An Investigation of the Huangmei Opera Film Genre: The Audience’s Perception of Ling Po’s Male Impersonation

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the spectatorship in Huangmei Opera films, especially on the issues related to audiences’ perception of Ling Po’s practice of male impersonation. It employs Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic theory from her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” to discuss the unconscious pleasure experience of the audience of Huangmei Opera films. However, it challenges Mulvey’s theory about male gaze and identification in cinematic apparatus by the case of Ling Po’s male impersonation, while men perceive him as a woman and women perceive her as a man. This chapter considers that the spectator’s identifications of Ling Po’s impersonation rely on the fantasy proposing links among cultural, societal, and psychological modes. It suggests that Ling Po’s images on and off screen represent a sexual ambivalence and enable polymorphous identification.

Most of the Chinese-language phrases in this chapter follow the rules of pinyin system of Romanization. However, some exceptions follow the rules of the Wade-Giles system of Romanization, such as the author’s name Yeong-Rury Chen and the Taiwanese-heritage filmmaker Li Han-hsiang’s name.