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

Abstract

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.