The Cultural Politics of Gender Performance

the CULTURAL POLITICS of GENDER PERFORMANCE

This essay examines the cultural politics of genderperformance in relation to the conditions of intelligibility in Chinese society. Cultural imaginings of gender in China are influenced not only by the ideological apparatuses but also by a traditional mode of epistemology that sustains a regime of collective make-believe wherein homosexual subjects are regarded as unintelligible. Although homosexuality exists in social reality, the lack of its own truthful representation creates numerous misunderstandings that prevent the development of a positive identity in Chinese culture, and homosexual sensibilities are suppressed by the hegemony of cultural values that drive sexual deviants to self-negation and self-sacrifice. Fe/male impersonation, as an oblique mode of expression, reveals a radical difference in desire which, undefined by the existing measures of epistemology, characterizes a phantasmal situation of the obscure human passion that fails to produce full presence in Chinese cultural space.

IGLOBAL GAZE / LOCAL GAYS

n recent years, as part of the process of globalization, Western gay studies have spread all over the world. By creating ‘an idealized image of ‘‘the West’’ as a yardstick by which to measure the perceived progress or failings of gay activities around the globe,’ as Elaine Jeffreys observes, Western gay studies have extended the liberal conceptions of human rights to support gay movements in non-Western countries, while missing the point that ‘different nations and cultures produce and uphold diverse sexual subjectivities’ (2007, p. 153). To a certain extent, the globalization of Western gay studies, in J. K. GibsonGraham’s words, seems to be a soft process of penetration that differs from the ‘hard, thrusting’ capitalism in economic or political domains (1996/1997, p. 1); and it constructs a transnational as well as translational relationship between the global gaze and local gays, providing an analytical framework to intelligize male homosexual expressions in non-Western countries. It seems to suggest a bond between analysts and analysands or an association between the power of

‘To see oneself as ‘‘ gay ,’’is to adhere to a distinctly modern invention’

- Dennis Altman

Applying the modern concept of ‘gay’ to Chinese homosexuality, we have to consider the problem of cross-cultural translation, which raises pressing questions about how non-Western homosexuality can be rendered intelligibly around the globe without ignoring their cultural specificities. The application of Western theory to the study of Chinese homosexuality may suggest a practice of cross-cultural ventriloquism, but the act of ventriloquy itself has a paradoxical dimension, signifying a two-way process of speaking for and being spoken for by the other. On the one hand, the image of a homosexual dan from China, for example, may look exotic or mysterious when it crosses the boundaries of its local cultural territories, and it must be translated into a globally-sensible language before it can be accepted as intelligible in the West. On the other hand, however, Western gay studies, which have developed out of their own socio-political contexts, may require an exercise of self-reflexivity, due to the encounter with other homosexual expressions from the rest of the world. Thus what has been taken for granted as a universal gay identity must be re-examined, as ‘the ways in which gay identities will change as ‘‘Asians’’ recuperate Western images and bend them to their own purposes’ (Altman 2001, p. 7). The process of recuperation not only involves the politics of negotiation between cultures but also enacts a recoiling power of theory with double-edged quality.

It is indeed a paradoxical moment when modern Western theory meets ancient Eastern cultures, but the anachronistic meeting would allow for more readings against the grains of our own habitual thinking and produce more insightful analyses attuned to the nuances of different cultural peculiarities. ‘As gay activists from non-Western contexts become more and more involved in settling agendas,’ notes Michael Warner, ‘Anglo-American queer theorists will have to be more alert to the globalizing and localizing tendencies of our theoretical languages’ (1993, p. xii). The study of Chinese homosexuality, however, does not mean to find theoretical equivalences in different cultures for substitution, but to examine the various expressions and dimensions of humanity under different conditions of intelligibility. The relationship ‘between intelligibility and the human,’ as Judith Butler observes, ‘is an urgent one; it carries a certain theoretical urgency, precisely at those points where the human is encountered at the limits of intelligibility itself’ (2001, p. 621). The following discussion, therefore, is not exactWly a ‘gay study,’ since its focus is not on the ‘normal’ gays, but rather on the life and death a homosexual dan who does not see himself as ‘gay’ and whose identity falls outside of the intelligible limits of the ‘modern invention.’ Against the global gaze, this study of local dan in China nonetheless may not only destabilize the dominant notion of ‘gay,’ but also open up wider spaces for new discussions of the complicated relationship ‘between intelligibility and the human’ through interrogating the ideological, material, institutional and cultural aspects of the formation of different sexual expressions.

An inquiry into fe/male impersonation

A/SEXUAL BROTHERHOOD

Affectionately called Gorgor (‘elder brother’), Leslie Cheung, a celebrated film actor, committed suicide on April 1, 2003, by jumping from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong, China. Best known to Western audiences for his role in Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji, 1993), Cheung is one of the few superstars who has woven his homosexual life into art. Following Chen Dieyi, the part he plays in the film, Cheung eventually chose death to express himself. While saddened by the loss of their favorite superstar, many of Cheung’s fans were unable to make sense of his death, which strikes a rather melancholy note about an obscure dimension of homosexuality/humanity, provoking questions directed toward an inconsolable passion buried in the wrinkles of Chinese culture.

