ABSTRACT
This essay explores the centrality of gender to the phenomenon of transnational stardom, arguing that what makes transnational stars “transnational” is their ability to navigate the gendered tensions of globalization. Recognizing that the historical process of globalization has created not just macro-level political and economic transformations but also transformations in everyday life and culture-including uneven transformations in the definitions of masculinity and femininity around the world-this essay explores how stars whose fame and labor cross national borders manage ideas about gender within global capitalism.
Despite a spate of recent scholarship on transnational stardom (including my own recent books on the topic (Meeuf 2013; Meeuf & Raphael 2013)), the concept remains undertheorized in film and media studies, largely because the term itself lacks a coherent definition-or, at least, one that we can all agree upon. Scholars and critics have steadily examined case studies that epitomize transnational stardom-such as Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Javier Bardem, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Chow Yun-Fat, Juliette Binoche, Zhang Ziyi, and many others-and yet the precise boundaries of the term remain elusive. What exactly does a star have to do to become “transnational?” Make movies beyond the borders of the country they were born in? Have fans in more than one country? Make movies in more than one language? Start in one national cinema and then make the move to Hollywood? Sabrina Qiong Yu’s (2012) excellent book Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational
Film Stardom tries to put this issue to rest by differentiating between “international stardom” and “transnational stardom.” An international star is one that “achieves international recognition or fame, even if he or she never makes a film outside his or her own country,” while a transnational star “physically transfer[s] from one film industry to another to make films” (Yu 2012: 2). This physical transfer, of course, most often means the transfer from one national film industry to Hollywood, thanks to the global power of the Hollywood film industry, but transnational star transfers are not necessarily limited to this common model (for example, it may include pan-European or pan-Asian stars or the work of Hollywood stars in other national industries). This definition is elegant and importantly foregrounds
stars’ labor to the definition of their stardom. Yu’s detailed discussion of the evolution of Jet Li’s transnational career offers an insightful exploration of race, gender, and national identity in relation to Li’s mobile film career. But this tidy distinction poses some problems, especially if the goal is to analyze how film
stars and their mediated persona crisscross national borders, resonate with audiences, and contribute to definitions of modern identity. Yu’s definition certainly helps explore how film performers move into different national production contexts and how that move impacts the construction of their persona, but how useful is it to separate the transnational circulation of the star and the transnational circulation of their fame? Yu’s definition privileges production and labor over consumption and reception, suggesting that the crosscultural exchanges of transnational stardom only occur when star labor crosses national borders. In turn, the dynamics of film and television consumption across national borders is categorized as “international” stardom. In both cases, moreover, these definitions assume a set of clear distinctions regarding national borders, national identities, and national cinemas that do not reflect the nebulous realities of globalization. Can the national identity of some films be clearly ascertained in a world of international co-productions? For that matter, can the national identity of some stars be easily understood? Are Hong Kong stars such as Jackie Chan “Chinese” after 1997? Is Neeru Bajwa, the Canadian-born actress who stars in both Bollywood and Punjabi films “Indian?” The questions of so-called international stardom are not separate from issues of trans-
national stardom, as Yu defines it: for example, how stars from other countries are consumed in national or local contexts, how non-local stars might fit into local star systems, or how a range of stars from a variety of backgrounds form a constellation of meanings about identity and personhood. These questions are relevant to stars such as Jet Li who start in one national cinema and then make the move to Hollywood, but they are equally as important for understanding, say, the popularity of Hollywood stars likeWill Smith beyond the borders of the US. Rather than separating these complexities into the categories of “international” versus “transnational,” we should be putting these examples in dialogue with one another to better understand the projection of gender identities across national borders. The circulation of stars and their performances across national borders, after all, has
been at the core of modern stardom almost from its inception. Hideaki Fujiki’s (2013) meticulous history of transnational film stardom in Japan’s film industry from around 1910 through the early 1930s, for example, shows the power and popularity of US film stars in Japan, seeing Hollywood stars such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, and others as key figures in the development of the Japanese star system. American stars, as Fujiki explains it, attracted passionate fans in Japan, acting as symbols of consumer modernity that sometimes affirmed and sometimes contradicted the dominant discourses of Japanese national identity. Moreover, American stars existed alongside popular Japanese stars, helping to shape the idea of stardom and public identity in Japan. American stars were not simply popular icons of Western consumer excesses against which Japanese stars were contrasted. Images of Hollywood stars often transformed the meanings and scope of Japanese stardom, prompting Japanese stardom to reflect the impact of Western consumer modernity in Japan, especially when it came to ideas of modern sexuality and personality. For example, Fujiki situates the popularity of Clara Bow in Japan in the 1920s within
the increasing cultural presence of the “modern girl” in Japan. While Japanese critics and authorities debated (and often bemoaned) the rise of the moga-a westernized, independent, consumer-driven version of the “modern girl” similar to the US idea of the
“flapper”—images of Clara Bow offered a hugely popular spectacle of modern girlhood that helped define the concept in Japan.While some media discourses in Japan saw Bow and the rise of the modern girl as an affront to traditional Japanese femininity-seeing young women embracing Western dress and lifestyles as caricatures of vacuous consumer excessother media discourses embraced the modern girl as a symbol of youthful liberation and modernity in a more culturally fluid Japan. Fujiki demonstrates how Bow’s films and popular persona in Japan negotiated these cultural controversies and also helped shape the popularity of Japanese stars. Natsukawa Shizue, for example, emerged as both a counterpoint to and reflection of Bow’s fame, offering the image of a more respectable modern girl who, unlike Bow, accommodated Japanese cultural attitudes about modern femininity while still embracing the modern girl image associated with Bow. From this perspective, transnational stardom is not simply a matter of labor that crosses
national borders. Rather, transnational stardom is one part of a larger transnational film culture-albeit one in which Hollywood continues to occupy the dominant role-where cinema provides a space of uneven cultural exchange. This space certainly includes transnational labor dynamics-not just the movement of acting labor across national borders, but also the transnational movement of all kinds of film personnel (for example, the steady stream of directors and cinematographers flowing into Hollywood productions ever since its inception). But equally important is the transnational circulation of visual media that creates moments of cross-cultural exchange, from the publicity images ofMary Pickford in Japan that helped make her a star there even before any of her films reached the country to the popularity of Indian actor Raj Kapoor in the 40s and 50s across Asia and Africa thanks to films like 1951’s self-directedAwaara (in which Kapoor plays a character inspired by the international successes of English actor turned Hollywood star Charlie Chaplin), to the VHS-fueled cult fandom of Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan in the US in the 1990s, before Chan became a Hollywood star. Transnational labor flows and transnational consumption, in short, participate in a larger film culture that creates ephemeral moments of cross-cultural exchange, inspiration, and commonality. In this way, cases of transnational stardom should be seen as examples of what Mary
Louise Pratt (1991) calls “contact zones”: spaces where different cultures and societies meet and grapple with one another within contexts of unequal social power such as colonialism or global capitalism. Kathleen Newman (2010) applies this concept to transnational film culture, proposing that transnational cinema operates by creating moments in which geographically diverse audiences forge momentary connections built around the shared experiences of global culture, even as that context seems to fade to the background behind intimate personal connections such as identification and emotional attachment. The contact zone, then, articulates the cross-cultural power of stardom:
