Unmasking abject male bodies and China's corporal dystopias: violent masculinity and body horror in Jia Zhangke's A touch of sin

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UNMASKING ABJECT MALE BODIES AND CHINA’S CORPORAL DYSTOPIAS:

VIOLENT MASCULINITY AND BODY HORROR IN JIA ZHANGKE’S A TOUCH OF SIN

by

Hanna Ramirez

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS, ARTS, AND SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(EAST ASIAN AREA STUDIES)

August 2023

Copyright 2023 Hanna Ramirez
ii
Table of Contents
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... v
Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 6

The World According to Jia Zhangke ................................................................................. 13
A Touch of Sin Synopsis ..................................................................................................... 16

Chapter 2: Migrant Bodies in Artistic Representations ................................................................ 19

Docility and Productivity .................................................................................................... 24
Viewing Migrant Bodies: The Powers of Viewing ............................................................ 25

Chapter 3: Theorizing the Horrors of Abject Masculinity: A Touch of Sin and the Monstrous
Masculine ...................................................................................................................................... 29

Chapter 4: Dahai the Sick Man of Shanxi, Grotesque Male Bodies, and Victim Monsters ......... 35

Background to Dahai’s Story: Rural Migrant Masculinity ................................................ 35
Analyzing Dahai: Dahai’s Slaughterhouse and Victim Monsters ...................................... 37

Chapter 5: Zhou Saner the Vigilante and The Valorization of Gangster Masculinity .................. 48

Background to Zhou Saner: The Wolf Warrior Effect, Men, and the Chinese Nation state
.............................................................................................................................................. 48
Analyzing Zhou Saner: The Psychopath and Lone Vigilante ............................................ 53

Chapter 6: Xiaoyu’s Intimate Dystopia, Violence on Female Bodies, and the Slasher Film ....... 59

Background to Xiaoyu: Abjection and Male Violence on Women ................................... 59
Analyzing Xiaoyu: Xiaoyu’s Intimate Dystopia and The Slasher Girl ............................. 61

Chapter 7: Xiaohui’s City Without Bodies, Urban Horror, and Suicide ...................................... 72

Background to Xiaohui: Urban Horror and Cities without Bodies .................................... 72
Analyzing Xiaohui: Precarious Life, Cruelty, and Suicide in the Pearl River Delta ........ 74

iii
Chapter 8: Conclusion Toward a Theory of the Monstrous Masculine and Abject Masculinity in
China ............................................................................................................................................. 83

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 85

iv
List of Figures
FIGURE 1 SONG CHAO'S PHOTOGRAPH OF MINERS ........................................................................ 20
FIGURE 2 DAHAI INJECTS HIMSELF. ............................................................................................... 39
FIGURE 3 DAHAI'S FINAL KILL ........................................................................................................ 45
FIGURE 4 ZHOU SANER RIDING A MOTORCYCLE ............................................................................. 53
FIGURE 5 THE CAGED BULLS .......................................................................................................... 57
FIGURE 6 XIAOYU AND THE SNAKE WOMAN ................................................................................. 63
FIGURE 7 XIAOYU'S MIRROR IMAGE. .............................................................................................. 66
FIGURE 8 XIAOYU AS SLASHER GIRL .............................................................................................. 67
FIGURE 9 XIAOYU AND LIANRONG WITH GOLDFISH ....................................................................... 76
FIGURE 10 XIAOHUI'S DEAD BODY ................................................................................................. 80

v
Abstract
In world cinema, the violent male body is glorified with the likes of anti-heroes such as Patrick
Bateman and Tyler Durden receiving a cult-like following. In contemporary East Asia, this same
lure behind violent men has inspired countless films which combine the glory of violent male
bodies with a visual language that references wuxia or martial arts and other gangster films.
These films have increasingly become one of East Asia’s most important cinematic exports.
Through the case study of Jia Zhangke’s 2013 film A Touch of Sin, I hope to not only establish
this visual language which paints violent men as “cool,” but also showcase the trope of violent
men as tied to an anxiety over capitalist accumulation and most importantly a crisis of
masculinity in post socialist China. An influx of more feminized masculinities, inspired by the
Korean wave, has marked a consumerist trend towards more metrosexual masculinities. This has
caused a nationwide panic that sees Chinese authorities pushing for more violent and heroic
forms of masculinity in order to regenerate the might of the Chinese nation.

In post socialist China, the classist dimensions of Chinese male emasculation cannot be stressed
enough. There is increased income inequality and an ever-growing class of male precariat
migrant workers that face capitalist emasculation, for not conforming to hegemonic masculinity,
that prizes capitalist production. However, within this schema, the migrant male body, unable to
conform to this cycle of production and consumption, becomes something that is abject and
incites horror in the eyes of viewers. Characters such as Zhou Saner, Xiaohui, and Dahai, are left
completely outcast and even hated in their respective economic situations as bodies, which were
preached the importance of capitalist accumulation; yet, are never able to truly capture it. I will
argue that the characters in A Touch of Sin are left as bodies without dignity and masculine
strength and as a result, are engendered in liminal situations which can only be described as a
specific experience of abject masculinity. In order to overcome their masculine abjection, and
make themselves masculine again, I argue, that the male migrant workers in A Touch of Sin must
resort to acts of violence and body horror as something cleansing that regenerates their lost
masculinity, subverts the healthy and productive capitalist body, and finally allows the horror of
their situations to enter a site where violent masculinity is glorified.

Keywords: China, Body Horror, Film, Men, Masculinity, A Touch of Sin, Jia Zhangke,
Abjection, Post Socialist China, Violence, Gender

Chapter 1: Introduction

When Jia Zhangke’s 2013 film A Touch of Sin or 天注定 was released, chief film critic at
the Guardian Peter Bradshaw wrote that the film “has something of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of
Dollars and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, but it is also a very personal, distinctive and angry
piece of work – a shotgun blast at the dark heart of modern China.”
1
A Touch of Sin continued to
be compared to the violent film fantasies of Tarantino like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs; yet
with a social realist and altruistic twist. Andrew Tracy of Sight and Sound Magazine commented
that Jia’s film, in comparison to Tarantino, “sets itself down squarely within a doggedly
depressing reality” that escapes the more glorified and fetishistic depictions of violence that is
still common in mainstream art house and Hollywood cinema.
2
With critic Manohla Dargis from
the New York Times writing that Jia uses his film as a fable and reconstructs his camera as a
way to “weigh the impact of social and political shifts on people — in every shot.”
3
While each
of these critics identifies how Jia makes a record of the grotesque nature of modern Chinese
capitalism, and the ways it has dispossessed millions of Chinese citizens, they have yet to
identify how Jia’s films can be construed as another iteration of the glorification of violence and
violent male bodies despite its claim to stand in solidarity with those most violated by capitalism
in China.

1
Peter Bradshaw, "A Touch of Sin," The Guardian, May 15, 2014, accessed May 29, 2023,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/15/a-touch-of-sin-review-jia-zhang-ke-china.
2
Andrew Tracy, "Film of the Week: A Touch of Sin," Sight & Sound Magazine, last modified April 26, 2019,
accessed June 7, 2023, https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-
recommendations/film-week-touchsin.
3
Manohla Dargis, "A Touch of Sin, Four Tales From China," The New York Times, October 3, 2013, accessed May
29, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/movies/a-touch-of-sin-four-tales-from-china-by-jia-zhang-ke.html.