With a history of several thousand years, China has developed complicated, if not contradictory, sensibilities towards homosexuality, which is usually expressed in obscure terms. What makes the study more challenging, in addition, is the oblique mode of representation that is, the clandestine style of Chinese tong xing lian (love of the same sex) that exists in the crevices of history under the pressure of a deeprooted force that suppresses homosexual desire. To understand this situation, we have to look into not only the ‘appearance’ but also the ‘disappearance’ of homosexual discourse in Chinese culture, and to investigate how the power of cultural force and political violence affirm and perpetuate patriarchal and heterosexist values. During the early periods of Chinese history, there might be a trend of ‘male favoritism,’ as anecdotes about emperors or masters and their male ‘favorites’ were recorded in histories. These records, however, are often so vague about the sexual dimension that it is hard to grasp for sure the nature of their relationships. Since most of the ‘favorites’ were servants in a feudal proprietary system, their relationships with their masters might not be as sexual as servile. As Bret Hinsch observes, ‘Chinese terminology therefore did not emphasize an innate sexual essence, but concentrated rather on actions, tendencies, and preferences .... Hence early records mentioning men who had sexual relationships with the emperors call them ‘‘favorites,’’ a description of their political status, not of an innate sexual essence’ (1990, p. 7).

Taking the hegemonic nature of cultural representation into consideration, Hinsch points out that homosexual expressions in China have been obscured by vague euphemisms or metaphors such as ‘cut sleeve,’‘half-eaten peach’ or ‘nanfeng.’ Relatively speaking, the most common yet no less allusive term for malemale love in Chinese is ‘the passion of Long Yang,’ as the relationship between Lord Long Yang and his bosom/blossom friend was said to have enjoyed a day of ‘glorious brightness’ in history. But still, the descriptions of their relationship were more figurative than literal, as Ruan Ji writes in a poem:

In days of old there were blossom boysAn Ling and Long Yang. Young peach and plum blossoms, Dazzling with glorious brightness.

Joyful as nine springtimes; Pliant as if bowed by autumn frost.

Roving glances gave rise to beautiful seductions; Speech and laughter expelled fragrance. Hand in hand they shared love’s rapture, Sharing coverlets and bedclothes.

Couples of birds in flight, Paired wings soaring.

Cinnabar and green pigments record a vow: ‘I’ll never forget you for all eternity.’

- (cited in Hinsch 1990, pp. 7071)

An inquiry into fe/male impersonation

The passion of Long Yang has faded away in the mists of time, and his amorous vows in ‘cinnabar and green pigments’ have been erased from the palimpsests of memory. Like birds in flight, these ‘gay’ youths in either sense of the word have disappeared below the horizon of the past. What we get from the poem can best be described as an illustration of China’s indirect homosexual aesthetics, and this indirectness reflects the operation of a homophobic power. In place of the early ‘bygone love,’ China has witnessed an overwhelming production of straight or straightforward representations of asexual friendship that has been developed into a dominant form of the male bond. There are plenty of examples in classic works about the long-lasting bond among male friends for example, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin and Journey to the West, to name only a few, but none of them claims to include any indication of ‘beautiful seductions.’

The study of brotherhood in modern China, therefore, should begin with a ‘lack’ the hegemonic lack of homosexual discourse. While the code of malemale friendship occupies a prominent position in China, cultural tradition also inscribes an implicit mode of discrimination against homosexuality. On the one hand, it would be considered an admirable act to devote one’s life to a brother-friend, but on the other hand, it is intolerable to feel affection for a friend of the same sex. In some cases, however, it might be a rather challenging task to distinguish between an intense yet asexual friendship and an erotic relationship among brotherly friends. As a fascinating drama, Farewell My Concubine presents a story about such an intricate ‘friendship’ of two Peking opera actors, Chen Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou, against a historical backdrop of the painful upheavals of China in the twentieth century. The two met in a training school for opera performers when they were only little boys. Their bond develops through a cruel training and hard life, in which violent and brutal punishments are only common treatments. The young Dieyi, a shy and slight boy, is trained to perform as a dan (female impersonator) in a sense, he is forced to ‘become’ a woman which requires him to sing and remember ‘Iamby nature a girl, not a boy’ throughout his life. Later on, he becomes wellknown for his exquisite performance in the role of the ‘Concubine’ in a piece of Peking opera, from which the film takes its name. His chunky, robust childhood friend, Xiaolou, is fitted to play the role of the masculine ‘King.’ For Dieyi, the bond between him and his stage brother is both emotional and professional, as he attempts to carry his passion for the King over into real life. However, Xiaolou seems to be unaware of Dieyi’s feeling and gives his heart to a prostitute named Juxian. Their professional and personal bond continues over several decades of tribulations and violence until the moment when Dieyi, fully dressed up in Concubine’s costume, cuts his throat in front of Xiaolou, the King.

