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Sword-Wielding and Gun-Shooting Women: Gender and Post-Colonial Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s Films
Lei, Chin-Pang
2022-11
Source PublicationGender and Action Films 1980–2000: Beauty in Motion
PublisherEmerald
Pages139-152
Abstract

With its worldwide fame for making action films, Hong Kong cinema has been defined as masculine. Action films, including the costumed martial arts films and the modern gangster films, have been a major genre in Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s on. Despite the dominant masculinity, women still play significant roles in some of these films. In fact, fighting women leave footprints in the history of Hong Kong cinema, which precede their counterparts in the West and even provide models for Hollywood after 2000. This chapter focuses on the female characters portrayed by the acclaimed Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, whose works have an ambiguous connection to mainstream genres. He modifies Hong Kong action films and creates unconventional female characters such as the drug dealer in Chungking Express (1994), the killer dispatcher in Fallen Angels (1995), the swordswoman in Ashes of Time (1994), and the kung fu master in The Grandmaster (2013). Wong’s films have been mush discussed in academia, but gender images therein are quite ignored. With high intertextuality, these characters are used to question mainstream action films and redefine women’s roles in male’s cinematic space. In addition, via the writing of these women, Wong constructs an open and ambivalent post-colonial Hong Kong identity. This paper contextualises the figures of sword-wielding and gun-shooting women and examines how Wong Kar-wai deploys these images to articulate the cultural identity of a post-colonial city.

KeywordGender Action Films Wong Kar-wai Hong Kong Post-colonial Culture Genre
Document TypeBook chapter
CollectionFaculty of Social Sciences
DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION
AffiliationUniversity of Macau
First Author AffilicationUniversity of Macau
Recommended Citation
GB/T 7714
Lei, Chin-Pang. Sword-Wielding and Gun-Shooting Women: Gender and Post-Colonial Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s Films[M]. Gender and Action Films 1980–2000: Beauty in Motion:Emerald, 2022, 139-152.
APA Lei, Chin-Pang.(2022). Sword-Wielding and Gun-Shooting Women: Gender and Post-Colonial Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s Films. Gender and Action Films 1980–2000: Beauty in Motion, 139-152.
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