7
While Jia claims that A Touch of Sin is a subversive film that gets to the heart of the ills
of Chinese capitalism and how it affects those in the lower class, analyzing the films in terms of
hegemonic masculinity turns the film away from a social or revolutionary act and more towards
supporting a violent conceptualization of masculinity and a state-supported patriarchal capitalist
system that is replicated through viewing the film. This continues to violate and dispossess
millions of rural migrants in contemporary China. According to experts on Chinese masculinity
Geng Song and Derek Hird, the paradigm of hegemonic masculinity in modern China is what
they have deemed transnational business masculinity.
4
Transnational business masculinity is a
form of masculinity that has seeped into a global cultural consciousness creating a class of
desirable men who are mobile managers and whose dominant economic positions result in sexual
prowess.
5
Within China’s iteration of transnational business masculinity, Erin Huang identifies
this masculinity as being translated into a specific Confucian context that focuses on
heterosexual reproduction within the system of the nuclear family.
6
Masculinity becomes tied to
a cycle of production and consumption that engenders heterosexual reproduction and the
formation of a nuclear family as being essential for a successful man.
7
Masculinity in modern
China is clearly tied to class and analyzing the classist notions of masculinity becomes an
important way to problematize and explore how those who fail to live up to this paradigm react
to this gap.
Within modern China, those who belong to a class of precarious unskilled workers called
nongmingong 农民工, or China’s internal migrant workers, are left alienated in a system that

4
Geng Song and Derek Hird, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, Women and Gender in China Studies,
vol. 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 16.
5
Song and Hird, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, 16.
6
Song and Hird, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, 16.
7
Erin Y. Huang, Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (New York: Duke University
Press, 2020), 79.
8
relies on their labor in China’s factories, construction sites, and mines; yet, also seeks to
dispossess them. In Jia’s film, the experiences of millions of nongmingong are represented
through the four vignettes that tell the stories of Zhou Saner, Xiaoyu, Xiaohui, and Dahai. Like
Jia’s characters, China’s economically disadvantaged migrant workers have few opportunities
for social mobility, forming heterosexual nuclear families, and consumerism which millions of
China’s nouveau riche now enjoy in China’s ever-expanding cities. The characters in Jia’s film
are preached the neoliberal logic of investing in the self and curtailing the body in order to rise
above their meager existence. Each character quietly wishes to achieve, in some iteration, a
dream of an economically stable and heterosexually productive lifestyle that is required to be a
successful Chinese citizen. Although, it is clear that they will never achieve this. The state
requires migrant bodies to achieve their infrastructural goals and to serve China’s highly elite
and mobile class. In essence, migrant bodies are cast as docile objects in a system whose
sacrifice is essential for China’s advancement despite never being able to enjoy its results.
As Jia expertly identifies, while this class of migrant men who are economically and
sexually castrated are considered failures in China’s gender hierarchy, they will not be quietly
suppressed. While nongmingong or migrant workers refers to the almost 292 million people who
belong to this class, around 64.1% of them are reported to be male.
8
With high rates of
singledom and low wages, they are forced to feel inept and economically castrated in a society
where heterosexual reproduction is tied to capitalist accumulation, particularly in Confucian

8
National Bureau of Statistics of China, "2022年农民工监测调查报告" accessed June 7, 2023,
http://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/zxfb/202304/t20230427_1939124.html.
9
ideology.
9
Migrant men need to find a way to reassert their lost masculinity and circumvent their
docility and this is often practiced through violence.
Following Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection, migrant bodies in China are looked at as
abject. While the abject is that which challenges the formation of the object or the I, as Kristeva
explains, the abject is needed as a boundary for the proper construction of the ego.
10
Within
abject masculinity, the abject is that which feminizes men and leads them away from the
paradigm of hegemonic transnational business masculinity turning male bodies into monstrous
iterations.
11
Because male migrant workers in China are seen as docile and abject, challenging
their correct masculine formation, it necessitates that they expel this in order to get closer to the
paradigm of hegemonic masculinity. Within an ever-growing language of violence, as the
paradigm of masculinity, migrant men in China expel their abjection through acts of violence
because this expels their undesirable qualities and gets them closer to hegemonic masculinity.
12

In Hollywood cinema especially, violence has become tied to masculine articulation, with
films like Fight Club and American Psycho depicting cool and suave anti-hero characters which
prize masculinity and its most violent articulations as desirable. In Jia’s cinema, this is clearly
present with the violent actions of his anti-hero characters a way to rise above their abject and
economically castrated statuses. When Dahai brutally murders the man who stole money from
his village, or Xiaoyu slashes the men who try to sexually harass her, each character is getting
closer to harming those who have oppressed them economically and kept them as abject subjects

9
Xiaodong Lin, "Single Male Rural-Urban Migrant Workers and the Negotiation of Masculinity in China," in East
Asian Men: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Desire, ed. Xiaodong Lin, Chris Haywood, and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill
(London: Palgrave Macmillan UK), 13-30, 17.
10
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.
11
Adam Wadenius, "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness," Horror Studies 1, no. 1
(2010), 131.
12
Wadenius, "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness," 131.

10
in China. In the eyes of the viewer, this elicits a response of horror as the realization of their
abject nature causes them to become not human but monsters using violence and body horror as
a last effort to be heard in a society that invalidates their masculinity. This is because, in a
capitalist system, which reduces each migrant to their body's capacity to labor, the body becomes
a last frontier by which Jia’s characters can articulate their wants and needs. Because the body is
needed for capitalist production, killing and hurting a potentially productive body becomes a
subversive act in this system.
If Jia paints his characters as sympathetic subjects who use violence as self-articulation,
this helps sustain the problem of violent masculinity. Because violence is the only language by
which Jia’s characters feel they can communicate their wants and desires, in light of their
oppression, this creates the problem of violent masculinity as much as it results from it. As
Pamela Hunt has argued in her research on subversive masculinity in Chinese literature, even the
most downtrodden and economically castrated men, who are just as oppressed by the patriarchy,
still benefit to some degree from “patriarchal dividends” through their complicit masculinities.
13

Because rebellion is tied to a culture of misogyny, even when migrant male bodies rebel it still
allows them to become closer to the hegemon.
14
While their feelings of alienation and
marginalization are real, they still comply and strive to conform to hegemonic masculinity and
their violent outbursts are a symptom of their last effort to attempt to conform.
15
The classist
dimensions of hegemonic masculinity are critical in understanding how the patriarchy continues
to sustain itself even by those most violated by it.

13
Pamela Hunt, Rebel Men: Masculinity and Attitude in Postsocialist Chinese Literature, 1st ed. (Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2022), 5.
14
Hunt, Rebel Men, 5.
15
Hunt, Rebel Men, 15.
11
Because migrant men have someone that can be oppressed to assert their dominance and
expel their abjection, this makes acts of violence central to their masculine regeneration. Jia’s
characters call to violence, monstrosity, and body horror, which abjects their victims and causes
them to challenge the corporeality of the body, regenerates their masculinity, and gets them
closer to hegemonic masculinity through the repetition of the very violence they have
experienced by the capitalist system.
16
As I will illustrate, the real monster in Jia's story is that of
the patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity which haunts the bodies of migrant men and causes
them to act in ways that constantly strives to reach it in their most unconscious desires.
Each character will emerge as a symbol of this dichotomy between abjection and
masculine regeneration that is practiced through inflicting body horror. As a filmic technique,
that challenges the corporeality of productive bodies in capitalism, body horror emerges as
another facet by which each character becomes a monster of capitalism that ultimately feeds into
a cycle of preserving the patriarchy. Dahai will be analyzed as a grotesque male body. Because
Dahai is sick and deteriorating, the body horror he inflicts ultimately turns his violence into a
slaughterhouse where Dahai as the executioner turns his victims into meat. Zhou Saner emerges
as the perfect model of the sociopath and his violent crimes that use body horror to valorize a
form of gangster masculinity traps him just as much as it allows him to conform to the hegemon.
Xiaoyu, as the only female character in the film, is evidence of modern Chinese intimate
dystopias that traps women into a cycle of reproduction and consumption. However, Xiaoyu is
left out of this because of her status as a mistress of a married man and her job at a violent male
heterotopia otherwise known as the spa. While her female subjectivity disintegrates, she can take

16
Xavier Aldana Reyes and Eira Fenn Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature
and Horror Film (Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2014), 394.