On the surface, the film seems to focus on the enduring friendship between Dieyi and Xiaolou, but such an intimate bond is just a form of imposture that covers an absorbed passion. As Jacques Derrida observes in his examination of androcentric friendship, since women cannot become friends with men, the ‘exclusion of the feminine in this philosophical paradigm would then confer on friendship the essential and essentially sublime figure of virile homosexuality’ (1997, p. 279). The ‘sublime figure,’ however, may function as a kind of symbolic substitution that belies the illusion of a virile brotherhood. It is crucial to note that while homosexuality might be a spin-off of the structure of brotherhood, it represents a different social order the two orders sometimes converge and sometimes separate. In Chinese society, as Susan Mann notes, the bonds among men such as sworn brotherhood ‘were key to success and survival for rich and poor, elite and commoners’ (2000, p. 1601). Although the notion of brotherhood implies a kind of mutual attraction, the longing for the ‘same heart’ (tong xin) is considered as different from the physical passion for the ‘same sex’ (tong xing). In the context of Chinese cultural tradition, the character of xing has a few meanings, which include ‘nature,’‘property,’‘temperament,’ and ‘sex.’ Very often, however, the word of tong xing is used to express only the like-mindedness in a friendship, while the sexual connotation is suppressed. By excluding sex from its social functions, brotherhood is transformed into a convenient representation of orthodox values such as loyalty and trustworthiness. The twist in Farewell My Concubine is that Dieyi becomes increasingly aware of his brotherly passion that can no longer be described in terms of compatible temperament. He wants a brotherhood that would embrace both heart and sex. Without any possibility of fulfillment in that social situation, his passion changes into an obsessive phantom, an encrypted secret of forbidden desire under the force of prohibition. The implication here is that the cultural force that endorses virile brotherhood also has a hand in destroying the ‘brotherly bond’ that Dieyi wants to establish. What the film reveals, in other words, is an unfamiliar mode of a/sexual brotherhood that excludes neither the feminine nor sex. Throughout Chinese history, however, this kind of tong xing brotherhood has been desexed and translated into ‘sublime’ expressions of stoic masculine friendship.

On the one hand, it would be considered an admirable act to devote one’s life to a brother-friend, but on the other hand, it is intolerable to feel affection for a friend of the same sex.

An inquiry into fe/male impersonation

Cultural intelligibility of brotherhood in China hinges on the lack of homosexuality; and this situation suggests a dominant regulatory system that Judith Butler refers to as the ‘heterosexual matrix’ ‘that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’ or denaturalized (1990, p. 151). The matrix of intelligibility provides a framework of normative principles. To deviate or to exist outside the normative is to jeopardize one’s viability as a social subject. As a result, those who deviate from the normative frames are often constructed through the rhetoric of pejorative terms as either perversely unintelligible or intelligibly perverse. The institutional expectation of aberrant behavior thus sets the conditions through which the force of intelligibility runs. To understand Chinese homosexuality or the lack of it, we have to examine how Chinese ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are formulated intelligibly within a complex socio-cultural matrix.

woman reading about the history of homosexual men would not have drawn a parallel with female sexuality’ (1990, p. 7). When the male center collapses, female sexual identity would be deemed non-existent or driven to selfsacrifice. The original story of ‘Farewell, my Concubine,’ for example, is about Xiang Yu, a king in ancient China, who loses everything in a battle except his favorite concubine named Yu Ji. Surrounded by enemy troops, he awaits his doomed final moment, drinking and listening to his concubine’s dreary chant: ‘Enemy troops surround us/Singing the songs of Chu, they mock us/My lord is doomed/I have nowhere to turn.’ After her last chanting performance, the concubine cuts her throat and dies in the lap of the King. Circulated in Chinese society as a ‘love story’ for thousands of years, ‘Farewell, my Concubine’ is transformed into a cultural discourse invested with dominant male values, which discriminate against not only women but also effeminate men. The sacrificial roles of women and femininity are associated with the idealization of masculinity. In such a cultural matrix, the ideal is a masculine one, and anything inferior, even when it occurs in men, is feminized, as positive values have been translated into a masculine framework in which the qualities of manliness are effectively connected with the moral norm and social privilege.

FE/MALE IMPERSONATION

Sexual deviance from orthodox masculinity is as a result identified with moral degeneration that carries negative associations in the popular imagination. During the Maoist era, for example, homosexuality was regarded not only as a sign of degenerate morality but also as a dangerous menace to revolutionary machismo. Dieyi’s effeminacy was therefore treated not simply as a matter of personal mannerism but rather as a social issue entangled within a political hysteria. While female red guards or militia-women with masculine features were exalted as role models, male effeminacy was held as incompatible with the revolutionary spirit. In Chinese history, women warriors and female machismo are considered as connoting a kind of healthy and robust energy. By contrast, the flabby, eunuch-like male effeminacy is regarded as a mark of moral turpitude or mental illness. Under strict social and political forms of surveillance, any sign of effeteness must be erased; and as a result, Dieyi has no other choice but to hide his sexual identity for the sake of survival. To survive in social terms depends upon the intelligibility of his subjectivity within the conditions and norms that shape and govern every aspect of his life. For that reason, Dieyi has to chameleon himself into an impersonator of ‘man,’ who performs a straight yet fake identity an act of imposture that imitates exemplary masculine subjectivity by adopting the position that the heterosexist ideology ascribed to him. Particularly during the Cultural Revolution, Dieyi has to impersonate a ‘man’ and even a pro-revolutionary man under the coercion of proletarian masculinity.

