AUTHOR
Shoufu Yin
University of British Columbia
Shoufu Yin is an Assistant Professor of history at the University of British Columbia. His recent projects and publications explore three directions of inquiry: (1) rewriting Sinitic intellectual and literary histories with a focus on seemingly formulaic official documents; (2) retelling the global history of political thought through the lens of Manchu and other Inner Asian language writings; and (3) rediscovering everyday forms of intellectual output in history and beyond.
If one goes to the cinema, watches TV dramas, or plays video games, there is one thing that one will not miss: the salience of Chinese women warriors. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) has notably popularized the swordswomen of traditional China. The Disney films of Mulan (1998, 2020) are based on the well-known “Ballad of Mulan,” which attests to the Sino-Steppe geopolitics of roughly the sixth century CE, when Mulan joined the army in her father’s stead. While the award-winning film The Assassin (2015) takes inspiration from Tang (618–907) legends devoted to women knights-errant, the monster film The Great Wall (2015) invented a woman commander Lin Mae who was presented as living in the mid-eleventh century. Interestingly, although Turning Red (2022) is mainly about a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl in Toronto named Mei, it actually stresses that a maternal ancestor of Mei acquired supernatural fighting power from her pact with red pandas during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).
Figure 1. Mulan, A Well-Known Chinese Woman Warrior
Source: Wikimedia Commons
These are not isolated examples. In recent decades, popular culture representations of women warriors of imperial China, whether historical or fictional, have gained increasing popularity in global media. My general take is that these films and games provide new opportunities for teaching and writing histories. They invite and encourage us to ask new and interesting questions. The release of Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019), which includes the character of Zheng Jiang, a bandit queen from the second century CE, sparked a wave of curiosity among players and fans who began to question whether Zheng Jiang was a real historical figure. This online discussion served as a catalyst for further historical inquiries: What kind of error did the developers of Total War: Three Kingdoms (2019) make when reading the primary sources? Were there actually bandit queens in second-century China or early China (1800 BCE – 200 CE) in general? (Short answer: yes!)
In some cases, popular culture representations even point to understudied areas in history. To give only one example, the series Pirates of the Caribbean (2003–2017) has effectively popularized the story of Zheng Yi Sao (1775–1844), a historical leader of pirates who remains relatively understudied in the field of Chinese and maritime history. During the spring semester of 2023, while teaching an introductory course on Chinese history (one from the lens of and with a particular focus on women), I found that my students were surprised to discover that Zheng Yi Sao was not a fictional character. In fact, they were particularly passionate about delving into the “real” history of this legendary female pirate.
Now, it seems that the time is ripe to at least think about teaching the history of imperial China by focusing on women, including but not confined to those who had once challenged their ascribed gender roles and/or those who have been featured in the global film/game industry. Before that, however, we need a conceptual and analytic framework that will enable us to critically engage different representations of women warriors in China and beyond—ranging from the earliest records in history to the most recent films or video games. How do producers and consumers (whether in East Asia or North America) Orientalize and fetishizing the imperial past, women in war, and the related narratives?
My purpose here is to test an idea that I call “the pseudo-recognition of women warriors.” As a first approximation, it refers to the problematic appropriation, imagination, or representation of women who played critical roles in warfare and other violent settings. In doing so, I want to draw a distinction from what Axel Honneth calls “misrecognition,” the situation where individuals fail to receive the respect crucial to subject formation, which leads others to fail to see that individual’s value in intersubjective, social, and political relationships.1 When a regime, either imperial Chinese or global capitalistic, orchestrates “pseudo-recognition” of women, it gestures toward recognizing their achievements—epitomized in acts of promoting their ranks or featuring their valor. However, in doing so, the regime cunningly redescribes their achievements in ways that reproduce the ideological order, whether patriarchal, orientalist, or both.
Elsewhere, I have identified multiple rhetorical strategies of pseudo-recognition that were particularly important in imperial China.2 The most established one eulogizes female commanders by reducing them to obedient daughters or faithful wives, who temporarily transgress the gender boundary only to better fulfill more important responsibilities that the patriarchal order prescribes for them. Why did Mulan join the battlefield instead of staying in the inner quarters serving her husband (as the normative texts prescribe)? Well, because she needed to save her father from throwing his life away on the battlefield. The second very influential strategy is simply to say that female leaders in war were exceptional individuals who transcend the gender order prescribed to commoners. While this approach plays an important role in actual documents of imperial China, it characterizes the logic behind some of the recent movies as well. Mulan has a unique destiny, according to Disney. And Mei’s maternal ancestor was uniquely chosen by the Red Panda Goddess as the guardian of her village, and this explains why such a woman rose as military and political leader. Another form of pseudorecognition that characterizes both imperial Chinese and contemporary global cultural production is certainly the fetishization of the female body when representing fighting women. In the sixteenth century, commercial prints started to visualize female commanders in the Chinese tradition, and Saito Tamaki thoroughly examined the “beautiful fighting girl” as a complex sexual fantasy with a focus on Japanese anime and manga.3
In brief, as other contributors to this forum have wonderfully demonstrated, the way we look at the past—whether it be a nostalgic quest for one’s origins or an Orientalist imagination of the Other—shapes our visions of the future. Given the paramount importance of critically examining our perspectives on the past, together its influence on the present and future, my discussion boils down to a proposal: From the lens of pseudo-recognition, it will be possible to compare how women warriors were represented in imperial China and global media. The imperial Chinese court repeatedly produced frameworks to make sense of women’s success in military leadership without giving up patriarchal ideology, which prescribes that women are not suitable for war. It seems to me that some of these discursive or representational strategies are still visible in cinematic representations of Chinese women today. In addition, it is worth stressing that the global popular cultural industry has notably introduced new techniques of representing and producing pseudorecognition of Chinese and Asian women and culture in general. This phenomenon warrants further research and analysis, as it has significant implications for how these cultures are perceived and understood on a global scale.
Footnotes:
[1]: See in particular Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” in N. Fraser/A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003), 237-67; see also Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), 29, 167.
[2]: Shoufu Yin, “Rewarding Female Commanders in Medieval China: Official Documents, Rhetorical Strategies, and Gender Order,” Journal of Chinese History 6.1 (2022): 23–42.
[3]: Saito Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Further Reading
Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013).
Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” in N. Fraser/A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003), 237-67.
Saito Tamaki, Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Shoufu Yin, “Rewarding Female Commanders in Medieval China: Official Documents, Rhetorical Strategies, and Gender Order,” Journal of Chinese History 6.1 (2022): 23–42.