12
on violent attributes and masculinize herself ultimately becoming like the slasher girl in the
horror genre. Meanwhile, Xiaohui shows the future of Chinese cities as a city without bodies
where the differing levels of precarity will support the patriarchy led by a class of highly elite
and mobile businessmen. By analyzing the abjection of each character which results in them
inflicting body horror on those who have violated them, this thesis will provide additional
insights into the classist dimensions of hegemonic masculinity and its implications on
economically disadvantaged male and female bodies in modern China.
I will argue that instead of interpreting Jia's film as a subversion of productive capitalist
logic and its conceptualization of masculinity in the Chinese context, it can be analyzed as
conforming to a visual language that glorifies violent male bodies. This thesis will provide
another lens by which to understand how even economically downtrodden men still seek to
conform to the vary patriarchal system which violates them. Underscoring the crimes committed
by characters like Zhou Saner, Dahai, Xiaoyu, and Xiaohui, as a form of cinematic body horror,
analyzes their lives as the monstrous double of the very system which has economically castrated
and emasculated them from ever conforming to the transnational business ideal that prizes
capitalist production along with sexual reproduction. Ultimately, while each character is cast as
abject by their respective social standings, violence is legitimized in the film as the ultimate way
in which to regenerate their lost masculinity in the world of the contemporary Chinese
patriarchal capitalist, which in the process of turning each character into monsters who kill
productive bodies, satiates the monster of hegemonic masculinity that feeds on the lifeblood of
abject male bodies.

13
The World According to Jia Zhangke
In a news report from the Guardian, the President and supreme leader of the People’s
Republic of China Xi Jinping reportedly told an American diplomat sitting next to him, “I’m not
an admirer of the kind of films that Zhang Yimou makes. I much prefer Jia Zhangke’s films,
such as Still Life and I Wish I Knew.”
17
The peculiarity of the statement questions the real
subversive nature of Jia’s cinema. Xi, the figurehead of China’s social harmony and a pervasive
censorship apparatus, is a fan of the very cinema his government has argued is subversive. The
majority of Jia’s films have never been screened in mainland China as officials feared his films
might incite bouts of resistance and violence in a society that seeks to preserve the stability of the
nation provided by the party.
18

Jia Zhangke, born in Fenyang county in Shanxi province, is a favorite in the global art
house film industry for his slow realism and documentary-like feature films that criticize a China
in transition. A member of China’s 6th generation filmmakers, Jia’s works conform to new wave
film techniques allowing him to be embraced by a global network of film elites and viewers
across festivals in New York and Cannes.
19
Jia originally became famous for his “hometown
trilogy,” all films which are set in his hometown of Fenyang, Shanxi province.
20
Xiaowu,
Platform, and Unknown Pleasures, layer fiction with non-professional local actors and a
documentary style that convincingly dazzled international viewers with its accuracy and
painstaking intricacy in presenting smaller Chinese cities and the countryside.
21
Jia has also been
known to make documentaries of the effects of China’s mass urbanization project and those who

17
Shenshen Cai, "Jia Zhangke and His A Touch of Sin," Film International (Göteborg, Sweden) 13, no. 2 (2015):
69.
18
Cai, "Jia Zhangke and His A Touch of Sin," 68.
19
Michael Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 14.
20
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 4.
21
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 4.
14
are deeply affected by it, with documentaries like I Wish I Knew and Useless, painting a picture
of a China slowly losing its socialist characteristics and embracing a capitalistic nightmare.
22

Viewers of Jia’s films are transported to an often-unseen part of mainland China where his
characters on the margins are struggling to survive and maintain relationships. They are seen as
just as drab, decaying, and frankly replaceable as the large-scale infrastructure projects in China
that rely on their labor.
Jia’s filmic world is filled with characters in China who exist only on the margin. Often
depicting stories of societal undesirables, like sex workers, pickpockets, coal miners, and factory
workers, Jia’s characters are all caught within an era where vast changes are being made for
China’s continued global ascension.
23
As Michael Berry writes, in his extensive interviews with
Jia Zhangke recorded in his book Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, while the characters in his films
are hyper-aware of their marginality, Jia simultaneously seeks to reject this categorization,
arguing they represent the majority of Chinese people despite the official ideology that stresses
the importance of Chinese collective capitalist accumulation.
24
Jia concludes that just like the
Chinese in real life, his stories are filled with alienated and apathetic youth from the countryside
who migrate to the city, often called “nongmingong” or migrants, who are disadvantaged and
yearning for a better life; yet, are relegated to the undesirable parts of the city inside torn down
buildings, local night clubs and gambling halls, shady alleyways, and even theme parks.
25
His
frequent characters such as small-town pickpocket Xiaowu, played by Wang Hongwei, or even
Jia’s muse and wife Zhao Tao are known for their quiet and melancholy reactions to China’s

22
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 13.

23
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 4.
24
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 9.
25
Cai, "Jia Zhangke and His A Touch of Sin," 67.
15
changes.
26
Unlike China’s big blockbuster films, which paint a happy picture of those who have
sacrificed for China’s development, Jia's filmic gaze is not so forgiving. Within Jia’s oeuvre,
these characters, while downtrodden and deeply affected by a China in transition, in the end, are
often resigned to their fate. Like Xiaowu sitting handcuffed to a pole with all the people in
Fenyang watching him and staring blankly at the scene, Jia’s films present characters who notice
the unforgiving nature of Chinese capitalism and their inability to rise above their brutish
existence are ultimately apathetic towards it, accepting their fate as perpetual precariats.
It wasn’t until A Touch of Sin, Jia’s 2013 film, that his character's accumulated
resentment began to have violent consequences. In comparison to the hometown trilogy, A Touch
of Sin is a jarring tonal shift away from a documentary-like record of injustices to the
representation of the violent vigilantes who are seeking to fight against their marginalization and
reassert their own subjectivity.
27
Critics were nonetheless obsessed with Jia’s turn toward the
depiction of brute violence with the film winning best screenplay at Cannes.
28
Many critics have
compared A Touch of Sin to Quentin Tarantino’s films and have even called it his attempt to
embrace the mainstream and put his film in conversation with a lucrative genre of gangster films
and wuxia dramas which have garnered much support from foreign audiences abroad.
29
The
violence depicted in A Touch of Sin is almost surreal. Zhao Tao brutally stabs a local government
official and Wang Baoqiang mercilessly shoots two men on his motorbike unprompted within
the first 5 minutes of the film, the depiction of brute violence had a tantalizing effect on
worldwide audiences.
30
It is for this same reason, that the film has never gotten its Golden

26
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 5.