When the male center collapses, female sexual identity would be deemed non-existent or driven to selfsacrifice.

An inquiry into fe/male impersonation

According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the idea that ‘sexuality and heterosexuality are always exactly translatable into one another is, obviously, homophobic. Importantly, too, it is deeply heterophobic: it denies the very possibility of difference in desires’ (1990, pp. 196197). In Farewell My Concubine, these phobic discourses are reflected in the practice of double impersonation. Dieyi, an impersonator of ‘man’ in society, also functions as an impersonator of ‘woman’ on stage. By profession Dieyi is a dan actor in Peking opera; and dan acting (female impersonation) has a long tradition in Chinese theater. ‘Originally these men were chosen for their looks and ability to appear feminine in women’s clothes’; and as Roger Baker notes: ‘The use of men to play women’s roles was the result ...of a ban on women imposed by the authorities for moral reasons’ (1994, p. 72). When discussing the transvestite theater, Stephen Orgel points out: ‘The reason always given for the prohibition of women from the stage was that their chastity would thereby be compromised, which is understood to mean that they would become whores. Behind the outrage of public modesty is a real fear of women’s sexuality’ (1989, p. 26). In Chinese society, homophobia and the ‘fear of women’s sexuality’ derive from the same hegemonic values cultivated and determined by the cultural tradition that makes homosexuality and female sexuality convenient scapegoats for social, moral and even political problems. In popular literature and histories of China, sensual women and sexual dissidents are often presented as villainous, particularly when they are involved in politics; and they are victimized and also punished by the value system of heterosexuality, which ironically treats polygyny and concubine customs as normal.

The convention of dan acting is supposed to satisfy men’s rather than women’s sexual expectations.

Such an act of impersonation ironically asserts a difference in desire that cannot be defined by the existing gender categories. Treated as a pseudo-male since his childhood, Dieyi translates himself into an image of ‘man’ that nevertheless functions only to ridicule the very notion of manliness. ‘If ideology is central to the maintenance of classic masculinity,’ as Kaja Silverman remarks, ‘the affirmation of classic masculinity is equally central to the maintenance of our governing ‘‘reality’’’ (1992, p. 16). In this sense, Dieyi becomes what he is not a ghostly figure of a furtive desire that haunts the presence of the heterosexual world. The ghost, in Derrida’s words, represents ‘the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible ...the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh’ (1994, p. 7). The paradox of ‘tangible intangibility,’ on the one hand, characterizes a phantasmal situation of homosexual desire that fails to produce full presence in Chinese cultural space, and on the other hand, describes an unusual human quality that transcends the limitations of the ideological framework of intelligibility. The ‘ungraspable visibility’ also indicates a sense of ‘dereality’ which, as Martin Kantor points out, ‘breeds further dereality because homophobia flourishes in the climate of ignorance bred by the homophobia itself’ (1998, p. 4). Without viable forms of expression in Chinese social discourses, homosexuality becomes a spectral ‘threat to the logic of heterosexual, patriarchal representation’ (Edelman 1994, p. xv). Unable to find a legitimate place in the heterosexist system, the figure of homosexuality is banished from the domain of the intelligible, and driven into an inexplicable darkness, which has previously been inhabited by other unthinkable figures like witches, pagans, barbarians, and mad women throughout human history.

In Chinese cultural tradition, there is a demarcation line between female impersonation that appeals to male pleasure and homosexuality that threatens male normality. The rosy cheeks and gentle movements of transvestite dan might reveal a homoerotic overtone of Peking opera, but the homosexual fantasy of the male body is transformed into heterosexual performance. Otherwise put, the image of dan as an ideal form of fe/male beauty underscores the dominant position of men’s hegemonic power, since the convention of dan acting is supposed to satisfy men’s rather than women’s sexual expectations. The unnaturally highpitched falsetto singing of dan, moreover, seems to be a strategy of over-feminization that disseminates homoerotic aesthetics in the voice of male-dominated heterosexuality. As a dan actor, Dieyi may remind us of Mei Lan-fang, one of the most renowned female impersonators in China. Mei was admired for his ability to present convincing, impeccable femininity. As A. C. Scott claims, ‘Mei’s stage technique was ‘‘unsurpassed in its unity of gesture, expression, and exquisite grace and delicacy of line. His voice has purity and quality’’’ (cited in Baker 1994, p. 73). However, in China, Mei was always honored as a ‘man,’ who had two wives. Dieyi’s case is different, because his gender-crossing involves more than just stage mannerisms. In this sense, dan acting becomes a way of life for Dieyi. His performance as an impersonated ‘woman’ on stage mirrors his sense of alienation that delimits his position as a ‘fake man’ offstage. As his fake femininity is foregrounded as an ostensible characteristic of his artistic appeal, Dieyi’s real passion fades in the irony that expresses his wry notice of the very acting convention he plays on an everyday basis. As an impersonated woman, he attracts numerous admirers, whereas his true desire fails to catch the attention of his stage brother Xiaolou. His popularity as a dan allows him to transgress the boundaries of the gender divide that constrain the rest of society, but he cannot cross the divide that separates how others perceive him and how he sees himself.

