| Abstract |
This study explores how Hong Kong director, Yan Yan Mak’s 2004 film, Butterfly, adapts Taiwanese author, Chen Xue’s novella, "Sign of the Butterfly" into a critical allegory of Hong Kong and Macau. The film, deeply rooted in local culture and critical insights, employs five techniques of allegorization: (1) queering classical Chinese poetry; (2) referencing and adapting aspects of early Chinese women’s films; (3) emphasizing Hong Kong’s political and social movements and directly criticizing the PRC government; (4) reconstructing lesbian identity and Hongkongers’ subjectivity; (5) painting Utopian imaginings of Macau. This study also discusses how the film’s depiction of historical events, including Tiananmen Incident and the Hong Kong student movement, concretizes and localizes the original novel’s vague spatiotemporal setting. This transformation turns Chen Xue’s sentimental, first-person narrative into an allegory of Hong Kong’s colonial history, shifting the focus from anxieties about gender identity to those of national identity. The film revolves around a married woman, Butterfly, and her memories of past and present lesbian love affairs. Through multiple layers of translation and adaptation, the film develops a complex allegorical and metaphorical framework through which the implicational relationships between Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Macau can be viewed. In addition to the themes of gender and desire commonly represented in queer cinemas, the film Butterfly also opens up new possibilities in terms of geopolitics and national allegories, constructing the identities of lesbians and Hongkongers Ultimately, revisiting Butterfly is believed to contribute to the development of Queer Sinophone alliances, and to introduce a new approach to lesbian research. |
