Introduction: The Paradox of the Martial Concubine

In Hollywood action cinema, as in Western culture at large, heroism and masculinity are more or less interchangeable. Even today, the rare femalecentred Hollywood action film is prefaced by apologetic advance publicity, as if to prepare audiences for ‘empowered’ images of heroic women. Chinese literature and film, of course, have long valorised martial women, presenting them as equals to their male counterparts. Countless short stories, novels, stage dramas and operas have presented swordswomen as forces that potentially complicate or destabilise Confucian standards of patriarchal power. In his study of China's literary swordswomen, Roland Altenburger identifies the Tang heroine Nie Yinniang as an archetypal heroine who ‘radically subverts the conventional [Confucian] system of gender roles’ (2009, 75). According to Altenburger, Ming writer Hu Rujia's tale Lady Wei Eleven represented a further advance in this tradition, as the titular heroine expressly defines herself as a ‘sword knight (jianxia)’ who roams beyond the domestic sphere (2009, 138). Lu Hsun's A Brief History of Chinese Fiction cites the Qing novel The Gallant Maid – filmed by Li Han-hsiang as The Adventure of the 13th Sister (Ernü yingxiong chuan, 1959) – as a new turning point in the modern, secular portrayal of the swordswoman. Here, the martial woman is an ‘artificial’ ideal, combining ‘heroism and the traditional feminine virtues’ without any of the mythological trappings of the Journey to the West tradition (Lu Hsun 1959, 339).

While centuries of swordswomen have challenged Confucian gender roles, it is important to recall that the wuxia genre itself violates much of Confucian morality. Granted, martial arts films dealing with Wong Fei-hung or Shaolin monks generally espouse conservative, male-dominated Confucian norms. Wuxia heroes are usually wanderers exiled from family units and governmental institutions, for they embody the societal detachment of Daoism more than the obligatory relations of Confucianism. As James J. Y. Liu observes in The Chinese Knight-Errant, the wuxia hero pledges loyalty and devotion to strangers as well as friends – a notion that radically violates Confucian social norms (Liu 1967, 7).