Girls in Masquerade

Abstract

Chapter 6 examines the localization of screening community during Hong Kong’s 1960s industrial modernization. It examines the intersections among gendered labor, the Chinese patriarchal family, celebrity culture and fandom, through films starring 1960s idols, Connie Chan Po-chu and Josephine Siao Fong-fong. While fandom and celebrity culture were created by the real demographics of an increasing number of female workers who became Connie’s and Josephine’s fans, their viewership became discursive sites that contributed to the constructions of a gendered community both within and outside of traditional Confucian familial hierarchies. My analysis of films such as Her Tender Love ((Langru chunri feng, dir. Lui Kei, 1969) and Teddy Girls (Fenü zhengzhuan, dir. Lung Kong, 1969) demonstrates that masquerade not only becomes a point of identification for fans, but also a focusing lens for the convergence of seemingly conflicted experiences of teddy girls and factory girls. As much as they embodied the contradictions of urban industrial modernization, factory girls and teddy girls (both on- and off-screen) and their experiences constructed youth fandom as a discursive site for the creative imagining of freedom and empowerment. And both contributed to making and screening of the industrializing and modernizing city that was 1960s Hong Kong.