Chinese stars play an increasingly visible role in re-orchestrating ethnic politics and gender dynamics in a transnational and translingual context. Scholarship about intersections of ethnicity, gender and celebrity reveals a focus on male icons and their female counterparts are much under-explored. This talk seeks to intervene in the current debates of ethnic and gendered discourses of celebrities by examining the construction and reception of Chinese female icons in both onscreen and offscreen settings. It uses Malaysian-born, ethnically Chinese, and Hollywood-based Michelle Yeoh as an example to illustrate how her persona is recoded and negotiated in the English-speaking and Chinese-speaking media space. Famous for her action star status, Yeoh extends her reputation from cinema to philanthropy, unfolding novel dimensions of her star credentials. In this talk, I suggest aural modalities including language, dialect and accent as critical parameters to inspect Yeoh’s evolving action stardom, moving away from the paradigm habitually tied with the virile body and female knight-errantry. The analysis covers three avenues of image-making spanning from the turn of the century to the latest decade: the Hollywood-produced Mandarin-speaking 2000 martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the 2011 French-British biographical feature The Lady and the 2016 World Economic Forum interview. I contend that Yeoh’s vocal or phonic presence, marked by both eloquence and accented utterances, enhances the star profile and valorizes audience engagement across cultural and linguistic borders. To the critical ends, this discussion not only enlightens an alternative model of assessing action screen identities but also disrupts the established approaches of inquiring about Asian star power in a volatile, multi-vocal/accented mediascape.
Dorothy Wai Sim Lau is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include stardom, celebrities, fandom, Chinese-language cinema, Asian cinema, digital culture, and screen culture. Her publications appear in journals such as positions: Asia critique, Continuum, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Asian Cinema, and several edited volumes. She is also the author of Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (2019) and Reorienting Chinese Stars in Global Polyphonic Networks: Voice, Ethnicity, Power (2021). She is writing her third monograph, Celebrity Activism and Philanthropy in Asia: Toward A Cosmopolitical Imaginary (under contract with Amsterdam University Press). Lau is currently the visiting scholar at the School of East Asian Studies, The University of Sheffield.
