi cation” proposed by Nikki Sullivan ( 2006 ) particularly helpful. By assigning the term a new critical theoretical edge, Sullivan undermines the exceptionality of any given type of body modifi cation and, by extension, the moralistic tendency to dichotomize forms of embodiment by which oppositions are set up between, for instance, transsexualism and transgenderism, cosmetic surgery and “non-mainstream” body modifi cation, conform- ing and subversive corporeal changes, or “bad” and “good” practices. In considering all forms of body modifi cation as distinct manifestations of “transmogrifi cation,” which she defi nes as “a process of (un)becoming strange and/or grotesque, of (un)becoming other,” Sullivan ( 2006 ) makes room for acknowledging “important similarities, overlaps, resonances, and intersections between a range of modifi ed bodies” (p. 561). Th e trope of transmogrifi cation helps shed light on the connections across a range

88 H. Chiang

of corporeal transformations in Sinophone fi lms, immersing the signifi - cation of castration in a web of relations to other examples of embodied and experiential change.

Some of the earliest examples of transmogrifi cation can be found in fi lms such as Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine ( 1993 ) and Tsui Hark’s Swordsman 2 ( 1992 ). In her essay, “Trans on Screen,” Helen Leung ( 2012 ) off ers a refreshing reading of the character of Cheng Dieyi in Farewell, My Concubine precisely through the prism of transmogrifi cation. Although the fi lm does not belong to the wuxia genre per se, and has raised all sorts of problems for critics who try to iden- tify a contemporary gay subjectivity in Dieyi’s character, it merits some discussion in light of its unique deployments of gender (un)becoming. Leung follows Sullivan’s ethical imperative to bracket concerns about the “positive” versus “negative” representational eff ects of Dieyi’s gender and sexual semiotics. Instead, Leung ( 2012 ) considers Beijing opera train- ing itself as a historically specifi c mode of transmogrifi cation: “a life-long physical training that molds pliant bodies into stylized theatrical role- types” (p. 194). In Dieyi’s physical transformation from an untrained boy to a perfect dan actor, his extra fi nger is chopped off by his mother so that he can be accepted into and trained properly in the troupe; he endures recurrent merciless beating for the perfection of theatrical form and movement; and his body transgenders with the successful enunciation of the line “I am by nature born a girl” after repeated mistakes and corpo- ral punishments (Fig. 6.1 ). Dieyi essentially exemplifi es, quoting Susan Stryker’s terminology ( 1994 ), a “monstrous” trans subject, “not in the conventional identity sense but more provocatively in the sense that he assembles gender and constitutes his self within the contingent structure of power that produces him” (Leung 2012 , pp. 196–7). Not surprisingly, the fi lm’s closure seals the fate of such a doomed subject with the onstage realization of Dieyi’s suicidal imitation.

Whereas Dieyi’s transformation into a feminine subject unfolds in a series of corporeal changes that do not involve castration, the most direct example of male-to-female transmogrifi cation can be found in the Dongfang Bubai character in Swordsman 2 . Th e arch villain in the fi lm, Dongfang Bubai, castrates himself to practice a lethal form of martial art (documented in Th e Precious Sunfl ower Scripture [ ]) that

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elevates him to the top of the common martial world ( jianghu ). Th is accomplishment earns him the assignation of the “undefeated in the East,” the literal meaning of his name (and an unambiguous allusion to Mao Zedong’s pompous appetite for power at the time when the original novel was written). Leung ( 2008 ) has argued that in this loose fi lmic adapta- tion of Jin Yong’s 1963 novel, Th e Smiling, Proud Wanderer ( ), the casting of Brigitte Lin, an actress famous for her immense beauty, exemplifi es a genuine attempt to enable certain aspects of transsexual subjectivity to emerge on the screen (pp. 71–77). Above all, the telling diff erences between the novel (written in the Maoist era) and its cinematic rendering (produced in the context of increasing queer visibility in Hong Kong) challenge other homonormative critiques of the fi lm (Chou 1995 , p. 300; Yau 1996 , p. 165). Whereas Dongfang Bubai dies within a chap- ter in the four-volume novel, she becomes the most prominent character in the movie, usurping even the limelight of the male protagonist Linghu Chong. With its plot revolving around Dongfang Bubai’s transmogrifi ca- tion, Swordsman 2 also departs from the original novel by orchestrating an erotically charged relationship between Dongfang Bubai and Linghu Chong. Th e casting of Brigitte Lin is signifi cant in this regard, because it

