Abstract
As part of my research on sexually explicit art and media in mainland China and Hong Kong, I unfolded the theme of queer sexuality in historical ghost fictions and movies (Jacobs, 2015). Several years before doing this research, I also wrote a script for a short film and video installation, The Ghost of Sister Ping, which I eventually produced and exhibited in Fall 2017 in collaboration with a team of artists and the artspace Videotage. The story is set in contemporary Hong Kong and presents a young academic lecturer, Sister Ping, who is intellectually accomplished but socially awkward and sexually frustrated. These circumstances change when she develops a crush on an older male scholar who spends a semester at her university. The ghost narratives from the Ching and Ming Dynasties (1368–1864) and Hong Kong movies from the 1970s and 1980s also narrate stories concerning a middle-aged scholar or functionary, usually a male and well-established person, who is derailed from an arduous task through the power of a sexualized ghost. In some of these movies, like Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1988) the viewer also becomes sympathetic to the ghost who wavers between earthly relations and her own tempestuous non-human realm. I borrowed this motif when featuring Sister Ping, a lecturer who has a deep crush but who is unable to realize sexual satisfaction and therefore walks towards her death amongst the stark mountainous landscapes of the Hong Kong New Territories. It had taken me several years to develop this ghost story and to apply for film funding from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. When I finally managed to get a film grant, the theme of the death wish caught up with my own deep personal distress, which included consecutive bouts of illness and the successive deaths of my sister and mother, This long process of anxiety and empathy exhausted me to the core and indeed made me fragile and panicked about my own mortality.
Many movies represent the anxious ghost figure as one who appears and vanishes while attempting to fundamentally disturb or interfere with human relations. In local Hong Kong Chinese history, these ghosts were often used as a vehicle to warn young people about moral waywardness and to encourage them towards abstinence and/or celibacy. Anthropologist Joseph Bosco has recorded these moralistically inclined ghost stories that are still making the rounds at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a large campus also located in the mountainous New Territories. Bosco’s article ‘Young people’s ghost stories in Hong Kong’ (2007) collects five stories and analyzes their superstitions and fears within the Confucian influenced environment that the students have grown up in. Angry ghosts linger on the campus and interfere with their studies and sometimes announce violent and premature deaths. Four out of the five ghost stories collected in Bosco’s research involve female ghosts who trigger the fears of young male students. It is stated that students should avoid sexual contact with women altogether and focus on their studies, that the consequences would be dire if they go on dates or have premarital sex.
In The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in 17th-Century Chinese Literature (2007), a sex-positive and feminist study of Ming Dynasty ghost literature, Judith Zeitlin explains that the female ghost represents an ‘upside down’ realm to scholarly thought and ambition, but one that provides positive sexual chemistry for a balanced intellect. According to Richard G Wang, a similar trope can be found in the male-oriented erotic novellas of the Ming Dynasty, which functioned as manuals on the spiritual benefits of sexual contact. It was argued that frequent sexual activity could indeed lead to contact with ghosts, which could be benign as it might lead to human immortality. Many of the erotic novellas presented the ideal of the ‘erotic immortal’ as the endless continuation of sex, and this kind of sex as the motivation behind spiritual enlightenment (Wang, 2011: 201). More practically speaking, as Zeitlin explains, it was believed that a fiery ‘yang’ force within the living being needed to be engulfed by the damp ‘yin’ force of the female ghost, or even a super-yin force. It was recommended in literature and in medical practice that a super-yin force was necessary for human well-being but needed always to be properly balanced. In some tales and medical journals, doctors would prescribe exactly how many times per week male intercourse with ghosts was advised and allowed (Zeitlin, 2007: 14). It was believed that people could sometimes be ‘possessed’ by such ghosts through their sexual dreams, as in male nocturnal ejaculations, in which case the super-yin function could also be fatal. But a good balance was necessary for a scholar to be productive, and this could be established through contact with ghosts. A specific type of congestive disorder called ‘stasis’ or ‘static congestion’ was thought to be caused by lack of energy and a suppression of emotions of passion and lust, which could lead to depression and rage (Zeitlin, 2007: 21).
In women’s literature there was also a glorification of this kind of rage, which was further developed in a large volume of poetry by women as ‘love-sick maidens’ who wrote about the death wish in the pursuit of impossible romance. In an article devoted to women’s writings, Zeitlin explains that the popularity of Tang Xianzu’s romantic tragicomedy The Peony Pavilion (1598) amongst women was enormous and stirred many commentaries as well as a genre of women’s poetry. Not unlike Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774) the play and its commentaries also started off a cult of young women using poetry as a way to praise the excesses of melancholy and the allure of death. Women who adored The Peony Pavilion promoted an extremely melancholic sensibility as a ‘phantom feminist’ could only reach satisfaction in death (Zeitlin, 1994, 2007). In short, it stirred up the romantic excesses and mental transgressions of women, but could not be easily developed as a practical feminism that could be applied to their actual lives.
