China – Bitch Flicks

‘Hooligan Sparrow’ Touches on Topics of Fame and Notoriety in Activism

The documentary, from director Nanfu Wang, follows Chinese activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) as she protests the lack of prosecution in a child sexual abuse case and suffers retaliatory harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. … ‘Hooligan Sparrow’ is, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the legends that activists build for themselves.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Hooligan Sparrow is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

There’s a lot going on in Hooligan Sparrow. The documentary, from director Nanfu Wang, follows Chinese activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) as she protests the lack of prosecution in a child sexual abuse case and suffers retaliatory harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. The film is full of scenes where strangers who may be plain-clothes police officers threaten to break Wang’s camera, or where the footage shows her running feet, the ground, or the stairs while people shout threatening things in the background. She breathlessly explains to us that she’s had to go into hiding, that she can’t use any form of travel requiring an ID or credit card and that her friends have warned her that the police are asking questions about her.

The issues that Sparrow and her associates (including lawyer Wang Yu, who has been indefinitely detained as of the film’s release), protest are important and well-explained. Sparrow first came to prominence when she began protesting the criminalization of sex work through a stunt where she publically declared that she would prostitute herself for free. In the film, she protests a high-profile sexual abuse case, in which a school principal allegedly abducted several of his female students and forced them to have sex with government officials. After first denying that any sex took place, the defence begins to argue that the girls accepted money in exchange for sex, which would reduce the charge to child prostitution rather than rape, and carry a much lighter sentence. Sparrow and Yu explain that this is a common tactic in Chinese courts – to cover up rape by claiming it was prostitution instead.

Although their cause is just, Sparrow and Wang, who becomes increasingly involved in the action even as she documents it, also carry a certain cloud of ego and drama into their work. It’s the same cloud of ego and drama that follows many full-time activists all over the world, and there have been very few explorations of what it means. It’s entirely possible to both try to make the world a better place and like being the center of attention, but there’s definitely a tension that plays out between those two things.

For example, there’s a scene late in the film where Wang is finally able to interview the father of one of the sexual abuse victims. He reveals that he avoided engaging with them earlier because the only thing he knew about Sparrow was that she’d done a stunt where she said she’d have sex for free. It seems like he doesn’t know or understand what she was trying protest – the protest didn’t draw his attention to the dangers faced by sex workers due to criminalization; it just drew attention to Sparrow. And it actually made him less interested in seeing her as a potential ally, even though they were on the same side.

As Wang narrates the film, after the fact, she also seems to take a certain amount of pleasure in how people were always trying to shut down her film. I don’t doubt at all that she was scared when she was running from violent mobs, or thought she was about to be arrested and detained by the police. But it’s telling that the story, which is supposedly about the persecution that Sparrow is facing, is framed by an incident where someone wrestled Wang’s camera away from her. Definitely scary. Definitely uncool. Kind of throwing the attention on herself rather than either the sexual abuse trial or the activist she’s been profiling.

Hooligan Sparrow is, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the legends that activists build for themselves. It’s about the notoriety that Sparrow receives, the unfair persecution, the harassment, the shunning – being left on the side of the road with her daughter and all their belongings – an incident that later becomes the subject of an art exhibit from Ai Weiwei. But it’s also about why she’s called Hooligan Sparrow. It’s about fame. It’s about glory. It’s about yelling really loud in front of a bunch of other people, and then congratulating yourself and kind of forgetting about it.

It’s not clear from the film whether Sparrow’s protest actually had much impact on the outcome of the trial – it’s not clear whether it made the victims feel supported; it’s not clear whether it changed anyone’s mind. I think it’s important for activists to publicly demonstrate that there are people who don’t agree with what’s going on, even if it doesn’t change anyone’s mind, but the film isn’t focused on whether Sparrow’s work has any impact on anyone else. It also doesn’t delve into the kind of investigative journalism that would uncover what’s happening in China’s rape and sexual assault trials, how systemic government corruption has become, or how the government (allegedly) tries to silence protesters.

On the flip side, the film also doesn’t fully commit to a narrative about Nanfu Wang’s journey as documentarian, even though she becomes a more and more active participant as the story goes on. There’s no strong sense of how this experience changed her, or what the role of gonzo journalism is in helping to bring freedom of speech and expression to China. There’s an interesting subplot in the film, where one of Sparrow’s followers seems to become interested in journalism after meeting Wang and takes up the mantle of “documenting the atrocities” on camera after she’s gone – it’s a subplot I would have like to have seen explored more.

I also wish the film had delved deeper into the subplot about how technology has made it harder for the government to make people disappear. The protesters in Hooligan Sparrow tape messages whenever they fear they’re about to be arrested, explaining that, if they die in custody it will not be because they killed themselves, imploring people to look for them if they go missing, and explaining how their disappearance may be linked to participation in political protests. It’s the same principle that led Ai Weiwei to tweet a photo of himself being arrested, and a form of action that may hold real promise for political change.