Fig. 6.1 Cheng Dieyi enunciates the line “I am by nature born a girl” after repeated mistakes and corporal punishments. Chen Kaige, Farewell, My Concubine , 1993

90 H. Chiang

allows Dongfang Bubai to re-emerge on screen as a beautiful woman , no longer a half-castrated man (Fig. 6.2 ).

In a later reading, Leung highlights the negative connotations of Dongfang Bubai’s transformation. According to Leung’s reassess- ment ( 2012 ), Dongfang Bubai’s transsexuality “is explicitly fi gured in the fi lm as evidence of the character’s ruthless ambition, destruc- tive power, and monstrosity. By intimately linking Dongfang Bubai’s will to dominate the world with the transformation of her body from male to female, the fi lm has displaced anxiety about totalitarian rule onto the sex-changed body, which it portrays to be both dangerously seductive and violently destructive” (p. 188). For our purposes, it is worth noting that this displacement works only because Dongfang Bubai has been assigned an unrivaled measure of martial art skill. Her self-infl icted sex change, then, mimics not only the castration expe- rience of Chinese eunuchs, but also their infamous image of being politically threatening agents. Th is personifi cation of insubordination enables castrated men to exhibit extraordinary skills superior to other gender “normal” characters in the fi lm, but, at the same time, condi- tions the demonization of their social role and signifi cance. In this regard, eunuchs and castrated fi gures in Sinophone cinema represent

Fig. 6.2 Dongfang Bubai’s fi rst encounter with Linghu Chong, already appearing as a beautiful woman rather than a half-castrated man. Tsui Hark, Swordsman 2 , 1992

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subjects of what Stryker ( 1994 ) calls “transsexual monstrosity” and “transgender rage.”

More recently, two fi lms have appropriated and reinvented this image of eunuchs as at once powerful and demonic: Su Chao-Bin and John Woo’s Reign of Assassins ( 2010 ) and Tsui Hark’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate ( 2011 ). Set in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the Reign of Assassins tells the story of an assassin gang called the Dark Stone, whose goal is to collect all of the mummifi ed remains of an Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhi. In one of the most climatic and shocking moments in the fi lm, the Dark Stone gang’s leader and an accomplished martial artist, Cao Feng, is revealed to be a eunuch who has served the imperial palace for over fi ve decades, but remains the lowest rank of the nine-grade system of public servants. Th roughout the fi lm, Cao embod- ies two opposing social statuses, standing at both the top of the Dark Stone gang and the bottom of the Chinese imperial court. His inten- tion in tracking down and unifying the two halves of Bodhi’s mummi- fi ed remains is to stimulate the re-growth of his phallic organ by way of acquiring the mystical power promised by Bodhi’s cadaver—in short, to reverse his castration permanently through an ultimate one-time trans- mogrifi cation. Incidentally, Ming China is notorious for being one of the historical epochs during which eunuchs wielded an unprecedented, enor- mous measure of political power (Tsai 1996 ). When mapped onto Cao’s martial art invincibility, this form of political threat to the Chinese world order symbolized the historical backdrop against which the nationalist condemning rhetoric of eunuchs began to accumulate in the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries (Chiang 2012 ). Th e demonization of Cao in the Reign of Assassins , therefore, strikes resonance with the culmi- nation of an anti- eunuch sentiment emerging from the waning decades of the Qing imperium (Chiang and Wong 2016 ). Like Dongfang Bubai in Swordsman 2 , Cao Feng exhibits a form of “transsexual monstrosity”, underpinned by martial art prowess that surpasses all other gender “nor- mal” characters, at the same time being portrayed as the most malicious fi ghter in the fi lm. Like Cheng Dieyi in Farewell, My Concubine , Cao Feng’s death serves as a vigorous reminder of the ultimate fate of eunuchs in the despotic past: to physically disappear from the world, but posing an abiding phantasmic presence in our cultural consciousness.

