Farewell, My Concubine: Gender, Performance, and Identity
This essay analyzes the 1993 film Farewell, My Concubine through the lens of gender performance, patriarchal oppression, and political identity in twentieth-century China. Focusing on the two central characters — Chen Dieyi (Douzi), a Peking Opera actor forced into female roles, and Duan Xiaolou (Shitou), his masculine counterpart — the essay argues that the film uses theatrical artifice as a metaphor for the social masks all Chinese citizens were compelled to wear under successive oppressive regimes. Drawing on Zhang's scholarly framework, the essay examines how feminized bodies, both male and female, are systematically subjugated, violated, and ultimately destroyed by a deeply patriarchal culture that simultaneously requires and condemns the feminine roles it enforces.
- Introduction: Masks, Performance, and Political Oppression: Thesis: theatrical artifice mirrors coerced social identity
- Forced Feminization: Douzi's Socialization in the Peking Opera: Douzi brutally socialized into feminine roles against will
- Gender Performance Versus Western Coming-Out Narratives: Douzi's experience contrasted with Western LGBT narratives
- Patriarchy, Femininity, and Social Annihilation: Chinese patriarchy erases feminine identity and agency
- The Cultural Revolution and Parallel Betrayals: Stage identities mirror Cultural Revolution's forced denunciations
- Feminized Bodies as Sites of Violation: Rape, prostitution, and violence target feminized bodies
- Conclusion: Death as the Only Escape from Performance: Both feminized characters die; patriarchy destroys its subjects
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay sustains a coherent central argument — that theatrical artifice in Peking Opera mirrors the coerced social identities imposed by Chinese patriarchy and political regimes — and applies it consistently across the film's narrative arc.
- It uses close reading of specific scenes (the pipe incident, the final suicide) to ground abstract claims about gender performance in concrete textual evidence.
- The parallel structure comparing Douzi and Juxian effectively demonstrates how both male-feminized and female bodies suffer equivalent fates under patriarchal systems.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates sustained secondary source integration, weaving Zhang's scholarly framework on phallogocentrism and Chinese masculinity directly into scene analysis. Rather than merely quoting Zhang, the writer uses the citations to validate and extend their own interpretive claims, modeling how film criticism can bridge textual analysis and cultural theory.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a broad thesis about artifice and oppression, then narrows progressively into Douzi's specific experience of forced feminization, before widening again to include Juxian and the systemic dimensions of patriarchal violence. The bookending of the film's opening and closing deaths mirrors the essay's own structural return to its central argument about gender performance leading inevitably to destruction.
Introduction: Masks, Performance, and Political Oppression
The film Farewell, My Concubine uses the lens of two men's lives to chronicle the political and social upheavals that gripped China first during the Communist consolidation of power and then during the Cultural Revolution. These men are extraordinary and unique: they are actors in the famous, traditional Peking Opera. However, the film argues that the artifice they are forced to employ in their art parallels the masks all Chinese citizens are compelled to wear in the face of a series of oppressive government systems. Eventually, the masks replace truth.
Although this is the case to some extent for all Chinese people, it is particularly true for Chinese women. Both pre-Communist and Communist China, for all of their efforts to become radical and create a more equitable relationship between social classes, were equally patriarchal. Certain bodies — those sexed both male and female — were forced into a subordinate feminine role and then condemned for fulfilling the dictates of that status.
The idea of gender as performance may be true of all societies, but the conceits of the Peking Opera render this truth far more starkly. In this Chinese art form, much like Elizabethan theatre in the West, men traditionally take female roles. This conceit becomes the source of comparison between the two main characters — poor young boys who are conscripted into the Opera before the Communist Revolution on the basis of their talent, but who are subjected to rigors no less severe than those endured by soldiers in any army.
Forced Feminization: Douzi's Socialization in the Peking Opera
Chen Dieyi (given the stage name Xiao Douzi) and Duan Xiaolou (stage name Xiao Shitou) are transformed by their occupations from impoverished, anonymous children on the streets of China into famous and beloved actors. Douzi is assigned to play the transvestite roles, while the more stereotypically masculine Shitou is allowed to play male roles. Both boys are brutally treated as they are molded into these artificial social identities — forced to endure bricks on their legs to master splits and subjected to grueling acrobatic training. In Douzi's case especially, this process demands a complete dissociation from his former identity. Before his training, Douzi identified as male; he is forced to both become and impersonate a female, a status literally painted onto him through his training rather than something natural to his own perspective.
At one point early in the film, Douzi is forced to sing that he is "by nature" a girl, not a boy — a declaration he resists. Eventually, with the fate of the opera company hanging in the balance, Shitou tries to convince his friend to sing the "correct" words. When Douzi still refuses, Shitou shoves a pipe down his throat — an act that symbolically rapes or castrates him, stripping away his masculinity. The expression on Douzi's face registers hurt and violation, yet as a result he ultimately agrees to sing the words in the prescribed way: that he is by nature a girl, even though this contradicts what he truly believes.
The scene in which he does so is laden with irony. Within the opera being performed, the song is supposedly sung by a young girl who has shaved her head to become a nun and thus resembles a young boy — yet she proudly proclaims that she is a girl. Douzi, however, is forced to undergo the opposite trauma. He has been symbolically penetrated by his friend — the very man who will grow up to play masculine roles against his feminine ones — and is compelled to resemble a woman within the traditional, gendered casting assumptions of the Opera, even though his true nature is that of a fully sexualized male.
It is interesting that this model of gendered socialization in the context of the theatre is very different from the conventional coming-out narrative found in most Western films. Although Douzi is perceived as more effeminate than Shitou, he does not self-identify as gay until much later in the film. Furthermore, assuming the role of a stereotypical female in Chinese Opera is very different from adopting an alternative mode of sexuality: it is playing a role, in a highly mannered fashion that eradicates any possible creative or nuanced personal response to sexuality. Douzi does not view this imposed female role as positive or as an expression of innate desire — a point made viscerally clear as blood pours from his mouth while he recites the "correct" words by rote.
Works Cited
Farewell My Concubine. Directed by Kaige Chen, 1999.
Zhang, B. "Figures of Violence and Tropes of Homophobia: Reading Farewell My Concubine between East and West." Journal of Popular Culture, 33.2 (1999), 101–109.
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