Queer voice(over): Reassembling female desire in Chinese cinema

Abstract

This article discusses Chinese director Ning Ying’s 2006 film wuqiongdong (Perpetual Motion) with an emphasis on the development of queer voice(over) – a queer feminist aesthetic achievement that subverts and perverts the heteropatriarchal suppression of women’s desire. Specifically, I analyse the ways queer figure’s voice-over interacts with haptic visuality, contemporaneous image and the intertextual references between film-texts and exterior texts about the film. I argue, through queer voice(over), Perpetual Motion expands its theme beyond the issue of infidelity in a heterosexual marriage, develops a cinematic critique to the twentieth-century Chinese feminist movements and articulates female desires from multiple registers of senses, psychology and historical subjectivity. In Chinese cinema where queer voices are usually marginalized, Ning’s queer voice(over) establishes a mutually referent relation between queer and heteronormative storylines, thus circumventing the state censorship and adding queerness into Chinese-language feminist debates and cinematic expression.