92 H. Chiang

Also set in the Ming dynasty, but more precisely during the reign of Emperor Chenghua (1464–1487), the Flying Swords is in fact a sequel to the New Dragon Gate Inn ( 1992). By drawing again on the historical context of the Ming dynasty, the fi lm unambiguously uses the infamous manipulative power of Ming eunuchs as a concrete cultural resource for demarcating the gender alterity of eunuchs in the fi lm. As is well known, Emperor Chenghua (1447–1487) established the secret ser- vice Western Depot ( ) in 1477 under the directorship of the ruth- less eunuch Wang Zhi ( ), who, according to the historian Henry Tsai ( 1996 ), “practiced the worst aspects of terror during his tenure” (p. 115). It is reasonable to assume, then, that Yu Huatian ( ), the most powerful eunuch character presiding over the Western Depot in the Flying Swords , is a fi ctional representation of Wang. Identical to Wang’s reputation, the Western Depot under Yu’s leadership off ends many infl u- ential ministers, especially those working for the Eastern Depot. To para- phrase Tsai’s ( 1996 ) depiction of Wang, “offi cials and ordinary were so frightened by [Yu’s] entourage that everyone hid as soon as they heard the depot agents coming to their vicinity” (p. 115). In fact, the story- line of the Flying Swords mirrors the fate of the Western Depot and its leaders—their eventual elimination. However, there is one notable diff er- ence between Yu in fi ctive construction and Wang in real life: martial art prowess. Although there is evidence to suggest that Wang loved martial arts and military science as a child, the physical power of Yu surpasses any imaginable measure of reality that can be associated with Wang’s military skill in terms of both degree and quality (Tsai 1996 , p. 116). In short, by being Wang Zhi’s Sinophone reincarnation, Yu exhibits “transsexual monstrosity” in ways similar to Cheng Dieyi, Dongfang Bubai, and Cao Feng. Despite of, or precisely because of, their invincible martial art strength, all of these characters take on the arch enemy role in Sinophone fi lms. Captured in the structural correlations of the body biopolitical and the body geopolitical, the transnational traffi c of governmentality in queer Sinophone cultural production precipitates from the periph- eral adaptation of historical mainland Chinese culture—a chronological leap in appropriation of an anti-eunuch mentality that fi rst emerged in late Qing China but continues to linger and defi ne the global cultural imaginary.

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The Transfeminist Butterfl y

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfl y ( 1989 ) and its cinematic adaptation directed by David Cronenberg ( 1993 ) have attracted signifi cant scholarly attention, but no critic has approached them from a decisively transfemi- nist perspective. Th at is hardly suggesting, of course, that the transgender elements of the story—notably the gender transformations of the two protagonists Song Liling and René Gallimard—have escaped much of the existing critical analyses of M. Butterfl y . Nonetheless, most serious commentaries on the play or the fi lm tend to center on the primacy of a mimetic displacement between gender, on the one hand, and other indexes of social identity on the other. Th us Dorinne Kondo’s ( 1990 ) astute deconstruction of the mutual imbrication of racial and gender stereotypes, and David Eng’s ( 1994 , 2001 , pp. 137–166) extension of such method by way of incorporating sexuality, often look through rather than at transgenderism as the epistemological tenor of political change. Marjorie Garber’s ( 1992 ) otherwise compelling reading highlights this potential pitfall more carefully, claiming that transvestism operates in the story as symptomatic of what she calls a “category crisis”—since it is “once again, something to be looked through on the way to a story about men or women, Asian or European” (p. 17).

