Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

According to Foucault, discourse is a set of practices producing and reinforcing certain forms of knowledge but also a site of resistance and subversion. This paper illustrates how a dominant literary tradition has been invented, stabilized but also unsettled in the historical discourse, by analyzing the representations of Mulan (the famous Chinese heroine joining the army by cross-dressing as a man) as a cultural practice. Firstly, this paper reveals that the representations of Mulan has been confined in a tradition that emerged during the Qing Dynasty and keeps gaining vitality from the later transmedia adaptations (such as novel, opera, film, textbook, children’s picture book and propaganda): a tradition that has been associating Mulan’s feminism with nationalism so as to tame her female agency for the Chinese nationalistic agendas. However, by spotlighting an undiscussed short film “Hua Mulan/Moonlight” (2020), this paper argues that such normalized literary practice is unsettled by this adaptation in the sense that it tries to free Mulan from the nationalist agenda and disassociate feminism from nationalism by providing an alternative interpretation for Mulan’s story. Such effort can be perceived as an indicator of the possibility that after being domesticated by and for the chronologically changing national narratives in China, female agency is becoming untamed in the era of identity politics. This paper further argues that it is this possibility that triggers the contemporary reframing of feminism as “toxic” to national security by the very national discourse that used to frame it as healthy to its construction.