Sinophone Libidinal Economy in the Age of Neoliberalization and Mainlandization: Masculinities in Hong Kong SAR New Wave Cinema

Abstract

The Sinophone perspective has become even more important for Hong Kong culture now that Hong Kong is de jure a part of rising China because of its being gradually disappeared into an undifferentiated vision of a growing China. In face of the neoliberalising global political-economy, the imperative of the massive China market and the growing competition from other Asian cinemas, Hong Kong film begins to develop a more bifurcated set of cultural politics. Posed against the perspectives of established Hong Kong New Wave filmmakers working on Hong Kong-China co-production blockbusters catering to what I call a mainlandising market, this paper argues that an emerging new cohort of Hong Kong filmmakers, which I can the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) New Wave, offers some decidedly different takes. While Hong Kong-China co-productions by established Hong Kong filmmakers tend to continuously struggle within vertical, binary relations to China, the Hong Kong SAR New Wave tends to offer a more horizontal, inter-local, quotidian and hybrid set of cultural politics that are decidedly Sinophone. This can be demonstrated through how they overturn genres that have defined Hong Kong film to the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Posed against (1) the kinds of hegemonic masculinities that have defined the Hong Kong gangster film, kungfu film and killer film, (2) the kind of masculinity expected of discourses about the rising China and its modern national traumas, as well as (3) the new hegemonic “neoliberal masculinity” (Sauer, 2010) representative of Hong Kong as a global financial market, these new expressions of masculinities demonstrate a different, post-1997 negotiation of local, national and neoliberalising global identities politics is about for a new generation of Hong Kong audience and filmmakers.