ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a body of martial arts filmmaking and its intersection with complex masculinities, gender and colonial histories in Asia. It might also remind us of the importance of the “kung fu craze” in the 1970s in molding the pan-Asian and transnational landscape of popular media on which the film draws. To make sense of the ways that Hong Kong cinema's images of martial masculinity were new, and to make better sense of them, we need to place them within their broader contexts. The crippled fighters discussed share a lot with the women warriors discussed by Kwai-Cheung Lo: Lo notes that the most “stable” and privileged masculinities are usually reserved for the villains of Hong Kong movies. Beyond the cinema, these new images of Chinese manhood also had their context within twentieth-century discourses on the role of physical culture within the modern nation-state, and in particular the place of the martial arts within these.
