Fish and elephant: Reexamining (in)visibility and claiming queer agency in China's first lesbian film

ABSTRACT

This article examines mainland China's first lesbian film Fish and Elephant (2001) and engages a queer/feminist critique of visibility politics that locates subversive queer female agency in invisibility. Fish and Elephant is generally considered a straightforward critique of the lack of visibility queer women experience in China, illustrating how emerging lesbian discourse is entangled with China's heteronormative and patriarchal social, political, and familial structures. In light of Peggy Phelan's critical feminist reexamination of visibility politics and queer theory's interest in reorganizing the active logic of agency, I argue that Fish and Elephant explicitly makes palpable the presence of visual absence and poses a potentially more legitimizing and suggestive lesbian discourse that is not constructed in reaction to heterosexual discourse. Throughout the film, representation of the queer female is interrupted as the two main characters are not imaged at key moments in the film's narrative. The resulting absence creates a disruptive, haunting presence that activates spaces external to the hegemonic norm, de-centering the male gaze and the normative family unit, and opening up a space full of possibility that points toward as yet unimagined or unrecognizable modes of representation and of being for queer women, all women, in China and elsewhere.

Disclosure statement

I have no financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of my research.

Notes

1. One example of promoting visibility in this way would be Coming Out Day in the United States, which is predicated on the idea that becoming visible to friends and family will lead to greater acceptance for the queer community in general (As of 2016 the Human Rights Campaign notes the importance of Coming Out Day: http://www.hrc.org/resources/national-coming-out-day). As another note, the Chinese title for the film is⟪今年夏天⟫; a more literal translation would be This Summer.

2. Homonormativity has been adopted as a term to refer to heteronormative values as practiced and espoused by homosexual individuals and couples. This tends to refer to the privileging of relationship practices that lead to or embody the stereotypical middle class nuclear family. It can also refer to the heavy representation of white, cis, male queer subjects across media platforms. Homonormativity, rooted in a heteronormativity, reproduces itself through the logic of neutrality and naturalness. Moreover, homonormativity is entwined with a neoliberal logic of self-governance and self-interest such that the rhetoric of ‘free love’ and ‘free choice’ in combination with the homonormative image of the gay subject as ‘just like’ the stereotypical heterosexual subject, has become an integral part of the gay rights discourse.

3. Let me take a moment to address my use of the terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘queer’ or ‘queer female’ in this article. It was brought to my attention in an earlier draft that although I use the term lesbian throughout, Xiao Ling clearly engages in sexual relationships with men. Here the point is not so much whether or not the main characters identify as ‘lesbian’, something we cannot know since neither woman labels herself with a specific term. Rather, it is important to clarify my own use of language and the intentions behind it. In my scholarship in general, I prefer the use of the term ‘queer’, precisely because it implies a more fluid identity construction, resists categorization and is linked not only to identity but also to theory, which helps the term as an identity marker maintain its active, malleable, unfinished tenor. However, Fish and Elephant has long been termed ‘China's first lesbian film’. Moreover, I find that the term ‘lesbian’ valuable as it indicates a sexual orientation that is less fluid, and as such creates a space for and validates the experiences of women who desire to be in romantic relationships only with other women. I believe that a lesbian identity is particularly important for queer women because female queerness is so often either explained away as a ‘phase’ or as having not yet found the ‘right’ man, or fetishized as ‘hot’ and ‘sexy’ in the context of the male gaze. In China, this phenomenon also exists. For example, there has been the ‘schoolgirl romance genre’ of queer Chinese Lesbian cinema written about by Fran Martin ‘where the dominant tendency is to bracket off same-sex experiences as an interlude in an otherwise unilinear and indicatively heterosexual life history’ (Liu 2015, 11). Therefore, I do not want to take the ‘lesbian’ out of ‘China's first lesbian film’. At the same time, I see my argument as relevant to queer women who may not identify specifically as lesbian and I hope to broaden, if slightly, the way we might think about female queerness so that it is not limited to an identity box in which only certain women ‘fit’. For these reasons, in the rest of the paper, I have chosen to retain the term ‘lesbian’ when referring to the film directly or borrowing language from previous scholarship, but switch to ‘female queerness’ or the ‘queer female subject’ when articulating my own argument. My intention is not to conflate the two, but to allow both ‘lesbian’ and ‘queer’ to retain power.

4. Cui Zi'en, whom I discuss below, does make a distinction between ‘independent film production’ and ‘independent spirit’ in order to distinguish independent directors who purposefully take on topics that do not fit within the mainstream (Shi 2012, 132). Like Cui, I refer specifically here to certain directors who began their careers in the 1990s using both independent production and spirit, such as Jia Zhangke (Xiao Wu 小武, Still Life 三峡好人), Zhang Yuan (East Palace/West Palace 东宫西宫, Beijing Bastards 北京杂种) and Wang Xiaoshuai (The Days 冬春的日子).

