Farewell, My Concubine: Gender, Performance, and Identity

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.

Gender Performance Versus Western Coming-Out Narratives

In many Western films, the idea of a non-heterosexual person "finding" their true self through cross-dressing is a familiar narrative. Douzi's gender journey, however, is far more ambiguous given the social context in which it unfolds. In the film's early scenes depicting the boys' training, they are shown nearly naked, comforting one another in an ambiguous fashion. Douzi is brutally socialized to identify as female, his sensitive temperament being "read" as femininity by the society around him.

After both men reach adulthood, Shitou tells Douzi that although he plays a king, Douzi is the concubine of that king within the opera. Although this sounds like a compliment to Douzi's acting, it also reflects how thoroughly Douzi has been distanced and socialized away from his core sense of self. The extent to which Douzi has been robbed of his true nature is most poignantly dramatized at the film's conclusion when, in his final performance, he literally commits suicide on stage while playing the concubine — blurring art and life in an irreversible act.

The film is bookended by Douzi's death. It is both the first and the last scene — the alpha and the omega of the narrative. The acting is static, mannered, and deeply traditional as Douzi begs the king to give her his sword so she can die. Then, suddenly, Shitou screams with horror, calling his friend by his real name, as he realizes that Douzi has actually used the sword to commit suicide.

Conclusion: Death as the Only Escape from Performance

Douzi does not entirely resist his role as an actor. When growing up with his prostitute mother, there seem to be few other venues for self-expression within his social context, and his likely fate seems dim given his entrapment in his mother's lifestyle. At the beginning of the film he attempts an escape but ultimately returns, lured by the promise of stardom but also by the fact that he has nowhere else to go. This is starkly illustrated when Douzi accepts a severe beating in exchange for his return, while the boy with whom he had run away commits suicide rather than accept the same punishment. Notably, Shitou also allows himself to be severely beaten by the Opera's master teacher because he permitted Douzi to escape — yet he will not risk supporting his friend, or even his own wife, when both are denounced during the Cultural Revolution.

The lack of support for those in the female role is further underscored by Douzi's unwitting creation of a rival when he rescues a baby early in the film. The boy is trained as a dan — a female impersonator like Douzi himself — and eventually takes on many of Douzi's roles. Douzi feels betrayed by this, and it stands as yet another example of how compassion and nurturing render one vulnerable rather than praiseworthy. Similarly, Juxian's kindness toward Douzi goes unrewarded. When Douzi, in despair over losing his roles to this rival, becomes addicted to opium, Juxian is instrumental in helping him recover. She also assists him after he is suspected of collaborating with the Japanese during World War II. Yet when Douzi is pushed into a corner, he ultimately acts to save himself — in part because, despite her kindness, he harbors deeper feelings for Shitou, his lover on stage though not in real life.

As the theory of gender performativity suggests, the performance of gender is never freely chosen but always shaped by social compulsion and constraint. Farewell, My Concubine makes this truth visceral: in a patriarchal society, the construct of femininity always works to harm rather than support those bodies gendered as female. A woman — or a man forced to perform as one — cannot survive without ties to a man. Both Juxian and Douzi, the film's two feminized figures, are ultimately destroyed not by any personal failure but by the system that required their subordination in the first place.

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.