Wang’s adrenaline-fueled attempt to get through the summer without losing her camera makes for an engaging story, but it isn’t always clear that what she’s captured on the camera exposes new information or reveals the path to increased human rights in China.

Sparrow’s fellow activist, Wang Yu was arrested along with several other human rights lawyers in 2015 and, as of the film’s release, had been held without trial since. The filmmakers have set up a page with information on Wang Yu’s detention by Chinese authorities as well as suggestions for how to take action. Yu is also one of the women identified in the US government’s #freethe20 campaign.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Inside the Chinese Closet’ Highlights the Need for Social Acceptance of LGBTQ People in China and Globally

Often, when we talk about LGBTQ rights, we focus on legal battles – criminalization, marriage equality, adoption, and civil rights – but Sophia Luvara’s new documentary reminds us that social acceptance and cultural attitudes are just as important. ‘Inside the Chinese Closet’ follows Andy and Cherry, a gay man and a lesbian woman who struggle to reconcile their desire to live truthfully with their families’ expectations of them.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Inside the Chinese Closet is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Editor’s note: We have used LGBTQ to be inclusive but the documentary only addresses the issues facing gay men and lesbian women.

Often, when we talk about LGBTQ rights, we focus on legal battles – criminalization, marriage equality, adoption, and civil rights – but Sophia Luvara’s new documentary reminds us that social acceptance and cultural attitudes are just as important. Inside the Chinese Closet follows Andy and Cherry, a gay man and a lesbian woman who struggle to reconcile their desire to live truthfully with their families’ expectations of them.

Andy spends time trying to arrange a “fake” heterosexual marriage for himself through an LGBTQ dating service designed for that purpose. When asked what he’s looking for in a fake wife, he says that he wants someone who can be a best friend and that, in the long run, they’ll have to have some kind of love between them if they’re going to live together and raise children. During his conversations with potential matches, they have business-like discussions about who will be expected to do what in the relationship, whether they’re willing to adopt or have children through artificial insemination, and what their parents will want from a potential son or daughter-in-law. In between these exchanges, Andy takes phone calls from his father, who urges him to work harder at finding a wife, and to make more demands of potential candidates.

Cherry is in the process of ending her own fake marriage, and feels pressure from her parents to adopt a child. In China, there’s no legal way for her to adopt as a single parent or as a lesbian woman or lesbian couple, and her mother and father propose an outlandish scheme to buy unwanted babies from the hospital. Cherry says that the only time her father beat her was when he found out she was gay, and we learn from her mother that the neighbors make her feel ashamed for having a child-free daughter. They also contemplate the practical problem of who will take care of Cherry when she’s older, if she doesn’t have any children.

While Chinese laws criminalizing same-sex relationships have relaxed in the past 15 years, and Andy and Cherry are each out to at least one of their parents as well as their friend groups, they struggle with pressure to live up to their parents’ expectations, and to lead their lives as they wish. Even though it’s legal to be LGBTQ now, heteronormative cultural expectations still pathologize and stigmatize queer people by creating the sense that they aren’t living up to their adult responsibilities. It feels like Andy and Cherry are treated and viewed as the Chinese equivalent of American adults who live in their parents’ basements playing video games all day, while their parents urge them to find a job. The question of marriage equality or adoption by LGBTQ couples is so far off the table in China that the only way for Andy and Cherry to start a family, as they’re expected to do as adults, is to pretend to be straight.

Inside the Chinese Closet is an uneven film. The subject matter is interesting – and it certainly made me more aware of the nuances of LGBTQ identity in China – but it isn’t always clear why Luvara has chosen to follow these particular individuals. The press materials make it seem as if Andy’s major problem is finding a wife and Cherry’s major problem is finding a child, but it seems like the reverse is really true. As the film goes on, it seems as if Cherry is emotionally isolated, in love with a straight friend who doesn’t love her, and doesn’t actually want to have a child. Her struggle is in getting up the nerve to tell her mother to stop coming up with ridiculous schemes to buy a kid, because she doesn’t want one.

Andy, on the other hand, seems to really want a child. He blames it on his father when he discusses it with potential partners, but, from the way he talks, it sounds like he really would like to be a father. Andy’s biggest problem is that there’s no legal way for a gay man or gay couple to adopt a child in China – his dates with potential wives keep falling through, in part, because he’s afraid that they either won’t agree to have children, or will take the children when they break up with him or move abroad to live with a woman.

Many LGBTQ rights advocates in the U.S. and Canada would agree that the key changes in the last few decades have come not only from legislation but also from a growing acceptance in society of LGBTQ people. Homophobic hate groups have that right – we are promoting the message that it’s okay to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, pansexual, asexual, genderqueer, etc.; having more and more people accept that message has allowed many LGBTQ people to live fuller, more authentic lives. Inside the Chinese Closet is a reminder that, without that kind of social change – which comes slowly, and takes a lot of work – having the legal right to exist is only a small step forward. Andy and Cherry are still blocked from participating in the traditions and social structures they want to be a part of – they’re bombarded with messages that they should have families, but excluded from the joy of building families of their own with the people they love.

Compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity are still alive and well, and LGBTQ people still face stigmatization, even in countries with marriage equality. But Luvara’s film shines a light on how heteronormativity operates in an era where gay and lesbian people have enough savvy and technology to arrange fake marriages and cross-border adoptions from the comfort of their own apartments. It makes me wonder whether that’s going to speed up the march of LGBTQ rights in China or slow it even more.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘It’s A Girl’: The Importance of the Reproductive Justice Framework

The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Written by Max Thornton.

It’s easy to be seduced by the rhetoric of choice. We all want to believe we’re free agents, exercising our will with maximum autonomy. Who wants to be the product of social forces and discursive systems that circumscribe the very possibilities of your existence before you’re even born?

The reality is, though, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, every choice a person makes is radically delineated by a vast web of socioeconomic, political, cultural, and material influences. Systemic change, then, isn’t simply a matter of individuals making different choices; nuanced, contextually-sensitive analysis of the many forces at play is crucial.

Reproductive justice isn’t as simple as choice and can’t be reduced to being “pro-choice.” The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Evan Grae Davis’ 2012 documentary, It’s A Girl, attempts to analyze some of the factors at work in the issue of sex-selective abortions in India and China. The film’s great strength is its clear divide of focus, to examine in turn the different contexts of India and China, showing how the same issue in both countries has a quite distinct matrix of causes.

Fun fact: if you google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh. — Fun fact: if you Google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh.

In India, a heteropatriarchal tradition has united with rampant capitalism to produce a context in which sons are financially valuable while daughters are an economic drain. The payment of dowries is technically illegal, but that hasn’t put an end to the cultural practice of the bride’s family paying the groom’s, sometimes quite extravagantly. Consequently there is immense social, cultural, and economic pressure on women to provide sons.

The limitations of the choice framework are abundantly clear when the film shows a rural Indian woman talking openly and unrepentantly about killing her own female newborns: it’s a choice she made, sure, but this choice was circumscribed by so many discursive and material circumstances, the combination of poverty and patriarchy that keeps women wholly dependent on their husbands, the entrenched devaluing of female life, the failure of law and government authorities to enforce the laws that exist… I can’t help comparing the many women in the US who abort fetuses because they would be born with disabilities. Again, this is a choice they make, and it is (or should be) absolutely the pregnant person’s decision whether or not to continue being pregnant; however, it is a choice enacted in a cultural milieu that considers disabled lives not worth living, an economic milieu that treats disabled lives as a burden, a political milieu in which healthcare is so precarious that many families lack the resources to care for children with disabilities.

Similarly, in India there are very many factors at play, and the film might have benefited from engaging a critique of a few more of them, such as the compulsory heterosexuality and cissexism of treating every infant as though its birth-assigned sex will dictate its entire life course, and the unchecked capitalism that exacerbates the issue.

In China, the situation is quite different. The end result – sons are valuable, daughters are a drain – is the same, but the equation that leads to this result is not heteropatriarchal tradition plus capitalism, but heteropatriarchal tradition plus government control of reproduction. The one-child policy has been in place since 1979, with an exception for rural families whose first child is female – they can try again for a boy. Women who are found to be pregnant illegally face forced abortion and forced sterilization. (Again, I found myself irresistibly drawing comparisons closer to home, this time to the anti-abortion lobby in the US and its campaign to recriminalize abortion, perhaps willfully ignorant of the fact that forced birth is just as dystopian a violation as forced abortion.)

It’s A Girl is particularly strong in its analysis of China’s situation, both its roots and its ramifications. For example, the “gendercide” against female infants has resulted in a generation whose males vastly outnumber its women, and this has led to a spike in sex trafficking and the kidnapping of child brides. Concurrently, there is a young sub-society of undocumented children, who were born illegally and have no official existence and thus no access to healthcare, schooling, passports, and other benefits of citizenship.

Special mention of this supercool woman, who rescued an abandoned infant and who I want to be friends with.

A perfect film would perhaps have committed to a fuller analysis. At 64 minutes, this documentary runs a little short, and could easily have found time for a discussion of, say, the impact of globalization – which might have mitigated the occasional moment of awful hypocrisy and paternalism, such as the one interviewee who outright indicts these countries by comparison with (I paraphrase slightly) “countries where women are fully equal.” (Tell us more, Sam Harris.) Nonetheless, overall It’s A Girl is a solid popular introduction to a fraught topic, and not a bad entrypoint into thinking through reproductive justice issues with nuance and complexity.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. The event where he saw this film was kind of weird, but he made a cool new friend. Hi, Lillian!