Yet, the kind of transfeminist inquiry I propose here far exceeds a mere polemic about the cultural anxiety of cross-dressing. In extending other scholars’ critiques of the essentialist and overlapping constructions of gender, racial, and sexual identities, I argue that the category of transgen- derism itself reorients the political agenda of feminism beyond a sheer intersection of gender with other identitarian grids in a confi ned geopo- litical context. Th is globalization of feminist politics subverts a quintes- sential root of cultural (dis)identifi cation that has heretofore garnered insuffi cient attention in deep interpretations of M. Butterfl y : the govern- ing hegemony of cultural nationalism. 3 By incorporating M. Butterfl y into the remit of Sinoglossiac production, my following analysis asks ques- tions that are meant to acquire valence across diff erent medial contexts: How does class revolution matter to M. Butterfl y ? Is the story a critique of

3 On minority subjects’ negotiation with mainstream culture, see Muñoz ( 1999 ).

94 H. Chiang

Orientalism or the East, or more specifi cally, of American society, French politics, or China? Is the butterfl y a metaphor for displacing the bound- aries of being human and, ultimately, embodiment itself? 4 Extending my analysis in the previous section, we might also add: In what ways can we map the cultural politics of life onto the geopolitics of history? How to approach the shifting grounds of imperial hegemony through the lens of gender and (trans)national entanglements? By making transfeminism the basis of a multidirectional critique, my goal is not to off er an inclusive, singular response to these questions (Enke 2012 ). Rather, I aim to enun- ciate a set of Sinoglossiac feminist modulations that centralizes the category of transgenderism in order to re-present the political ambition of M. Butterfl y in a robust transcultural frame. Th ese modulations develop a critique of the symbolic phallus in its imbrication with the cultural reach of China’s geopolitical rise.

A lasting legacy of M. Butterfl y stems from its staging of a psycho- analytic catharsis, culminating in the climax of its fi nale. Th is cathartic surprise would not have worked without a longstanding motif lurking in the popular imagination about cross-cultural romance, especially one between a Western man and an Asian woman (de Lauretis 1999 ). In fact, the title of M. Butterfl y proclaims itself unambiguously as a descendent of Puccini’s infamous opera, Madame Butterfl y , one of the few well-known Italian operas that actually casted an eye on Asia (Tarling 2015 ). As the love story between Gallimard, a French accountant working in China, and Song, a Chinese opera singer, builds up its momentum, the audience is suddenly shocked by a dual gender inversion: not only does Song turn out to be a male spy working for the Chinese Communist Party, but after fi nding out Song’s actual identity, Gallimard decides to transform him- self into the Oriental butterfl y that he has always fantasized about. Th is reciprocal inversion calls into question the very realness of their mutual aff ection. Instead of the Asian heroine committing a suicide, a famil- iar ending in such tragedies as Madame Butterfl y and its Broadway vari- ant Miss Saigon , the white male protagonist succumbs to his own death, an ironic sign of liberation (Clement 1988 , pp. 43–47). Th e cathartic twist is only a twist insofar as it redirects dominant assumptions about

4 On the history of being human, see Smith ( 2007 ).

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cross- cultural sexual fantasy and the reciprocal intersections of gender and race in contemporary Western society.

Rather than seeking to uncover a “repressed truth” (the real penis, the real Whiteness, the real homosexual, the real lover, and so forth) behind this double gender reversal, it is perhaps more promising to view the gen- der transformations themselves as occupying some metaphysical primacy (Chow 1996 , p. 70). By this, I mean to consider gender as constitu- tive of the core parameters of being human and, accordingly, the trans- gender metamorphosis of the two protagonists as representing a more foundational political outlook of human lifehood. Th is echoes Stryker’s ( 1998 ) insight that the analytic power of transgenderism “promises to off er important new insights into such fundamental questions as how bodies mean or what constitutes human personhood” (p. 155). Focusing transfeminism back on to the question of gender, Gayle Salamon ( 2008 ) has argued that “the transgendered subject is the constitutive outside of binary gender” (p. 118). In order to bring in the relevance of class con- fl ict, for example, or the cognate question of human endeavor into our reading, we must tackle the historical background of the 1960s, the com- munist fervour that fuelled Maoist inclinations in Paris in particular, as the larger context for rethinking the transcultural critique of M. Butterfl y (Bourg 2004 ).

