Asian scopic modernities: alternative visibilities of transnational Chinese masculinity in global cinema

Deposited with permission of the author. © 2006 Alvin Kok-yong Koh.This thesis examines transnational Chinese masculinity as the articulation of Asian scopic modernities in contemporary Hong Kong, Hollywood and mainland Chinese films. Transnational Chinese masculinity is a transborder formation of Chinese male representations that occurs across national boundaries via dispersed networks of production, distribution, and consumption. These representations constitute the modernity of transnational Chinese masculinity. This thesis investigates significant cinematic events that contribute to these new conditions of visibility: the popularity of Hong Kong actors Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung who embody marginalised paradigms of masculinity in Asia; the crossovers of Hong Kong stars into Hollywood; and the advent of Zhang Yimou's alternative blockbuster films and Quentin Tarantino's trans-Asian films. These cinematic events form part of a mosaic of visual modernities in Asia - what is herein defined as Asian scopic modernities. “Asian scopic modernities" refers to the revolutionary transformations of visual relations in Asia that result in a plurality of modern scopic regimes. The transformations occur in various areas of cultural production in a complex relationship to modernity as a societal, cultural, political, and historical phenomenon. Asian scopic modernities are alternative visual regimes constituted by the disjunctive global forces or Asian regionalism, Chinese crossovers, and Chinese translocalisms. Each of these forces foregrounds a logic of visuality that destabilises the Chinese male subject uniquely--these logics are identification, mimesis, and becoming. Each of these logics is accompanied by corresponding corporealisations: the charismatic, the mimetic, and the becoming-Chinese bodies. These bodies subvert the dominant scopic regime of patriarchal Chinese masculinity through resubjectivisation in the public domestic, embodied processes or de-mirroring, and the temporal deterritorialisation or Chineseness