The ironic practice of double impersonation problematizes the authenticity he craves. Despite his ability to perform, Dieyi does not want to play the role that the heterosexist society casts for him. To use Marybeth Hamilton’swords,Dieyi attempts to ‘display,’ not ‘perform,’‘his real, offstage self’ (1993, pp. 115116). For can dojustice. ‘In all the culturally dominant forms ofrepresentation,’ as Teresade Lauretis observes, ‘desire is predicated on sexual difference as gender, the difference of woman from man or femininity from masculinity, with all that those terms entail’ (1994, p. 110). Under such circumstances, Dieyi’s real desire slips away in the gap between the figures of impersonated man and impersonated woman. The formulation of heterosexist binarism, in other words, deprives Dieyi of the third space, as he is neither the prey of men’s sexual desire nor a hunter of women’s sexuality. The matter of longing or to be exact, of disavowed sexual longing has been transformed into a question of gender belonging. In what Hamilton calls ‘a culture that demonized homosexuality’ (1993, p. 116), Dieyi, wholoses his ownsense ofbelonging, has toimpersonate either ‘man’ or ‘woman’ as expected by social institutions for the purpose of surviving, since he knows well enough that the fate of a sexual dissident would not be better than an unfaithful concubine or a political renegade in China.

/ FEAR OF QUSHI

TFIGURE OF VIOLENCE

he traditional model of Xiang Yu-like masculinity and Yu Ji-like femininity is thus complicated and challenged by the ambiguous image of dan who crosses the assumed boundaries of the respective en-gendered domains of ‘men’ and ‘women.’ Such trangression not only suggests the repudiation of the manly ‘kingdom,’ but also demands a ‘dominion’ of different kinds of values, norms and powers. Unfortunately, however, any type of dissidence or resistance to the masculine orthodoxy would be marginalized, denounced and persecuted in China, as the prohibition on homosexuality seems to be a crucial way to reinforce social order and hierarchy. In Chinese society, malemale love is widely regarded as ‘a worse evil than female unchaste behavior,’ as Bernard Faure observes, since ‘iconoclastic men were more subversive to the state than immoral women’ (1998, p. 232). Parallel to political and social violence that is ‘out there’ in the world, the oppression of homosexuality usually takes the form of the second ‘modality of violence’ which, as Armstrong and Tennenhouse note, is ‘exercised through words upon things in the world, often by attributing violence upon them’ (1989, p. 9). The discursive form of violence has put a seal of silence upon the discourse of homosexuality, which is ostracized and under-represented in Chinese literature and history. According to Jonathan Dollimore, the fact that the resistance to heterosexual orthodoxy and its ‘literature, histories, and subcultures’ is ‘absent from current debates (literary, psychoanalytic, and cultural)’ suggests the existence of a violent

As Farewell My Concubine shows, the culturally prevalent prohibition forces Dieyi to take the position of an impersonator, while his real desire is expunged from the domain of intelligibility. Different from the Western cultures in which one can find concrete existence or evidence of material, political and social discourses for homosexuality, Chinese culture suggests a kind of absence that is related to a cultural lack of the embodiment of homosexuality. The cultural lack implicates a deep-rooted phobia of ‘nonmen,’ who do not possess the biological and cultural requirements of whole manhood. Early in the film, the account of chopping off an extra digit on the left hand of Dieyi, as Sean Metzger notes, implies that his ‘acceptance into the theater requires his castration, an act that, among other functions, prefigures his later selection as a dan’ (2000, p. 219). The common Chinese term for the castration operation is qushi, which indicates the removal of either power or the male reproductive organs in effect, the two things are always interconnected in Chinese society. ‘The procedure carries the implication of a relationship between power, mutilation, and male physical identity,’ as Jennifer Jay notes; ‘thus removing the male reproductive organ also means removing the power normally associated with the male sexual identity’ (1993, p. 464). The image of emasculated men is usually related to the brutal production of eunuchs in the past. As a result of their castration, eunuchs were separated from the rest of men; nonetheless, their presence either in popular imagination or in history evoked an entrenched fear that affected all men, because castration suggests a lack of wholeness in terms of not only physical body but also social identity and privilege. In Chinese history, castration has been inflicted not only on eunuchs but also on ordinary people as a punishment. In the Han Dynasty, for example, Sima Qian, a court historian who authored the earliest account of Xiang Yu and his concubine, was sentenced to castration as an alternative to the death penalty after he inadvertently offended the emperor. This well-known story has been woven into the fabric of Chinese culture to represent the horror associated with the loss of manhood. Although the practice of castration has died away in history, the threat of qushi is deeply embedded in cultural memory as an expression of the fear of non-manhood. The fear, which often results in an act of internalization of heteronormative ideology, suggests a castration complex that is closely related to disqualification and dishonor of man in a social context.