It is important to bear in mind that while the play M. Butterfl y quickly built up its fame in New York City between 20 March 1988 and 27 January 1990 (and eventually around the world), a similar Broadway musical adaptation of Puccini’s opera was premiered in London in September 1989: Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s Miss Saigon . Evidently, there is a stark contrast in the geographical settings between the original opera, on the one hand, and the subsequent dra- matic and musical adaptations on the other. Whereas Madame Butterfl y tells a story between an American naval offi cer and a Japanese well-to-do lady, in both M. Butterfl y and Miss Saigon , the settings are relocated to a communist country: China and Vietnam respectively. Moreover, the lead female character in M. Butterfl y turns out to be a transvestite secret agent, whereas Miss Saigon is crowned as such only at the place where she works as a prostitute. Th ere is one more notable diff erence in the M. Butterfl y variant: the Western man no longer comes from America, but France,

96 H. Chiang

where the May 1968 movement serves as the backdrop for the story. In a diff erent way, Miss Saigon also picks up on the theme of communism in Cold War Asia by building on the Vietnam War and the Fall of Saigon as its main historical stage. If M. Butterfl y presents a genuine critique of Madame Butterfl y , one of its chief mechanisms comprises the narrative positioning of class struggle at the center of world revolutionary politics.

Th e centrality of global economic systems to the plot (un)layering of M. Butterfl y embeds a diff erent, perhaps more universal, sediment of social strife: the question of being human itself. As Kristin Ross ( 2002 ), Richard Wolin ( 2010 ), and others have convincingly demonstrated, French inter- est in Maoism reached a peak in the May 1968 movement, after which it evolved into a new vision of social democracy, grounded in a language of “human rights” for which French citizens have always prided themselves since its invention in the Enlightenment (Robcis 2012 ). High-profi le public intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva weighed in, and their brief political allegiance with Maoism in the late 1960s was quite pivotal for their subsequent intellectual reorienta- tion (e.g., resulting in, most notably, Foucault’s conceptualization of bio- politics) (Wolin 2010 , 288–349). Th e French discourse of human rights as an axiom of human life, connected as it was to a communist rhetoric and more specifi cally to an ideological Sinophilia at the time, casts light on the mirroring of gender and cross-national mimicries between Song and Gallimard. Th is demands a rethinking of their transgender subjectiv- ity on its own terms: not as conditional of appending other social objec- tives, but as expressive of a broader historical struggle over the meaning and legitimacy of human organization.

Th e global politics of the 1960s, then, provides a key ingredient to our contextualization of the Song-Gallimard love story. Th is is a time in China when both the Peking Opera and European operas are con- sidered “bourgeois” and relics of the past. In 1968, at the peak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Song is sent to a labor camp for “re-education.” While the camp’s loudspeaker is gradually replaced by the familiar music of Madame Butterfl y , the scene of Song in the camp fades and the camera shifts to Paris 1968, where Gallimard is watch- ing a performance of the opera in tears. Afterward, Gallimard reminisces about China in a bar, and the man sitting next to him looks out of the

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window and remarks that Paris is looking more like Beijing, with stu- dents shouting Maoist slogans and rioting in the streets. As we know from the work of Wolin and others, this initial upsurge of mass student interest in Maoism actually emerged from French students’ decisive lack of concrete engagement with Chinese culture. Th e meaning of “cultural revolution” in Paris changed over time as the educated class became disil- lusioned with Maoism, but here it unveils the ugly side of the Butterfl y fantasy. As Rey Chow ( 1996 ) puts it,