27
Yanjie Wang, "Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke's Cinematic Discontent in A Touch of Sin," Journal of
Chinese Cinemas 9, no. 2 (2015): 159
28
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 116.
29
Wang, "Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke's Cinematic Discontent in A Touch of Sin," 159.
30
Cai, "Jia Zhangke and His A Touch of Sin," 74.
16
Dragon seal of approval from the Chinese film censors with the agency being worried that such a
violent depiction of Chinese migrants could potentially incite violence in real life.
31
If his films
previously have quietly recorded the violent process of bodily displacement and destructive
urbanization that grounds China’s infrastructure projects, then A Touch of Sin overtly shows how
the symbolic destruction of a precarious underclass of migrants has begun to violently burst out
into the open and, even more chillingly, how capitalist injustice incites violence.
A Touch of Sin Synopsis
A Touch of Sin, the 2013 film by Jia Zhangke, tells the stories of the more violent and
upsetting side of China’s economic prosperity. It has rendered the bodies of those like Dahai and
Zhou Saner like the dead truck driver discarded and crushed by China’s economic machine; yet,
conversely still ready to fight back.
32
Jia’s characters, in A Touch of Sin, while economically
disadvantaged, are much like the gangsters and fighters in wuxia and gangster dramas, that are
commonplace in East Asian cinema. They are rendered as heroic outlaws who have adopted
concepts of chivalry, justice, and brotherhood.
33
While he uses these sorts of films as a reference
point to shed his migrant characters in a more heroic light, Jia was inspired by four real life
stories of crimes in China that became famous on the micro-blogging platform Weibo.
34
Told in
four vignettes, the story mixes the reality of marginality in China with the visual language and
ideology of a martial arts film. The character of Dahai, played by Jiang Wu, is a coal miner from
Shanxi that is angry that his village has yet to receive the dividends from the coal mine they

31
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 116.

32
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 7.
33
Cai, "Jia Zhangke and His A Touch of Sin," 70.
34
Jiwei Xiao, "China Unraveled," Film Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2015): 24.
17
signed away to Boss Jiao.
35
With local officials colluding with Boss Jiao to steal the money and
deprive the villagers, Dahai hopes to travel to Beijing to reveal the corruption and arrest them all
for their crimes. However, once it is clear that the legal institution will not help him, Dahai takes
a shotgun and murders the officials and Boss Jiao; their bodies splattering across the screen. The
next vignette tells the story of Zhou Saner, played by famous comedian Wang Baoqiang, who
returns home to his small village outside of Chongqing for the new year and his mother’s 70th
birthday.
36
Attempting to reconnect with his family and spend the important new year’s holiday
together, Zhou is shown as comparatively wealthy and unemotional in the poor village which is a
remnant of China’s more rural past. Eventually, as Zhou Saner leaves Chongqing, he is seen
shooting a woman on the street in the head and steals her purse dressed as a local worker.
37
The
third vignette tells the story of Xiaoyu, played by Jia’s wife Zhao Tao, who is a receptionist at a
massage parlor.
38
Xiaoyu is in a relationship with her married Boss and desires to have a family
with him if he divorces his wife. The wife, confronts her and has her beaten up. At the massage
parlor, the shaken Xiaoyu is harassed by some government officials who think she is a sex
worker. Angry and upset, Xiaoyu kills them with a knife and flees the scene. In the final
vignette, Luo Lanshan who plays Xiaohui, is shown at a factory in the Pearl River Delta.
39
After

35
Xiao, "China Unraveled," 24. In this section, Xiao points out that Dahai’s story is based on Hu Wenhai, a peasant
who killed 14 villagers in 2001 after a dispute between the villagers and a local coal mine boss.

36
Xiao, "China Unraveled," 24. In this article, Xiao explains that Zhou Saner is based on a fugitive Zhou Kehua
who carried out a series of murders while he was traveling around China in 2012.
37
Xiao, "China Unraveled," 24. In this section, Xiao points out that Xiaoyu’s story is based on a pedicure worker
who stabbed and killed a government official who was sexually harassing her in a hotel in Hubei.
38
Xiao, "China Unraveled," 24.
39
Xiao, "China Unraveled," 24. Xiao writes that Xiaohui’s story is based on the highly publicized Foxconn cluster
suicides where 14 workers jumped off buildings to their deaths.

18
accidentally causing his friend to cut his hand on a fabric cutting machine and being punished by
working for his friend for free, Xiaohui flees to Dongguan and works as a waiter at a hotel
catering to Taiwanese and Hong Kong businessmen. The hotel is a hub of sex work who are
paraded around the businessmen for them to choose. Xiaohui falls in love with one of the girls
named Lianrong but ultimately, she rejects him. After quitting the hotel, once he witnesses
Lianrong providing sexual services to one of the guests, he returns to the factory and commits
suicide by jumping off the balcony of his dorm room. While the stories are closely intertwined,
with each new story starting when two characters encounter each other unbeknownst to them in a
public setting, the emotions each character undergoes are much the same despite their different
circumstances. Each character is left feeling abused, pushed to their limit, alienated, exploited,
and disenfranchised by a society that consistently is numb to the plight of the working class.
40

40
Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke, 7.

Chapter 2: Migrant Bodies in Artistic Representations

While Jia’s film might be constituted an altruistic depiction of the migrant bodies abused
and exploited in a society that is numb to the plight of the working class, Jia’s film still has much
in common with artistic representations of migrant bodies in the mainstream. Like Song Chao’s
photographs, Jia’s film still reduces migrant bodies to their capacity to labor and as objects for
the middle-class gaze. Like A Touch of Sin’s Dahai, Song Chao was once a migrant worker
himself working in the coal mines of Shandong province.
41
Since becoming a famous
photographer, Song has become known for his depictions of grimy migrant bodies.
42
As a former
migrant worker, Song understood the plight of migrant bodies and wanted to use photography to
document those in distress and caught up in a system that profited off the bodies of the working
poor.
43
Song Chao, just like Jia himself, is fascinated with the subject of migrant bodies as a
means for commentary on the economic and social situation of modern China. These rural
migrants are referred to as nongmingong 农民工, a segment of the population with rural
classification via China’s household registration system. As peasant workers that migrate from
China’s inland provinces to megacities in the East, they engage in work that is considered
undesirable such as construction, service, sex, and mining work.
44

41
Song Chao, "The Face of Coal in China," accessed May 17, 2023, Asia
Society, asiasociety.org/magazine/article/face-coal-china.
42
Song Chao, "The Face of Coal in China," accessed May 17, 2023, Asia
Society, asiasociety.org/magazine/article/face-coal-china.
43
Song Chao, "The Face of Coal in China," accessed May 17, 2023, Asia Society,
asiasociety.org/magazine/article/face-coal-china.
44
Wanning Sun, Subaltern China, Asia, Pacific, Perspectives Series (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 3-4.

20
However, the shift that the migrant worker body has undergone is drastic. From once
being a body part of the vanguard of China’s revolution, it now exists as a part of an ever-
growing population of precarious laborers who are seen as semi-tolerated outsiders, necessary
for China’s development, an unsavory reminder of the ills of capitalist accumulation.
45
To justify
a system that is built off the continued subjugation of migrant bodies, the Chinese state
propagates a doctrine that objectifies migrant bodies and turns them into docile laboring bodies a
reality depicted and reinforced in Jia’s film. This is to both honor their sacrifice to China but also
cast them in a self-sustaining cycle where their work makes them more docile. In effect, this
further integrates them into state
policy.
Migrant bodies in art are
removed of any identifiers that
divorce themselves from their labor;
they become an extension of the
resources they mine every day.
46
In
Song Chao’s photography in Figure
1, the black and white color scheme
reinforces their essentialization as
laboring bodies because they are
expressionless and covered in the
very coal that they mine. As Wanning

45
Sun, Subaltern China, 159.
46
Song Chao, "The Face of Coal in China," accessed May 17, 2023, Asia Society,
asiasociety.org/magazine/article/face-coal-china.

