ABSTRACT
Portraying significant roles in action comedies and kung-fu revival films of the early 1990s, Michelle Yeoh rose to Pan-Asian 1 superstardom and became one of the most recognizable and revered action heroes of Hong Kong cinema. In the late 1990s, she received significant exposure to international audiences with her roles in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (Spottiswoode 1997) and the Hong Kong/Chinese-American co-production Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long, Lee 2000). She has since been cast in three recent Hollywood action films: Sunshine (Boyle 2007), The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Cohen 2008), and Babylon A.D. (Kassovitz 2008). Through her work in mainstream American film, Yeoh has helped to shape an impression of Hong Kong female identity that differs from the one produced by Hong Kong action men working in Hollywood since the 1990s. While Hong Kong action men are presented as distinctly Asian heroes in Hollywood (i.e. they retain their “Asianness” in their American representations), Hong Kong action women are characterized as transnational mediators facilitating connections between “the East” and “the West.” In her American characterizations, Yeoh appears to subvert the politics of representation of Hollywood that have historically envisaged the Asian female body as a sexual function of the white male hero; instead, she is presented as a maternal hero, a representation that frees her body from white male sexual conquest. Thus, this chapter will consider how Yeoh's characterizations in Hollywood counter a history of Western representations that have feminized and fetishized the Asian female body.
