Asian martial arts cinema, dance, and the cultural languages of gender

Abstract

Analyses of Asian martial arts films often suffer from contradictions inherent in western paradigms of gender. Because of a lack of theoretical tools to analyze movement, Asian martial arts film stars are often caught in a rhetorical trap in which they are alternately seen either as an immobile pin‐up (and therefore an erotic object) or as in perpetual motion (and therefore feminine). These contradictory western models of gender perpetuate post‐colonial notions of the sexual, feminized ‘oriental’ male body, while simultaneously and ironically disallowing female martial arts stars to be seen as anything other than ‘masculine’. I attempt to resolve these contradictions by noting that models of dance analysis allow descriptions of movement to include culturally‐specific concepts such as Yin and Yang, and may thus serve as an alternate, method of gender theorization.