Figure 1 Song Chao's Photograph of Miners
21
Sun notes, migrant bodies become mere objects of the urban middle-class photographic gaze
which consume the migrant body as an object of representation in the guise of pretending to
represent the reality of migrant life.
47

Artistic depictions of migrant bodies in China underscore their martyrdom to the
development of China, reduce them to their productive capacities, and depict migrants as content
to sacrifice for the nation. This is most evident in Migrant Worker Museums across China where
exhibitions valorize migrant workers as hard-working and compliant social bodies.
48
These
bodies contribute to and sacrifice for the development of contemporary urban China and go
through hardships to achieve self-realization and self-improvement.”
49
With items such as the
tattered uniforms of China’s migrant's uniforms and pictures of grimy migrant bodies on
construction sites and in mines, the banal conditions they exist in are valorized in rhetoric that
commemorates their hardworking nature.
50
As Junxi Qian and Junwan Guo have so aptly found,
while the migrant worker museums literally visualize the economic utility of migrant bodies, it
also allows the state to underscore migrant workers as “diligent, self-reliant, and self-developing
subjects who adjust to, rather than a question, the unjust structural logics of urban political
economy.”
51
While being necessary for the urbanization of new China, they are nonetheless left
structurally outside unable to enjoy the rights, privileges, and guarantees of an urban population
of bodies that are considered of higher value in the very places these migrant bodies have built.
52

To understand how the characters in Jia’s film find themselves in such a precarious
situation with little hope of escaping, Foucault’s concept of docile bodies allows us to understand

47
Sun, Subaltern China, 159.
48
Qian and Guo, "Migrants on Exhibition,” 305.
49
Qian and Guo, "Migrants on Exhibition,” 305.
50
Qian and Guo, "Migrants on Exhibition,” 305.
51
Qian and Guo, "Migrants on Exhibition,” 306.
52
Sun, Subaltern China, 159.

22
how the Chinese state has rendered its ideology reproducible by the migrant bodies who are most
violated by it. In Foucault’s seminal work called Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
he shows how the docility of the working class and the unconscious control of the way in which
the working class body inhabits and moves through space is necessary for the quelling of class
consciousness and creating bodies which reproduce state power through its very acts,
mannerisms, and movements.
53
As Erin Huang has shown in her studies on post-socialist urban
China, the creation and maintenance of space, as well as how bodies are taught to move through
space, necessarily becomes a violent production.
54
In Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space,
Lefebvre explains that the body is a type of space for both the maintenance of state ideology and
resistance to it.
55
As Erin Huang so aptly explains, if the body should be treated as a potential site
of resistance by the Chinese state, then the body becomes a powerful tool, a potential disruptor of
the urban fabric necessitating a network of infrastructure that seeks to dispel any chance of this
resistance becoming a reality.
56
This is why the body in Jia’s film becomes the perfect site by
which his characters can enact their violence, as the body is just as much a part of the problem as
it is a site of its potential resistance.
In modern China, the CCP does not seek to control its citizens through brute violence
outright it now controls through a logic of rationality that asks citizens to consider the most
reasonable choice.
57
This necessitates the average citizen to impose docility on themselves, but
also, in the context of the Chinese state, to create forms of mobility and immobility most adeptly

53
Michel Foucault and Alan Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd
Vintage Books edition (New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1995).
54
Huang, Urban Horror, 11.
55
Huang, Urban Horror, 14.
56
Huang, Urban Horror, 14.
57
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 224.

23
done through the uneven senses of belonging allocated to its citizens. Because the CCP is
ultimately afraid of the violent resistance presented by the characters in Jia’s film, they seek to
control the body through the monotonous nature of factory work and unskilled labor. As
Wanning Sun has shown, the bodies of rural migrants, whom the state has denoted as lazy and
unproductive bodies, are transformed through a structure of institutional practices and discipline
that force these bodies to have correct movements, behaviors, beliefs, gestures, habits, attitudes,
and aptitudes.”
58
While this turns these bodies into laboring and immobile bodies that serve the
needs of the state, it also creates a sense of alienation, despair, and uncertainty that has become
the existential threat experienced by most unskilled migrant laborers in China.
59

The migrant bodies' depictions have undergone massive changes. These bodies have gone
from the moving bodies in Chinese communist posters poised to fight in mobile military stances
in the Maoist era, now to images of passive immobilized migrant bodies depicted calmly and
bleakly in photographs and paintings.
60
In Jia’s film, this is achieved through the juxtaposition of
the silent and immobilized shots of migrant workers with the factories or other spaces of
labor. While Xiaohui jumps to his death in the last vignette, the hum of the factory continues.
From the peasantry in the Maoist era to their immobilization in the post-Mao era, as Foucault
explains, passive bodies naturally become more docile as they become more useful.
61
Those
bodies which are most useful will keep going on in the system, operating the machinery in the
factory and not acting out in a way that might complicate capitalist production like those
presented in Jia’s films.

58
Sun, Subaltern China, 17.
59
Sun, Subaltern China, 17.
60
Chumley, "New Socialist Realisms," in Creativity Class, 95.
61
Foucault and Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 138

24
Docility and Productivity
Because, as Foucault points out, bodies become more docile as they become useful, it is
important for the state to create an environment where workers recreate state logic through their
movements and behaviors.
62
As Foucault argues, in his analysis of how the factory’s interior is
set up, each worker must be accounted for and the grid-like structure of the factory allows one to
visually understand how an object goes from raw materials to finished product, with each body
moving according to the production line in an almost symphonic motion.
63
Foucault’s point is
that seeing the ways in which space is organized, workers will naturally act in a way that
continuously creates rather than undermines this space; because they can feel its disciplinary
presence ultimately choosing to become subsumed by the factory space making them more
useful for the state.
64

As Foucault explains, the timetable is one of the most important mechanisms for this as it
“establishes rhythms,” “puts particular functions,” and “imposes occupations” in a “regulated
cycle of repetition.”
65
As Foucault argues, this time is not regular time but a disciplinary time
that measures itself in the utility of the body at work.
66
This causes migrant bodies to be
subsumed into their labor and monotonously acting out state doctrine with every garment, or cell
phone that they help produce in the factory. As their lives are ruled by the clock at the factory,
they become not individuals who are able to have wants and needs but part of a machine that
alienates their individuality through the control of their temporality. Migrant bodies are

62
Foucault and Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 145.
63
Foucault and Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 145.
64
Foucault and Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 145.
65
Foucault and Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 149.
66
Foucault and Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 150.

