Revisiting the Stardom of Yang Naimei: The Typecast, the Modern Girl, and the Femme Fatale

Abstract This paper aims to revisit Yang Naimei’s stardom by discussing her as China’s most famous femme fatale of the 1920s. She was the first Chinese film actress to be typecast according to her public persona, and the first to be cast in a series of anti-heroes. In my discussion, I treated her as an extreme case of the 1920s film actresses through which we could see more clearly their ambitions, their talents, their situations, and their struggles. I would like to argue that she is an extreme locus of modern femininity in 1920s China, where being a modern girl, a film star, or a femme fatale is one and the same thing. As a modern girl in search of her subjectivity, she exerted a vibrant energy in the search for visibility through performing stardom. This paper also examined the bense discourse that has been popular in China for almost a century, and in particular discussed why the film actress is always closely tied between her on-screen image and her off-screen image, as a response to an essentialist idea, attitude, and assumption that surrounds Yang Naimei, that she can effortlessly play a femme fatale on screen simply because she is a femme fatale herself.