Shape shifters: Racialized and gendered crossings inPiccadilly(1929) andShanghai Express(1932)

Abstract

The Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905–1961) is today considered an ambivalent icon who, on the one hand, was the first Asian American film star to gain international recognition, and on the other hand, became a symbol of the hypersexualized Asian woman in film. In this article, I will analyse the crossing of racial and sexual boundaries in two of her films, Piccadilly (1929) and Shanghai Express (1932). The comparison of Piccadilly with Shanghai Express reveals the journey not only of transatlantic agents, like Anna May Wong, but also the simultaneous trajectory of sets of interrelated motifs, narratives, and aesthetic tropes. As discourses of gender and race converge into the figure of the transnational Asian American actress, Anna May Wong offers a key and privileged site to unpack and discuss them. The relationship between sexuality and race in these films has often been reduced to processes of exoticization. However, I will show that this relationship ought instead to be understood as interrelated through practices of appropriation, subversion, and cross-dressing.By applying the term ‘exotic’ to the analysis of Anna May Wong’s performances, I aim to foreground the entangled processes of sexualization and exoticization in order to reveal that the delineation of the ‘other’ is more ambivalent than clear. The films are particularly interesting in the context of ‘sexoticization’ because they do not construct a gendered and racialized ‘other’ that is clearly distinct to a western ‘us’. Modes of appropriation and masquerade complicate the representation of the ‘sexotic’, non-European ‘other’.