25
necessarily produced within a temporal framework that emphasizes their ability to act correctly
to maximize utility and thereby recreate a structure of power.
67

Artistic production and mass media are now another indoctrination center that presents
migrant workers in accordance with the state’s interest in presenting workers as satisfied and
immobilized subjects.
68
Foucault’s concept of docile passive bodies is now the overarching
aesthetic by which migrant bodies are displayed within the Chinese context and in Jia’s films.
Migrant bodies in artistic representations are made docile through their depictions that extend
state space. Like the caged bulls unable to escape, who represent Zhou Saner, migrant bodies are
never truly able to revolt and instead are left caged in a system that recreates their docility.
69
In
both the public and the private, docility is reproduced for the continuous maintenance of China’s
infrastructural buildup that continues to occur at lightning speed because of a class of
immobilized, passive, and docile bodies that sacrifice themselves for this reality.
70

Viewing Migrant Bodies: The Powers of Viewing
As Maccanell says in his studies of the tourist and their encounters with modernity,
“Modern man has been condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for his authenticity, to see if
we can catch a glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity or purity of others.”
71

Another reason that migrant bodies must be presented as docile, immobilized, and passive is for
the regeneration of middle class people. The modern middle class urbanite feels alienated in

67
Foucault and Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 152.
68
Lily Chumley, "New Socialist Realisms," in Creativity Class, 1st ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2016), 118.
69
Chumley, "New Socialist Realisms," in Creativity Class, 118.
70
Chumley, "New Socialist Realisms," in Creativity Class, 118.
71
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley, California: University of California
Press, 2013) 41.

26
society, and so returning to the countryside allows them to reclaim part of their humanity that has
been lost in the destruction implicit within the mission of modernity. Because migrant bodies are
icons of weariness, suffering, and bitterness their artistic representation is not meant to be an
accurate representation of the real plight of migrant bodies and the ruinous position they inhabit;
but, to validate the lost modernity of the urban viewers that watch Jia’s films.
72

Because middle class people in modern China are accustomed to the historical amnesia
and destruction implicit in the Maoist era, they watch films that represent migrant bodies become
what Jie Li has called a “utopian ruin.”
73
A utopian ruin is a dialectic between the “nostalgia and
trauma, anticipation and retrospection” of the Maoist era and the failure of its values in the
present.
74
Looking at it as both an era of idyllic utopianism along with the reality of the mass
trauma of the Maoist years, the utopian ruin not only creates a better sense of the reality of
modern China but more accurately represents those disappointed by its failure.
75
In this
construction, the modern urbanite, through watching the ruinous landscapes and people often
represented in small towns and counties filled with rural migrants across China, is indexed as
being able to have class consciousness. They are able to understand the power dynamics of this
relationship and what has been lost in the adoption of capitalism and urbanism in modern China
which allows them to extend their paternalistic and objectifying gaze as a practice of
regenerating their own alienation.
76

While migrant representations are seen as potentially proving the class consciousness and
the saving power of the modern, the migrant workers do not see migrant representations as being

72
Chumley, "New Socialist Realisms," in Creativity Class, 101.
73
Jie Li, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 4.
74
Jie Li, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, 4.
75
Jie Li, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, 5.
76
Chumley, "New Socialist Realisms," in Creativity Class, 104.

27
able to validate their own longings. As Wanning Sun has shown, in her ethnography on migrants'
reaction to seeing themselves represented in film, migrant workers were not interested in seeing
their real lives represented by cultural elites.
77
Rather, they preferred films that were more
fantastical with a happier message like Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, or even Chinese
propaganda films that present revolutionary ideas that valorize migrant workers.
78
As Sun muses,
potentially the reason that migrant workers are attracted to these narratives is that they focus on
human relations and the intervention of a larger force to fix all of life’s problems which harkens
back to the utopian ideals of the Maoist era.
79
Or as Sun so eloquently says, allow “workers an
opportunity to imagine a world that they would want to live in.”
80

As Wanning Sun says, when “the subaltern are invited to participate in the semiotic game
that aims to promote harmony and unity but only on terms and conditions that have been set by
the ruling elites” they see right through the facade of empathy and empowerment.
81
The way that
modern elitist viewers are able to consume these sorts of films becomes just as effectively
moving and escapist as Forrest Gump or ET which migrant viewers find so moving. As
Maccanell explains, modern man loses his ties to his work and feels his relationships and
community dissolving in a society increasingly focused on utility and hyper individualism.
82
In
this way, the viewing and consumption of migrant bodies become just an extension of the
escapist fantasies that urban people must use as they now, in a state of anomie, fear their lack of
authenticity.
83
Just like those who view Jia’s films, Jia keeps extending the fetishizing gaze, not

77
Sun, Subaltern China, 106.
78
Sun, Subaltern China, 106.
79
Sun, Subaltern China, 106.
80
Sun, Subaltern China, 96.
81
Sun, Subaltern China, 161.
82
MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 91.
83
MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, 91.

28
only to regenerate their lost humanity and authenticity but also can continuously help police
migrant bodies through the guise of empathetic liberalism. In this way, the continued violence
against migrant bodies is propagated by middle class viewers who consume these artistic
representations. The docility that is imposed on them by the intermingling of the middle class
gaze and the state explains why migrant bodies are abject and the structural inequalities that
cause violent outbursts.

Chapter 3: Theorizing the Horrors of Abject Masculinity: A Touch
of Sin and the Monstrous Masculine

Because migrant male bodies exist in a realm where their docility and servitude are
required, and they are consistently objectified by a middle class gaze, this wholly emasculates
them and causes them to become abject men. Following philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theories on
abjection, masculine bodies which do not conform to the hegemonic transnational business
masculinity, propagated by the Chinese state, become abject male bodies. For Kristeva, the
abject is something that naturally challenges the normal identification of the I.
84
The abject is
epitomized by that which is considered excess such as blood, guts, vomit, and the cadaver as it
challenges the correct and normal functioning of the ego and turns us into a mortal object.
85

Kristeva points out that human beings are naturally fascinated by the abject.
86
While it is
something rejected from inside ourselves, we often seek it out to engulf us because it allows us to
construct our world by understanding what challenges its existence.
87

In a discussion of gender and most importantly abject masculinity, alternate or abject
masculinities are necessary for the formation of hegemonic masculinity. Masculine abjection is
usually characterized by feminine characteristics or other perverse forms of masculinity that
challenge the construction of a more macho form of hegemonic masculinity.
88
Women and
economically and socially marginalized males become overall abject and must expel these
qualities to take part in and preserve hegemonic masculinity. Abject males can either accept their

84
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 2.
85
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 3.
86
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 3.
87
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 4.
88
Wadenius, "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness," 130. Wadenius explains that
alternate or abject masculinities are usually defined by qualities which are against hegemonic masculinity.
Therefore, they usually have to do with qualities such as low economic status, perverse sexualities and sexual habits,
bodies which do not conform to the norm, and habits which might be constituted as feminine or non-masculine.
30
continued abjection; thereby, accepting their inability to conform to hegemonic gender norms, or
expel their feminine qualities and raise their abject bodies through practices that re-assert their
masculinity and dominance.
89
The most socially acceptable way to regenerate masculinity, is
through sexual and literal violence on those deemed lower than them, both reconstructing abject
males in terms of hegemonic norms while also supporting the patriarchy and continuing their
oppression.
90

While abjection is necessarily something that must be expelled for correct masculine
subject formation, it is also a tool of control. Kristeva explains, “on the edge of nonexistence and
hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me there, abject and abjection are
my safeguards. The primers of my culture.”
91
If the abject disturbs identities, systems, and
orders, which results in the affect of horror, it also sustains all of these.
92
The theory of abjection
and abject masculinity is essentially a discussion of who is and who isn’t policed and whose
bodies are accepted as the norm and whose bodies are made to feel marginalized.
93
Borders are
necessarily political and because the abject naturally exists on the edge of that border,
determining which bodies and behaviors are deemed normal is just as necessary for hegemony as
determining what is not.
94
Fear of the abject controls people's behaviors in a more sinister way
than direct corporal punishment on male bodies and necessitates certain violent behaviors to
regenerate any form of emasculation.
95