Culturally pervasive, ‘the terror of homosexual desire,’ according to Judith Butler, may ‘lead to a terror of being construed as feminine, feminized, of no longer being properly a man’ (1997, p. 136). Homosexuality, in this sense, carries the insinuation of a ‘failed’ man inside the system of meaning production, as the threat of castration is characterized not in physical but in cultural terms to indicate the pressure in/on men to avoid being emasculated. By endorsing the fundamental role of masculinity in the formation of normal male subjectivity, the threat of qushi signals a connection between non-man and homosexuality. To a certain extent, qushi as a trope of cultural violence can be described in Foucauldian terminology as a ‘strategic field’ of forces, where various forms of power operate concurrently to generate a social body of repression in the name of normality. Often the ‘normal’ is distilled by exposing what it is not; and institutions focus on the ‘abnormal’ in an effort to control society and the people in it (Foucault 1967, pp. 3941). The fear of being abnormal politically, socially or sexually often sets up an equation between cross-gender behaviors and malicious characters, denouncing sexual deviants as unprincipled scoundrels, making people learn to loathe homosexuality before they understand it. In China, the violent force of power may also impose other equations, by which those detected to be traitors and counter-revolutionaries, for instance, are en-gendered as alluring men who are both corrupted and corrupting. ‘The interpretation of sexual deviance as political dissidence,’ as Katrin Sieg argues, ‘reflected the specific, androcentric structure of a centralist state that expected its citizens to duplicate patriarchal relations in the domestic sphere as a sign of political loyalty’ (1994, p. 94). What becomes significant, for example, in Dieyi’s vain erotic adventures with Master Yuan, a wealthy patron, is the refraction of political violence. Later on, in a surprising turn, Master Yuan is identified as a counter-revolutionary and executed without a fair trial. While cross-dressing on stage is admired, crossgender acts offstage are absolutely intolerable. Cultural values are used by the government to discredit both sexual and political dissidents who are usually among the most susceptible to violence. The phobic constructions of anomaly, castration and unintelligibility generate violent suppression or erasure of any sign of transgression or deviation that might demand a different order of social/political normality.

An inquiry into fe/male impersonation

The traditional model of Xiang Yu-like masculinity and Yu Ji-like femininity is thus complicated and challenged by the ambiguous image of dan who crosses the assumed boundaries of the respective en-gendered domains of ‘men’ and ‘women.’ Such trangression not only suggests the repudiation of the manly ‘kingdom,’ but also demands a ‘dominion’ of different kinds of values, norms and powers. Unfortunately, however, any type of dissidence or resistance to the masculine orthodoxy would be marginalized, denounced and persecuted in China, as the prohibition on homosexuality seems to be a crucial way to reinforce social order and hierarchy. In Chinese society, malemale love is widely regarded as ‘a worse evil than female unchaste behavior,’ as Bernard Faure observes, since ‘iconoclastic men were more subversive to the state than immoral women’ (1998, p. 232). Parallel to political and social violence that is ‘out there’ in the world, the oppression of homosexuality usually takes the form of the second ‘modality of violence’ which, as Armstrong and Tennenhouse note, is ‘exercised through words upon things in the world, often by attributing violence upon them’ (1989, p. 9). The discursive form of violence has put a seal of silence upon the discourse of homosexuality, which is ostracized and under-represented in Chinese literature and history. According to Jonathan Dollimore, the fact that the resistance to heterosexual orthodoxy and its ‘literature, histories, and subcultures’ is ‘absent from current debates (literary, psychoanalytic, and cultural)’ suggests the existence of a violent force that suppresses the representation of ‘sexual dissidence’ (1991, p. 21).

‘Sexual deviation,’ as Dollimore argues, is generally ‘thought to be a deviation from the truth; this is a truth embodied in, and really only accessible to, normality, with the result that, even if sexual deviants are to be tolerated, ‘‘ there is still something like an ‘error’ involved in what they do ...a manner of acting that is not adequate to reality’’’ (1991, p. 69). The lack of truthful representations creates numerous misunderstandings that prevent the development of a positive homosexual sensibility in Chinese culture. In the case of Dieyi, when he loses his position within the system of heterosexual structures, he turns into a ghost living nowhere, and his subjectivity, as a result, becomes inarticulate in social discourses. In Chinese society, homophobia permeates every layer of its cultural fabric; and homosexual anxiety is silenced by the hegemony of heterosexist force, which presses sexual deviation to self-negation and self-sacrifice.The lack of their own voice transforms homosexual people into mute strangers ‘whose languageless presence,’ in Homi Bhabha’s words, ‘evokes an archaic anxiety and aggressivity by impeding the search for narcissistic love-objects in which the subject can rediscover himself’ (1994, p. 166). Their narcissistic introversion constricts the development of speaking subjectivity, and makes ‘failed speech’ a pitiable mark of identity for this silenced group.

SURFACE OF SHAME/ILLUSION OF INTELLIGIBILITY

The revelation of the ‘unrepresentable’ suggests a radical difference in desires that has been violently disavowed by Chinese culture. In Farewell My Concubine, the performance of Dieyi’s deferred suicide seems to emphasize a painful process that captures the complex emotions and experiences of Chinese sexual dissidents. Following the narrative line of the film to trace the earlier events in Dieyi’s life, audiences may expect an eventual, climactic revelation of the cause of Dieyi’s frustration; but what is provided throughout the film is not a singular cause, but rather the diffuse unfolding of hardship, endurance and loss. Dieyi cannot find a proper place for the male bond that he desires in the heterosexual world. ‘That refusal to desire, that sacrifice of desire under the force of prohibition,’ as Butler points out, ‘will incorporate homosexuality as an identification with masculinity. But this masculinity will be haunted by the love it cannot grieve’ (1997, pp. 137138). Dieyi’s unrequited love of his stage brother seems to be an ungrievable instantiation of the expunged passion, an invisible subtext of Chinese culture; but it also reveals the non-reciprocity of Dieyi’s desire in a homophobic system of heterosexuality a nonreciprocity that inscribes him as an incomplete subject of lack, cast aside in the trajectory of Chinese history. The dominant regulatory system produces sexual norms through a frame of cultural intelligibility, thus rendering homosexual desire an incomprehensible ‘ghost’ that haunts mankind. Occupying the site of the abnormal and the unnatural in the system of meaning production, Chinese homosexuality does not achieve a full status of intelligibility; and Chinese cultural tradition lacks the willingness to recognize male subjectivity in different or deviant forms. The film as a whole, therefore, represents a process of exploration into the critical condition of Dieyi’s un/intelligibility, but its ending provides neither a

In the closing scene of Farewell My Concubine, the film cuts to a close-up of Dieyi’s face a strained face covered up by the thick stage make-up of Peking opera. His glittering eyes are searching. The most obvious irony of this scene is that at the very moment he ‘comes out’ to borrow an expression from Western gay studies Dieyi seems to sneak back to his make-up. If the trope of ‘the closet’ in the West is informed by the relationship between secrecy and shame, ‘face’ in Chinese culture is full of complex symbolic meanings. Different from the image of the closet, as Fran Martin observes, ‘the sort of subjectivity projected by the discourse of ‘‘face’’ is one that produces its effects on the metaphoric facial surface, rather than being imagined as inhabiting the ‘‘interior depths’’ of the person’ (2003, p. 198). Dieyi’s coming out, however, cannot be understood only in terms of a true/false dichotomy. The theatrical make-up that Dieyi wears is not a mask, for he no longer needs to pretend at the moment when he declares his true identity. The implication here is that the makeup has been mistaken as a mask by the system of cultural intelligibility in which the effacing effects dissimulate the truth of homosexuality with a false appearance. In China, face and shame are interrelated in a symbolic space between personal and social functions. The word for shame in Chinese is chi, which is ‘an emotion as well as a human capacity that directs the person inward for selfexamination and motivates the person toward socially and morally desirable change’ (Li et al. 2004, p. 769). Paradoxically, however, chi is also associated with the experience of being humiliated or insulted. If one has chi, one is supposed to xi chi (wash off shame) or xue chi (wipe out shame). In the case of Chinese homosexuality, the ambivalent chi might be considered a social enactment of self-conception that reveals the unashamed force of cultural intelligibility. Within the framework of homophobic culture, the scattered fragments of homosexual experiences in Chinese history are given only a surface but not a face. However, under the surface of shame, Farewell My Concubine shows up a new body of knowledge that derives yet transcends what is called chi, leading to an exquisite insight of selfawareness. In this sense, chi might be considered a self-reflexive activity that reveals the limits of the schemes of intelligibility. What the ending of the film seems to emphasize is that Dieyi as a ‘shamefaced’ homosexual person in society has eventually earned new meanings for his passion, which can no longer be taken at its ‘face’ value.

The point that merits our particular attention is that if Dieyi really feels ashamed, he is ashamed of being a ‘man’ as defined and confined by the heterosexist regime of intelligibility. To understand Dieyi, we must examine the double-faced practice of impersonation that has moved beyond the limits of our preconception about shame. On the one hand, ‘the physical experience of shame records in dramatic fashion,’ says Judith Halberstam, ‘a failure to be powerful, legitimate, proper’; and on the other hand, ‘it records the exposure, in psychoanalytic terms, of the subject’s castration’ (2005, p. 225). Although having failed to achieve a legitimate and intelligible position in the heterosexual system, Dieyi nonetheless develops a sense of selfknowledge out of the shame of those failures. Dieyi’s selfawareness, however, cannot be regarded as a case of transforming ‘gay shame’ into ‘gay pride,’ but rather as an example of disrupting the relationship between the surface and deep meanings of chi in the matrix of Chinese culture. Dieyi attempts to wash off chi, a humiliation that is imposed on him; but his endeavor demonstrates, at the same time, a certain inner conviction that he has about his own worth and authentic validity beyond the grasp of the heterosexist epistemology. In this regard, Dieyi can no longer be understood as an ‘impersonator,’ since his castrated experience of being a ‘man’ tells another kind of intelligibility about the human, an unashamed truth beyond the face-value acknowledged by the heterosexist system. Farewell My Concubine, therefore, invites us to take a closer look at Dieyi and, more importantly, to look beyond, or beneath, the fac¸ade of our complacent knowledge about homosexuality that has already been culturally imagined or prescribed for us.