“Is “revolution” itself, the fi lm seems to say, not simply another type of “fantasy stereotype”—the fantasy stereotype that exploits in the name of the collective, the people? If we mobilize, as we must, criticism against Western “orientalist” and “imperialist” fantasies about the East, then should the cruelties committed by way of this other fantasy stereotype not also be under attack? Th e pro-Chinese Communist fervor in France of the 1960s—is it an awakening from Western imperialism and orientalism, or is it not simply the other side of that dream called Butterfl y, which fetishizes the East this time not in the form of an erotic object but in the form of a political object, not in the form of the beautiful “oriental woman” but in the form of the virile oriental man, the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong? (pp. 79–80)”

Perhaps the dream of the Western masculine subject has never been of a submissive butterfl y, but of a revolutionary prototype (from the Middle Kingdom) with the vision and power to overthrow the conditional pres- ent and to inculcate a utopian future.

Th is connection between Paris and Beijing, therefore, suggests that the gender crossings of Song and Gallimard represent a deeper yearn- ing for cross-national politicization. Th is confl ation, convergence, and confl uence between gender transgression and interregional mimesis is driven home most forcefully by the most famous and yet controver- sial scene in M. Butterfl y , when Gallimard decides to transform himself from a white middle-class male subject into an Oriental butterfl y (in this concluding scene, he announces “My name is René Gallimard, also known as Madame Butterfl y”). After putting on a wig, applying thick layers of lipstick and facial powder, and wearing a kimono, Gallimard

98 H. Chiang

commits suicide by cutting his throat with a piece of mirror (allusion to the “mirror stage” in Lacanian psychoanalysis; Fig. 6.3 ). Diff erent crit- ics have approached Gallimard’s fate diff erently, but there seems to be a general consensus that his suicidal transgenderism symbolizes an abrupt about-face of the processual manifestations of castration. Whereas throughout the bulk of the story, Song is depicted as the “castrated” (wo)man, M. Butterfl y actually concludes with Gallimard castrating himself. However, what Gallimard castrates is not his sex, race, or gen- der. Th ese readings would lure themselves into the myth of a “repressed truth,” because they merely reify the normativity of the real penis, the real Whiteness, and the real androcentric manhood. Rather, borrowing from Chow’s ( 1996 ) description of Gallimard’s fi nal gesture as exempli- fying the visible painting of fantasy, I consider what he castrates in the very act of slashing his throat to be the projection of political and erotic fantasy (pp. 84–85). 5 Th e cut signals the white man’s death, but it also represents an act of removing the symbolic phallus—the quintessential ground of white masculine identity.

5 Here, Chow is drawing on Lacan ( 1981 , pp. 91–104).

Fig. 6.3 After transforming himself into Madame Butterfl y, René Gallimard looks into the mirror with which he eventually takes his life. David Cronenberg, M. Butterfl y , 1993

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If M. Butterfl y is historicized vis-à-vis the global politics of the 1960s, China emerges as the Lacanian phallus embodied by the supposed Oriental butterfl y—an ontological symbol that signals its detachment from the French white man (the real Oriental woman, however ironi- cally) the moment such relinquishment defi nes his death. 6 China, it seems, carries the seat of hyper-virile masculinity, having long been con- sidered the historical origins of all things “under heaven” ( ) through and beyond the Maoist period (Chen 2001 ). Indeed, the fi lm ends with the “butterfl y” (Song) fl ying back to China. With that, France is left in a vacuum—a dispossession—of Maoist passion, and we are left not with the Western misperception of the East, but with the decolonizing traces of communist China itself.