In my research and ghost movie, I adopted the notion of phantom feminism and also related it to Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘shadow feminism’ as a silent and otherworldly queer agency that guides women’s quest for sexual pleasure (Halberstam, 2011: 130). In this sense, the ghost is seen as a gender-fluid and hedonistic agent, whose fall into destitution and death is an escape from the nuclear family and Oedipal models of parenthood. (Halberstam, 2011: 124). In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam criticizes the feminist impulse to substitute a father for a symbolic mother figure: The pervasive model of women’s studies as a mother–daughter dynamic ironically resembles patriarchal systems in that it casts the mother as the place of history, tradition and memory and the daughter as the inheritor of a static system which she must accept without changing or reject completely. (Halberstam, 2011: 124–125).
The figure of a ghost as cited here can be used to disrupt notions of human history or reproduction as the ghost refuses to cohere and succumb to a narrative of development, which amounts to a suspended body ‘out of time, space and desire’ (Halberstam, 2011: 145). As we can see in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, the ghost-figure Fleur once lived as a high-class courtesan and entertainer in 1930s Hong Kong, but then experiences a downfall after falling in love with one of her clients, 12th Young Master. After a steamy love affair, which could not be endorsed by 12th Young Master’s parents, the affair ends in a suicide pact between the two lovers and an agreement to meet again in the after-life. While Fleur died and became a restless ghost, 12th Young Master survived by a cowardly backing out of the pact. In 1988 Fleur returns at a specific location and time to rendezvous with her lover but instead is discovered by another man, who is initially horrified by her but eventually becomes sympathetic to her plight. The man’s wife is also threatened by Fleur, who has a certain kind of sex appeal and wears ornate dresses and lingerie. It is actually the controlling mother of 12th Young Master who had humiliated Fleur by arguing that sexual fashions of the past are superior and could never be attained by modern women like herself. In one of the scenes, 12th Young Master’s mother offers her a special kind of tea made of Hangzhou tea leaves ‘collected by virgins’ and ‘carried on their supreme and tender breasts.’ She tells Fleur that modern women would never be able to collect those kinds of tea leaves on their breasts. She despises Fleur for being an independent woman and tries to convince 12th Young Master that other types of ancient services would be better for her precious son.
When Fleur returns to earth, she takes revenge on the stern mother by embodying ancient erotic agency, a finesse in fashion and entertainment that modernization can no longer aspire to. But Fleur also becomes increasingly lonely and a weakened figure who drifts in the contemporary city and observes the lost state of civilization, which mirrors her own personal downfall. She makes countless efforts to find her lover, and upon finally locating him realizes that he is still living having failed to die in their suicide attempt. She sees that he has become an old, opium-addicted homeless man, a person devoid of sensuality and unable to provide companionship. She decides to leave him and to exit the sad realm of ageing humans and their earthly struggles. As a phantom heroine, who manifests superb artistry, Fleur compensates for the dire straits of conservative Confucian morality and family dynamics. She is presented as an artistically gifted courtesan with unusual gender fluidity who transgresses social norms by allowing a client to fall in love with her and then as a brave-hearted ghost who is able to accept and resolve her ill-fated romance.
Shadow feminism also means that women can neglect or fabricate origins while gaining definition and identity by way of contact with other women. In this sense the shadow feminist is often a person who is in the background of another person, or is a fractured person who can only exists as multiple presences. This type of phantom subjectivity is developed in the Shaw Brothers’ classic Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972) directed by Chor Yeun and featuring Lily Ho as a young and beautiful prostitute Ainu who is captured and forced to work in a famous brothel run by an older madam Chun Yi. Chun Yi tries to control the disobedient Ainu but then slowly falls in love with her. The two women become experts in sexual techniques and martial arts but they can only advance as an ill balanced twin-pair. They switch between love and hatred and try to find ways to control each other. There is sexual attraction that is also frequently disavowed by each of them. They resemble each other physically and both have superhuman abilities that can be used to deceive each other. Ainu is a raw and angry prostitute who slowly goes mad and starts killing all the ‘old masters’ or clients who have hired her as a prostitute and then treated her harshly.
In one scene she is hired by on older man for a bondage session but she sets him on fire while he is tightly bound. Chun Yi keeps defending Ainu in front of her clients, but she also ends up hating her and tries to kill her. But her attempt is outdone by Ainu who, in one of the final scenes, uses the pretext of a kiss to slip a poisonous potion in her mouth. As the older maternal figure and owner of a successful enterprise, she is sent to death by a younger and sexy courtesan. At the same time, at the end of their affair and as the movie reaches closure, both lovers are depicted as phantom heroines, as martial arts warriors who have played hard, lived their relation to the fullest, and now must exit the realm of humanity.
Based in Judith Zeitlin’s historical analysis of ghost literature and the queer theory of Jack Halberstam, these ghosts are examples of ‘phantom feminism’ as powerful erotic forces that can disrupt and illuminate our routine academic lives and methods of sexual pleasure. Phantom feminism does not refer to an illusory or non-existing presence, but a roaming force that invades humans on occasion and triggers their desire for more sex in a less frantic afterlife.