1 - Distortion of Desire: Sex and the Desiring Female Body in Hong Kong.

Cultural representation of female desire in films about Asian women has mostly taken on a heteronormative male gaze. Chinese patriarchal control has historically defined the female body around the man’s position of power and his penetrating gaze of desire. When women explore sexual desire, it is received as vulgar, unruly, and unacceptable.

Centering research around Chinese women in Hong Kong, this paper challenges the notion of the right to desire and invisibility of female pleasure as blanketed under the dominant male order. Attention to self silencing of women and the social stigmas that come with deep seeded traditional beliefs play into the reinforced hierarchies of power over the woman’s body.

This paper reframes the notion of desire and how it is distorted by the man made projections of fantasy through film and media. How is a gaze distorted by anxieties and obsessions around the suppression of desires? How does cultural burden converse with the liberation of the contemporary Chinese woman’s search for pleasure? The silenced body speaks through her situated, muffled, and provocative gaze.