As I have been suggesting, Gallimard’s transmogrifi cation is a form of castration, compounding aesthetics and ethics, but it is not simply a sexual, racial, or gender castration on the level of bodily erasure. Instead, his self-slashing castrates the promise of projecting a political and sexual fantasy. Th is is mirrored in Song’s double inversion (from a man into a woman and back into a man). Again, at the end of the fi lm the butterfl y fl ies back to China. But we must also not forget that Song is no longer the “butterfl y” by this point; rather, Song’s very presence implies the sym- bolic status of China as the phallus that has been cut off from the white man’s identity constitution. In other words, this ending makes a powerful statement about China itself: that Gallimard’s death also resembles the death of China’s own projection of political fantasy. Much like the way that scholars have understood empires to contain the origins of their own decline, Song’s homecoming to China echoes the demise of Maoism in Paris in the late 1960s: a political formation that is ingrained with the ground of its own undoing. Th e colonial phallus, after all, retracts back to its homeland under a diff erent guise and relinquishes its project(ion) of political desire.

6 Although de Lauretis ( 1999 , p. 330) calls attention to Song’s yearning in intriguing ways, her reading tends to take for granted the homosexual nature of Song’s desire and inadvertently risks ontologizing the myth of a “repressed truth” about the normativity of the real penis—Song’s penis. Regardless of their physical make-up, the butterfl y fantasy can easily operate in a reciprocal fashion between Song and Gallimard, making a primordial presupposition of homosexuality always volatile.

100 H. Chiang

Whereas most critics have construed Hwang’s play as an eff ort to chal- lenge Orientalism from the viewpoint of disenfranchized minorities, my rendering of Song and Gallimard’s gender transitions as a political end per se, rather than a means through which to look, makes possible under- standing M. Butterfl y as a critique of global “China” as much as it is of late capitalist America. Th e diff erent crossovers featured in the fi lm often- times subvert wider national and geopolitical frameworks at the same time that they trouble gender. Gallimard’s transformation into a Japanese butterfl y makes the Orient all the more opaque than a simple citation of the beauty of Chinese operatic arts; Song’s conversion into a powerful communist spy highlights the trope of class struggle (as political struggle) absent in Puccini’s opera, from which the power of his romance narrative with Gallimard originally derived; and Hwang’s rerouting of the racial and gender oppression of Asian Americans through a historical context rooted in both an European genealogy of human rights and a revolution- ary modularity of Sinocentrism undermines any subsidiary articulation of nationalism for anchoring a story about, above all, transgenderism itself.

Conclusion: Entangled Fate

Rey Chow ( 2012 ) has recently defi ned “entanglements” as “the linkages and enmeshments that keep things apart; the voidings and uncoverings that hold things together” (p. 12). Th is essay highlights the fate of trans- mogrifi ed subjects as the common ground around which the “entangled” meanings of castration cohere in cultural Sinoglossia across the Pacifi c. In presenting M. Butterfl y as a “Sinoglossiac” rather than a “Sinophone” fi lm, my aim has been to supersede the lingo-centric and translational limita- tions of Sinophone theory. Th e representation of castration in Sinophone wuxia fi lms tends to be routed through the embodied experience of martial art prowess, a cinematic technique that foregrounds the gender liminality of eunuchs. Yet, this unorthodox personifi cation functions as a convenient rationale for the social denigration of castrated subjects— taken as symptomatic of their “transsexual monstrosity.” Th e Sinophone fi lmic articulation of castration thus emanates from a contemporary

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adaptation in the cultural periphery of an earlier anti-eunuch sentiment that epitomized the heart of fi n-de-siècle revolutionary Chinese con- sciousness. On the other hand, castration in M. Butterfl y is depicted most colorfully in Gallimard’s transmogrifi cation from a French white male accountant into an Oriental Butterfl y. Yet his transformation climaxes at the enactment of his suicidal outro, representing the eradication of the possibility to project a political and sexual ambition, a resisting denuncia- tion, if you will, of Maoist colonial fantasy. Th e kaleidoscopic operations of “castration” converge in its fatal excess—death as the common destiny of feminine subjects, whether it is Cheng Dieyi or René Gallimard— across diff erent medial contexts within and beyond the cultural signi- fi er “China.” Sinoglossia theory therefore brings Sinophone martial arts fi lms and M. Butterfl y together by construing the global Chinese cultural imaginary as the fulcrum of its critical vitality.

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