Her body belongs to her nation? A feminist reading of recent Chinese and American female spy films

ABSTRACT

Since the 2000s there has been a rise in female spies depicted in both Hollywood and Chinese cinema. This article employs Kaplan’s familial model and Braidotti’s discussion of body to analyze the problematic relation between women and nation in three recent female-led sexpionage spy films—Red Sparrow (2018), The Message (2009) and The Silent War (2012). Through situating these movies in the context of growing nationalism and political tension (i.e. “Cold War 2.0”) and post-feminist media texts emphasizing women’s liberated sexuality, we examine how Red Sparrow promotes American nationalism via advocating certain women’s bodily rights, whereas The Message and The Silent War promote Chinese nationalism by prioritizing women as state subjects rather than sexualized individuals. In these two Chinese films, the transcendence of the sexualized Chinese female spy-protagonist into revolutionary leader and symbolic mother figure is only realized through death by sexual and physical abuse. Although Red Sparrow asserts women’s sexual rights and challenges the notion of nation-as-family, the bodily rights it advocates operate within an individualist framework detached from the collective actions for women’s emancipation and empowerment. Red Sparrow also implicitly supports the virtuous heterosexual conjugal relationship, which reinforces heterosexism and a decidedly state-centric hierarchical and political ordering.

KEYWORDS:

• Female spy
• nation
• women
• body
• post-feminism

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Nathaniel Ming Curran and Dr. Annie Hau Nung Chan for their editing supports.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kimburley Wing Yee Choi

Dr. Kimburley WY Choi is Associate Professor of Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. Choi’s research interests lie at the creative intersection of cultural studies, sociology, and media studies, focusing on media representations, power, and everyday life practices. Choi is the author of articles in Journal of Consumer Culture, Urban Studies, Qualitative Research, Cultural Studies Review, Ethnography, Gender, Place & Culture, Journal of Gender Studies, Childhood, Social Semiotics, etc. In 2019, Choi’s paper titled “Home and the materialization of divergent subjectivities of older women in Hong Kong” won the Outstanding Paper Award (2018/19) from the Academy of Hong Kong Studies. She is currently involved in several research projects, including Hong Kong older women life history in the form of re-enactment through web-based interactive re-storytelling, Hong Kong museums and nation-building, and transnational woman subjectivities.

Hong Zeng

Dr. Hong ZENG is a cultural studies scholar whose research centers on the dynamics of gender and spatial politics within visual cultural production. Her work critically examines how ideologies operate and the various forms of resistance they generate in creative industries. She is currently Assistant Professor of the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. She has published articles in Visual Communication, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Journal of Visual Art Practice, and Asian Cinema. She was the 2020 Yale-China Arts Fellow and was a visiting scholar at the School of the Arts, Columbia University in 2015. She is currently working on her monograph Women Artists Reshaping Spatial Politics in Hong Kong.