‘Take the longest way to cross the street’: mobile women in Wong Kar-wai’s films

Abstract

As an acclaimed Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai has created numerous figures of mobile women, such as the martial artist in The Grandmaster (2013) and the lone traveler in My Blueberry Nights (2007). However, the issues pertinent to women in his films are often overlooked. In recent decades, feminists have examined women’s mobility as a challenge to the gendered spatial division between public and private spaces. In society, popular media is powerful in constructing the notion of space, while cinema can question the fixed ideas of gendered space. However, feminist work in media geography is still relatively rare. By subverting the conventional elements of various genres, Wong repositions women in cinematic space and reflects the global trend of women’s mobility. Wong’s films demonstrate the geographical power of cinema by deploying the transnational elements of Hong Kong and Hollywood genres to negotiate the meanings of gendered space. By revealing the cultural significance of Wong’s works in relation to gender and space, this article argues that the studies of genres and their variations are crucial at the intersection between media geography and feminist geography as an emergent research direction that could broaden the horizons of both fields.