‘Take the longest way to cross the street’: mobile women in Wong Kar-wai’s films

Abstract

As an acclaimed Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai has created numerous figures of mobile women, such as the martial artist in The Grandmaster (2013) and the lone traveler in My Blueberry Nights (2007). However, the issues pertinent to women in his films are often overlooked. In recent decades, feminists have examined women’s mobility as a challenge to the gendered spatial division between public and private spaces. In society, popular media is powerful in constructing the notion of space, while cinema can question the fixed ideas of gendered space. However, feminist work in media geography is still relatively rare. By subverting the conventional elements of various genres, Wong repositions women in cinematic space and reflects the global trend of women’s mobility. Wong’s films demonstrate the geographical power of cinema by deploying the transnational elements of Hong Kong and Hollywood genres to negotiate the meanings of gendered space. By revealing the cultural significance of Wong’s works in relation to gender and space, this article argues that the studies of genres and their variations are crucial at the intersection between media geography and feminist geography as an emergent research direction that could broaden the horizons of both fields.

Keywords:

• Genre
• Hong Kong cinema
• mobile women
• space
• Wong Kar-wai

Acknowledgement

I am grateful for the insightful comments offered by the anonymous reviewers. Also, I want to express my gratitude to Prof. Sue Thornham and Prof. Ben Highmore, my supervisors at the University of Sussex.

Disclosure statement

No competing interests are reported by the author.

Notes

1 The queer diaspora depicted in the film is noteworthy. By linking Hong Kong with Argentina, the film traverses transnational geographies and presents a postcoloniality (Wong 2020); through the gay protagonists’ spatial dislocation, it conveys uncertain postsocialist futures (Kim and Atanasoski 2017). The director deploys space and gender imagery to deliver alternative cultural and political discourses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chin-Pang Lei

Chin-Pang Lei earned his PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex in England. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Macau. His articles have been published by academic journals such as Asian Journal of Communication, Asian Journal of Social Science, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. He is also the author of the monographs 隱形澳門 [Invisible Macau] and 夢伴此城: 梅艷芳與香港流行文化 [Dream and the City: Anita Mui and Hong Kong Pop Culture].