UBC Press Blog

Globalization, Postcolonialism and Chinese Patriarchy

Eliza W.Y. Lee, ed. 2003, Chapter 2: Engendering a Legal System: The Unique Challenge of Postcolonial Hong Kong by Carole J. Petersen, p. 23-26.

Gender and Change in Hong Kong

As recently as 1990, the concept of gender equality did not really exist in Hong Kong’s legal system. There was no legal right to equality in the colonial constitution and no laws prohibiting sex discrimination or sexual harassment. Although the British government had already ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), it had not extended CEDAW to Hong Kong because the Hong Kong government did not want to be bound by it (Byrnes and Chan 1993). Certain other international human rights conventions that applied to Hong Kong included a right to equality, but they were not directly enforceable in the Hong Kong courts (Byrnes 1992). As a result, sex discrimination was openly practised and widely accepted as the norm. For example, women were legally barred from inheriting much of the land in the New Territories, there were discriminatory laws and employment regulations, and virtually every newspaper contained sex-specific job advertisements (Jones 1994; Petersen 1996; Samuels 1993). Since the colonial government, traditionalists, and the business community strongly opposed sex-discrimination legislation, there seemed little hope of meaningful law reform.

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Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong

Hok-Sze Leung 2008, Chapter 3, p. 65-67.

Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, Helen Hok-Sze Leung, 2008

When Stanley Kwan received an invitation from the British Film Institute in 1996 to make a film for the commemorative series “The Century of Cinema,” he set out to make a well-researched and informative documentary about the general history of Chinese cinema. As he immersed himself in the film archive in Shanghai, however, a queer turn of events steered the project in an entirely different direction. Kwan was struck by two phenomena in Chinese cinema that have wielded enormous influence on his life and career: a strong undercurrent of homoeroticism and a long tradition of non-normative gender expressions. As Kwan became more and more absorbed in these issues, he abandoned his original vision. Yin ± Yang: Gender in Chinese Cinema (Stanley Kwan, 1996), a cinematic essay that combines film history with Kwan’s personal reflections on gender and sexuality, emerged from these side-tracked efforts. The film has often been characterized as Kwan’s first public declaration of his identity as a gay man: the film critic Sek Kei, for instance, calls it a “frank and direct expression of his homo-sexuality.” Yet, this narrative of gay desire is also complicated at every turn by continual – if not always coherent – musings on issues of gender variance. The Chinese title, Nansheng nuxiang, literally “boy with a girl’s face,” refers to a type of “face” within the ancient “face reading” tradition (xiangxue) that portends prosperity. Indeed, this “face” of the girl-boy – the transgender face – leaves an indelible imprint on the winding narrative of the film, which meanders from Kwan’s ambivalent relation with his father, his early obsession with the hyper-masculinized figures of action stars Bruce Lee and Wang Yu, and his later penchant for making “women’s films” to the various forms of cross-dressing and cross-gender embodiments that he traces in Chinese cinema. Continue reading…