"He's a Woman, She's a Man" and Leslie Cheung discussed in new book

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Lisa Odham Stokes, Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s “He’s a Woman, She’s a Man”, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2009.

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Lisa Odham Stokes’ monograph study of the Hong Kong film “He’s a Woman, She’s a Man” is another volume in The New Hong Kong Cinema series published by Hong Kong University Press.  This is a particularly attractive volume for the general reader, including fans of Hong Kong cinema and Leslie Cheung, but also touches on much that is of interest to specialist readers in film and gender studies.

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This concise work is written primarily with the general reader in mind.  The writing is clear, lucid and direct.  While a key theme of the book is gender issues as they are represented in the film, and also life of the film’s star, Leslie Cheung, the book is mostly free of the type of specialist jargon that is almost totally unintelligible to a general reader.  Nevertheless, in a nod to her academic colleagues, the author does summarize enough of these arguments (usually in the extensive footnotes) to orient her discussions for specialists without bogging down the main text, and many of the issues discussed in the notes may, in fact, be of considerable interest to the general reader.

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This slender monograph is an easy read, yet it is densely packed with valuable information on formal and conceptual issues surrounding this film, its reception, the Hong Kong entertainment industry and its celebrities as reflected in the themes explored in this 1994 Hong Kong “dramedy”.  The core of the book is Chapter 3, Cross-dressing, Gender-bending and Sexual Orientation.  In it, Odham Stokes discusses these issues not only in the context of the film, but in the broader context of Hong Kong and China and examines how these issues played out in the real life of the film’s star, Leslie Cheung.  This book has the most comprehensive treatment of Leslie Cheung in a Western language and includes invaluable discussions not otherwise accessible to those who do not read Chinese.  The issues of gender identification, celebrity and sexual politics are given significant treatment in the main body of the text and further elaborated and expanded upon in the footnotes amounting to a significant contribution to studies of this film and of Leslie Cheung.  This work stands, along with Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s Undercurrents:  Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, UBC Press, Vancouver, Toronto, 2008, as essential reading for an understanding of Leslie Cheung and how he embodied gender issues in 1990s Hong Kong, whether in his film roles, his stage performances or his private life.

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Highly recommended.

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