89
Karen Gonzalezrice, "No Pictures," Performance Research 19, no. 1 (2014): 15-24, accessed June 7, 2023, Taylor
& Francis Online, 16.
90
Karen Gonzalezrice, "No Pictures," Performance Research 19, no. 1 (2014): 15-24, accessed June 7, 2023, Taylor
& Francis Online, 19.
91
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 2.
92
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 4.
93
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 395.
94
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 395.
95
Aldana Reyes, "Abjection and Body Horror," 395.
31
Abject bodies become disgusting because they reveal what is beyond the border. Abject
male bodies, monstrously react to their abjection with violence, challenging the corporeality of
the productive capitalist body and the construction of hegemonic masculinity. The bodies of
abject masculinity, such as those presented in Jia’s films, elicit horror because of their perverse
qualities and their challenging of the normal function of the contemporary Chinese patriarchal
capitalist system which has made them feel inept. As Barbara Creed, a scholar of feminism and
horror has so aptly argued, “the male body, on the other hand, is represented as monstrous only
when it assumes characteristics that are associated with the female body.”
96
It is the abject’s fear
of its economic castration and feminine qualities that creates and sustains the monstrous qualities
of abject males and results in their violent outbursts that support rather than undermine the very
patriarchal capitalist system that has made them abject.
In the context of modern China, men who believe in a more macho form of masculinity
feel abjected because of a market trend toward effeminate masculinity. Stars, such as former Exo
member Lu Han, have popularized the internet term “little fresh meat” or insultingly “sissy
pants” to describe a group of effeminate male celebrities that have begun to proliferate in
Chinese media.
97
While Geng Song has reported that some have been blacklisted by the media,
effeminate men are still receiving popularity.
98
This is part of a larger trend of Soft East Asian
masculinity transported to China through boy’s love manga and the Korean wave.
99
However, as
Geng Song has mused, while there is a trend for “little fresh meat” actors, they nonetheless are
becoming an issue of state concern, not only because it reflects a revolution in gender relations,

96
Wadenius, "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness," 130.
97
Geng Song, "“Little Fresh Meat”: The Politics of Sissiness and Sissyphobia in Contemporary China," Men and
Masculinities 25, no. 1 (2022): 68. Geng Song describes Little Fresh Meat stars (小鲜肉) are actors and singers who
are described as fresh faced, with softer more androgynous features, and healthy lean body. In addition, they are also
innocent when it comes to love and romance and highly appeal to a female fan base.
98
Geng Song, "“Little Fresh Meat” (2022): 68.
99
Geng Song, "“Little Fresh Meat” (2022): 71.
32
and the borders needed to construct hegemonic masculinity, but also because it reflects a huge
market of young female fans and entrepreneurs who are being allowed to herald the market and
by proxy masculinity.
100
As a result, many men are beginning to feel that more macho forms of
masculinity are being abjected which has resulted in increased feelings of alienation and
resentment towards women and a market that does not represent them which is even more
exacerbated among a community of economically disadvantaged migrant men.
In a case study of male live streamers, the resiliency of the patriarchy in China is
illustrated. In an ethnographic study by Chris Tan, Tingting Liu, and Xiaoya Kong, Chinese male
live streamers reported needing to perform intimacies with their female fans by displaying more
feminine types of affection and care so that they might capitalize on these fictitious parasocial
relations.
101
Rather than this newfound softness being something that male live streamers feel
liberated them from a restrictive conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity, the majority
reported that it made them feel emasculated and made them dislike women.
102
One male live
streamer called himself a licking dog or tiangou, equivalent to the internet term simp, which
denotes subordination and servitude to women.
103
From this study, many of the live streamers
felt abjected from having to perform feminine qualities and from having to become subordinate
to feminine market forces.
104

While male live streamers might not face the same issues as male migrant men, they both
are forced into feminized service jobs which causes them to turn toward more toxic and macho
forms of masculinity to regenerate their emasculation. This is because it is ultimately the monster

100
Geng Song, "“Little Fresh Meat” (2022): 70.
101
Chris, K.K. Tan, Tingting Liu, and Xiaoya Kong, "The Emergent Masculinities and Gendered Frustrations of
Male Live-Streamers in China," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 66, no. 2 (2022): 257-277, 268.
102
Tan, Liu, and Kong, "The Emergent Masculinities and Gendered Frustrations of Male Live-Streamers," 268.
103
Tan, Liu, and Kong, "The Emergent Masculinities and Gendered Frustrations of Male Live-Streamers," 270.
104
Tan, Liu, and Kong, "The Emergent Masculinities and Gendered Frustrations of Male Live-Streamers a," 270.

33
of hegemonic masculinity and each man’s unconscious want to strive towards that which haunts
them and causes the men in Jia’s film to turn toward violent actions. Bodies such as those in Jia’s
films, do not need to be monsters in a fantastic way to exhibit the horror of the monstrous male
body.
105
In fact, the horror of Jia’s world is that abject men like Dahai, Zhou Saner, and Xiaohui
are constantly haunted by the specter of hegemonic masculinity which they are constantly
striving to reach. This gives abjection a clear tie to the continuation and the maintenance of the
patriarchy even by those like Dahai who are most emasculated by it.
If the monstrous abject male body, like the characters in Jia’s cinema, must necessarily
resort to acts of violence, to serve the specter of hegemonic masculinity, then the horror which
abject male bodies exhibit is a form of body horror. Body horror is described as something which
challenges the corporeality of the body and generates fear as an expression of the abject.
106
Body
horror is that which shows the body in decay, dissolving, destructing, and that which challenges
the positive construction of the body and brings it away from its productive nature under
capitalism.
107
While some forms of body horror insist on using the supernatural, more realistic
body horror is driven by gore and violence, which reduces the body to mere meat, an expression
of abjection which threatens the body’s corporeality.
108
Because the characters in Jia’s films are
divorced from the productive capitalist body, which is ideal under the Chinese patriarchy, they
feel the need to resort to killing productive bodies to regenerate their masculinity and get closer
to its hegemonic form.

105
Xavier Aldana Reyes, "Abjection and Body Horror," in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed.
Clive Bloom (Cham: Springer, 2020), 404.
106
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 52.
107
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 54.
108
Aldana Reyes, "Abjection and Body Horror," 394.

34
In Jia’s films, it is the realization that they are stuck in their brutish existences unable to
rise above their self-loathing and resentment that begins their quest to annihilate their abjection
and bring themselves back to the norm, using the body.
109
With little to no social or sexual
capital and in a system that feminizes them, the body is the only commodity migrant laborers can
offer the state. As a result, the body is also the first site of resistance.
110
Characters like Dahai
and Zhou Saner, while being displayed as cool vigilantes who can get revenge on those who
economically castrate them, use body horror to get revenge on those who have abjected them.
However, when Dahai slaughters those who have abjected them and turns them into meat, he
strengthens the patriarchy. Through their use of body horror, Jia’s characters redraw the
boundaries between the self and the other, bringing them away from the place where they exist
as abject bodies and closer to the monster of hegemonic masculinity which they both mirror and
help sustain by harming other bodies.
111

109
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 394.
110
Wadenius, "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness," 130.
111
Wadenius, "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness," 130.

