Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Postsocialist China

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Tang Tang (Zhang Hanzi, 2004) and Mei Mei (Gao Tian, 2005), two Chinese documentaries. Although each documentary centers around a female impersonator, they approach their subjects in distinct ways. While Mei Mei portrays its subject with nuance and intense emotional investment, Tang Tang emphasizes formal experimentation. Positioning Tang Tang at the intersection of what I call the film’s “performing documentary” and the subject’s “performance of gender,” I argue that the reflexivity permeating Tang Tang foregrounds the openness of the queer subjectivities it portrays. My investigation further addresses each film’s subjects as human beings materialized in and through a matrix of social, political, and economic conditions marked by spatial and temporal parameters.