5. In Fish and Elephant, the entire cast is made up of non-professional actors. Li Yu also put out actual date-seeking advertisements in order to set up the numerous dates the main character, Xiao Qun, is pressed into by her mother (Cui 2011, 216). Another instance of this unscripted approach occurs when Xiao Qun tells her mother that she likes women; up until filming, the actor who plays the mother was not given the full script and did not know that Xiao Qun was queer. Her reaction was unrehearsed (Shi 2004, 26).

6. ‘New queer cinema’ is represented in this article by Cui Zi'en and his films.

7. Certainly, homosexuality in general has been pathologized in China as it has gained visibility, which continues to impact Chinese discourse around male and female queerness. As noted below, it was quite recent that ‘[homosexuality] was declassified as a sexual disorder by the Chinese Psychiatric Association’ (Shi 2004, 24). And Cui Zi'en himself ‘points out [that] homosexuality is recognized in China, but only as an object of medical and psychiatric management, and above all as a threat to public health’. This association between queerness and ‘public health’ continues to influence public opinion as well as the allocation of resources such that ‘the issues of AIDS prevention and homosexuality’ are conflated and funds flow into the public health sector but not to other queer causes, ‘such as sexual diversity’ (Liu 2015, 36–37).

8. The example Phelan employs here is that of ‘almost-naked young white women’. In America we are inundated with their images, but they certainly do not run the show (Phelan 1993, 10).

9. Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba's (2016) book Translating the Queer discusses this form of gay ‘consumer citizenship’ in the context of Latin America and notes that the ‘creation and definition of gayness takes place among middle- to upper-class Latin American homosexuals’ and leaves out all others (155).

10. Liu (2015) discusses the rise of homonormative culture in China following state policies that have resulted in moves toward privatization and integration into global neoliberal structures. For example, the gay community in China has itself attempted to exclude or distance themselves from China's ‘money boys’ (male sex workers who serve a male clientele), who are seen ‘as a blight on the image of the homosexual community’ (2).

11. Petrus Liu (2015) makes clear that ‘the Chinese government never persecuted homosexuals per se’ because they were not officially recognized ‘before and after 1949’. It was, however, possible to charge someone with ‘hooliganism’, a somewhat broad category of offenses that was often used to ‘handle the issue’ of homosexuality (43).

12. In the 1930s and 1940s, tea hostesses were remarked in Shanghai guidebooks alongside courtesans as women who commonly earned additional income by entertaining men on the side (Hershatter 1997, 58–59).

13. For detailed discussion of the male gaze in cinema, see: Laura Mulvey, (1989) 2009. Visual and Other Pleasures. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

14. This echoes the invisibility of female–female love in the context of the tea house setting, where it would only have been seen as ‘sisterly’, or perhaps as erotic – and non-commercialized – affection between courtesans (Sang 2003, 21). In either case, even as the man's trajectory visually connects Xiao Ling and Xiao Qun, their emotional connection is set outside of the framework of male-centered commercial exchange.

15. This is the repetition of language previously ascribed to the son of Xiao Qun's mother's husband-to-be. When Xiao Qun's mother expresses anxiety about her daughter accepting her second marriage, the husband-to-be tells her that his son's response to the father's news was, ‘You're my family, you're doing right’ (你是我亲人,你做得对).

16. Petrus Liu (2015) explains that the new term tongqi or ‘living widow’ refers to women who have unknowingly married homosexual men. While this category of women has led to a pathologizing of homosexuality as something that produces women's unhappiness and also only makes visible male queerness, it also indicates the pressures on queer people in mainland China to hide their sexuality and marry someone of the opposite sex. According to one study that Liu references, ‘China has 25 million tongqi at the moment’, a number that is likely higher (12).

17. See the April 13 2016 article in the New York Times, Judge in China Rules Gay Couple Cannot Marry: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/world/asia/china-same-sex-marriage-ruling.html?_r=0 (Wong and Piao 2016).

18. The absence of Xiao Qun and Xiao Ling in this scene is notably disruptive because one expects to visually follow the mile markers of their relationship, and because of the symbolic significance of Xiao Qun's fish tank and its contents to her relationship with Xiao Ling over the course of the film. When Xiao Ling first moves in, they add new fish to Xiao Qun's tank, clearly representing their fresh start together. Then, when Xiao Ling leaves in anger, the tenor of her absence is revealed to Xiao Qun when she finds all of her fish floating dead at the top of the tank. Xiao Ling later apologizes for killing them. In the shot just prior to the montage of the fish market, the two women sit on Xiao Qun's bed smoking and talking to reestablish their intimacy after the brief break up. The succeeding cut to the fish market implies that they have gone to purchase new fish together as a sign of their reunion, and a later shot bears this out.

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Jenn Marie Nunes

Jenn Marie Nunes is a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. Her areas of interest include modern Chinese poetry and film, translation, and gender and sexuality studies.