‘Studying men, in other words, is not as easy as it looks,’ says Susan Mann (2000, p. 1612). Our imaginings of ‘men’ can be hindered not only by the mechanism of heteronormativity whereby male is the standard and female is its inferior counterpart, but also by the mode of epistemology that endorses a binary distinction between the heterosexual and the homosexual. As David M. Halperin notes, the heterosexual/homosexual binarism is itself a product of homophobia, just as the man/woman binarism is another expression of sexism. The homosexual, says Halperin, ‘is not the name of a natural kind but a projection’ of ‘mutually incompatible, logically contradictory notions,’ which generate ‘a series of double binds’ oppressive to ‘those who fall under the description of ‘‘homosexual’’’ (1995, p. 45). To develop a positive homosexual subjectivity in Chinese society is by no means to assert the replacement of one binary structure with another, but to question the underpinnings of heterosexist epistemology and to examine the deeper operations of the prevailing system of intelligibility. ‘When we ask what the conditions of intelligibility are by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized,’ as Butler argues, ‘we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all’ (2001, p. 621). In China, the condition of intelligibility has been complicated by the cultural tradition in which the homophobic values have been reiterated by people over a long period of time to become a knowledge frame of ‘collective makebelieve.’ As a result, those who deviate from the make-believe would be constructed as unbelievable, unintelligible, and unacceptable. In Farewell My Concubine, Dieyi emerges exactly as a challenge to the regime of intelligibility that fails to recognize the complexity of human sexuality.

The theatrical makeup that Dieyi wears is not a mask , for he no longer needs to pretend at the moment when he declares his true identity .

An inquiry into fe/male impersonation

The question of homosexuality, as Jill Campbell maintains, has ‘open[ed] up the constellation of interrelated problems sexual, political, and social’ (1993, p. 62); and it embodies an ultimate silence that is somewhat mysterious and unapproachable. What we find out in Farewell My Concubine is that homosexuality, which has been buried deeply in the darkness of Chinese history, is reclaimed and resituated in a modern context. In this sense, the film enacts a collective memory with its full symbolic intensity; and this enactment is realized with the awareness of the hegemonic force that underlies social and historical amnesia. The reclamation of homosexuality, so to speak, is encoded with unusual significance that transcends the boundary of history; and it is related to a suppressed dimension of humanity that should have developed during the period of Chinese history the film covers the period of China’s modernization. However, whatwehave witnessed is an ironic instance of cultural suppression in which the sensibility of homosexuality remains castrated and silenced as China moves into a ‘modern’ society on its own terms. In such a modern society, Dieyi still cannot find his legitimate place; and his refusal to give up the right to affirm his own intelligibility, which has violently been disavowed, eventually costs him life. At the last moment of the story, Dieyi seems to have blurred ‘the distinction between himself and his fantastic role by taking his own life at the end of the number’ (Metzger 2000, p. 228).

Dieyi’s death, however, cannot be regarded simply as a matter of blurred distinction between work and life. The death of the ‘actor,’ which is prepared in the opening sequence and accomplished at the very end of the film, provides a heart-rending frame for this tragic, intense drama. What the tragic ending of the film suggests is that Dieyi has to kill the impersonated figure in order to express himself. In other words, having survived numerous trials, torments, cruelties and injustices, Dieyi finally decides to terminate his impersonation in order to assert his authentic humanity. What is most notable is that such a painful story has touched a raw nerve outside the domain of artistic representation: Ten years after the production of the film, Leslie Cheung, the actor who plays the role of Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine, followed suit. The doubling of the death of the actor and the death of the character draws further attention to what happens to an impersonated desire that has never adequately expressed in Chinese history. Their deaths seem to insist on being spoken as an expression of sufferings, and enunciated in the sufferings is a form of homosexual subjectivity that is suggestive of human triumphs over historical failures. ‘The act of renouncing homosexuality,’ as Butler argues, ‘paradoxically strengthens homosexuality, but it strengthens homosexuality precisely as the power of renunciation’ (1997, p. 143).

The paradox of renunciation/preservation helps us rethink the question of how Chinese homosexuality develops in a culture that is fundamentally homophobic. As Farewell My Concubine shows, homosexuality is marked as shameful and remarked as shameless in its final acquisition of a new measure of intelligibility. This reversal leads to a fundamental question about the film that is, who bids farewell to whom? At the end of the film, the relationship between the King and his concubine seems reversed, as Dieyi, the fearless and shameless dan, who has gained a new definition of ‘man,’ bids farewell to Xiaolou, a Xiang Yu-like figure of a fake hyper-masculinity, who is entrapped in the heterosexist system but is now compelled to redefine his inadequacy and mendacity against confrontations with the fundamental strangeness of homosexuality outside of the frame of collective make-believe. The poignant ending thus highlights the need to recognize homosexuality as one of the unacknowledged dimensions of humanity, which is deeper and different from those reachable by conventional approaches. Furthermore, it invites audiences to bid farewell to their own preconceptions about sexuality, bringing themtoanawareness ofthepressure of latent impresonation. This is not simply a matter of normalizing homosexuality, but rather of reimagining and recuperating the full or fullscale dimensions of humanity beyond the various illusions of cultural un/intelligibility.