Inroduction

This dissertation offers a feminist analysis of the “Cantopop Queen” and legendary actress Anita Mui Yim-Fong’s (1963-2003) comedic film performances from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s within the context of Hong Kong popular culture. It explores how she has challenged the stereotypical representations of the “masculine women” with her star persona transferred from music to cinema throughout the early, transitioning, and late periods of her artistic career.

Anita Mui still lives in the moment. She has been extensively discussed before and after her death. When she was alive, Mui was first a “bad girl” and then a “lonely flower woman” to speak about their joys and sorrows on behalf of women.

Yin Ruoshan

Highlights

• Anita Mui still lives in the moment. She has been extensively discussed before and after her death. When she was alive, Mui was first a “bad girl” and then a “lonely flower woman” to speak about their joys and sorrows on behalf of women. After her death, Mui was entitled by her city as the “Daughter of Hong Kong” to represent a pastime and a lost spirit.
• Throughout the history of comedy worldwide, this popular yet underestimated genre keeps humorously exploring serious issues, and in the case of Anita Mui, they are about gender. Mui takes her “gender game” from the stage to the cinema, from her private life to the public sphere.
• When Hong Kong comedies were full of teasing about female bodies and vulgar sex jokes, Mui used her star image to rewrite these demeaning depictions of women. Dyer argues that the star image is an intertextual construction created by texts such as films in a specific cultural situation, showing that Mui’s star images and film roles are mutually influenced. Her star glamor takes the part of the screenwriter to write scripts that are tailor-made for her.
• In Mui’s performances, women can wear men’s or women’s clothing and fall in love with either gender. She has had many bold, sexy body presentations, but her sensuality was so aggressive that she would stare back with sharper eyes when men scrutinized her body to dispel the oppressive “male gaze.”
• Halberstam’s conceptualization of female masculinity takes Judith Butler’s former discourse on deconstructing gender binaries in a more appropriate direction for decoding Mui’s androgyny.
• Like the legendary women warriors such as Mulan or Mu Guiying from the ancient dynasties, Mui contributes to a good case study in modern times to discuss female masculinity within Chinese communities.
• In its golden age, the Hong Kong film industry established a Hollywood-style studio system headed by Shaw Brothers. As a performer working in the system, Mui has never participated in directing or scriptwriting. She thus becomes an excellent example for studying the “Star-as-Auteur” phenomenon in Hong Kong commercial film scenes.

Experience at MALCS

I attended MALCS just in time for the final mini-peak of the epidemic, and happened to watch the hit Hong Kong biopic Anita (2021) just before the full lockdown in early 2022, and thus stepped into a golden age of Hong Kong cinema that was far removed from the era I lived in. To combat the anxiety brought on by the epidemic, I watched dozens of Hong Kong comedy movies from the last century over the winter break in preparation for the dissertation theme and fully experienced the charm of Hong Kong comedy and the influence of Anita Mui as a legendary diva. It is with love and admiration for Mui that I wrote this essay, and I hope that as you read it, you will empathize with these nuances of emotion and appreciate the pioneering nature of gender in her acting career.

I am grateful to the professors at MALCS for supporting my research on Hong Kong popular culture. MALCS is a programme that allows you to explore any topic of interest and express your opinions freely. After graduation, writing in the workplace may get thousands of reads and likes, but there's never that level of free expression again. A short year at MALCS is truly something to cherish.