Chapter 4: Dahai the Sick Man of Shanxi, Grotesque Male Bodies,
and Victim Monsters

Background to Dahai’s Story: Rural Migrant Masculinity
To understand why a large and growing body of migrant men, through violence, help
sustain the very system which violates them, it is important to understand the relationship
between the state, masculinity, and class which has led migrant men to become monsters of the
capitalist system. In modern China, rural migrant men, like Dahai the coal miner from Shanxi
who shoots those who stole money from his village, are some of the most economically
disadvantaged and least respected. The low-paid jobs migrant men are forced to do are branded
as feminine as they focus on submitting to management and serving others.
112
As Eileen Tsang
has argued, globalization has made migrant bodies wholly replaceable but also, by extension,
“their masculinity—is deeply discounted.”
113
This is especially in a society where the
accumulation of social and sexual capital or suzhi is essential and leaves migrant bodies, who are
unable to self-improve, out of a cycle of heterosexual reproduction and as abject or perverse
iterations of it.
114

It is the lack of heterosexual relationships and a sense of belonging that seems to be the
most damning for migrant men like Dahai and leads them to their monstrosity. The cultivation of
abilities and value or suzhi has often become a prerequisite for the formation of correct
masculinity and a familial structure, where the son will eventually carry on and head the

112
Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the
Commercial Sex Industry," The Journal of Contemporary China 29, no. 122 (2020): 222.
113
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 223.
114
Lin, "Single Male Rural-Urban Migrant Workers and the Negotiation of Masculinity in China," 24.

36
patriarchal line.
115
In modern China’s neoliberal logic, the productive human body has become
something to invest in as a weapon of biopolitical control.
116
Therefore, the formation of a
correct and healthy body that can become part of the system is essential to belonging.
The hukou system, which divides urban and rural populations on a value scale of
importance and actively excludes migrant bodies, results in migrant men being unable to form
long term romantic attachments in the city.
117
Class is important when deciding about their
partner and many migrant women reject men of equal class status in favor of more advantageous
romantic relationships.
118
Because of China’s biopolitical technique that sets migrant men up for
economic failure, by not allowing them access to social mobility which could allow them to form
long-term romantic attachments and maybe becomes part of the middle class ethos, most migrant
men are forcibly outcasted from the familial structure. Jia’s coal miner character from Shanxi
named Dahai emerges as a symbol of the millions of migrant men outcast from this system.
As argued by Pun Ngai and Huilin Lu, the anger and resentment that results from migrant
men’s inability to find belonging in both society and the familiar structure, along with their labor
which devalues them, results in “the culture of violence.”
119
The idea of the “culture of violence”

115
Lin, "Single Male Rural-Urban Migrant Workers and the Negotiation of Masculinity in China," 28. Lin
describes suzhi as being the qualities of self-discipline, modernity, and civility that becomes translatable as the self’s
value within the market economy and becomes a prerequisite for forming heterosexual partnerships.
116
Lin, "Single Male Rural-Urban Migrant Workers and the Negotiation of Masculinity in China," 21.
117
Xiaodong Lin, "Male Migrant Workers and the Negotiation of 'Marginalized' Masculinities in Urban China," in
Marginalized Masculinities, 104. Male migrant The Hukou system, which was started in the late 1950s, was devised
by the Communist party as an institutional system that would better help them distribute goods and services in a
more politically conscious way. Fearing those in the city would revolt and lead to the end of the regime, the Hukou
the system was used to legitimize prioritize the allocation of goods and services to urban residents at the expense of
rural ones. Moreover, as China began to industrialize, the Hukou system was used to keep rural residents and
farmers from moving to the city long term.
118
Xiaodong Lin, "Male Migrant Workers and the Negotiation of 'Marginalized' Masculinities in Urban China," in
Marginalized Masculinities, 101.

119
Pun Ngai and Huilin Lu, "Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger, and Class Action among the Second
Generation of Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China," Modern China 36, 158.
37
was inspired by their ethnographic studies on migrant men in construction sites in China where
they witnessed some of the most debased acts of violence committed by migrant men.
120
They
witnessed migrant men threatening to kill themselves and others, damaging buildings, or even
fighting with other men physically to get management to agree to pay them the wages they
promised.
121
It is Dahai’s story that becomes a symbol of the culture of violence. Deprived of
money and their wages they can only use their bodies as a last frontier, the only commodity
which they can use to threaten the very corporations that have harmed them. Dahai’s struggles
are reminiscent of the millions of migrant workers in the countryside, who live in a society
where capitalism has become the main doctrine and the torn up social fabric causes a mass
distrust between workers and management. This wounds the social status and self-esteem of
migrant workers and necessitates violent acts – "give back my money stained with my blood and
sweat!”
122

Analyzing Dahai: Dahai’s Slaughterhouse and Victim Monsters
Dahai’s violent acts, which are evidence of the horror elicited by his abject state, reflect
Kristeva’s analysis of Celine’s novel A Journey into the End of the Night.
123
Just like the titular
character Ferdinand Bardamu, Dahai peered into the idealism of modernity and capitalism and

120
Ngai and Lu, "Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger, and Class Action among the Second Generation of
Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China," 146.
121
Ngai and Lu, "Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger, and Class Action among the Second Generation of
Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China," 146.
122
Ngai and Lu, "Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger, and Class Action among the Second Generation of
Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China," 154.
123
Romanillos, “Nihilism and Modernity: Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night,” 128.
According to Jose Luis Romanillos, Journey to the End of the Night is a novel about the titular character Ferdinand
Bardamu, a doctor who travels to different deathscapes across the world. The novel is partially an autobiographical
experience of Celine’s nihilism from his time in the trenches in WWI to witnessing the banal acts of violence and
mutilation of bodies during the colonial era.

38
sees it not as a bringer of progress but a black hole of nothingness.
124
For Kristeva, the banality
of capitalism and modernity as a bestower of progress is the abject nature of Celine’s work it
engages; in the demystification of the power of modernity and capitalism, by tearing apart
moralistic value judgments and social mores revealing them to be nothing.
125

In the words of Kristeva, modernity and capitalism are a nihilistic pursuit and that calling
it civilized is a fallacy. She writes that “never perhaps, not even with Bosch or the blackest
aspect of Goya, have human "nature," on the other side of the "sensible," the "civilized human,"
or the divine being opened up with so much cruelty, and with so little satisfaction, illusion, or
hope.”
126
Kristeva’s point ultimately underscores the horror of why Dahai chooses to commit
acts of violence. Dahai’s story is about a man so filled with a vengeance that he resorts to acts of
violence to get the dividends promised to his village by the head of the coal mine Boss Jiao.
While Dahai insists that his village is owed these dividends, as they belonged to everyone during
the communist era, those around him refused to hear his call. In the end, Dahai takes a shotgun
and slaughters the local officials and Boss Jiao who no longer represent the communist ideals
that Dahai believes so ardently. In Dahai’s society, there is no hope and there is no solution; we
are but senseless beings reduced to our abject bodies without morality or dogma to rise above it
in the “horror of hell without God.”
127

124
Romanillos, “Nihilism and Modernity: Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night,” 128.
125
Romanillos, “Nihilism and Modernity: Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night,” 131.
126
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 147.
127
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 147.

39
Using Kristeva’s points about Celine, Dahai’s story might be understood as a man living
without his God, an ill-fated prophet, a self-imposed deliverer of his people. Dahai’s story opens
with him riding on his motorcycle across the sleepy town in Shanxi that he inhabits. The camera
focuses on an image of a statue of a communist leader raising his hand in the village square.
Next to that is a picture of the Madonna and Child being held by villagers, riding in a van that
passes by. In the next scene, we see Dahai in his small but shabby apartment. He is preparing to
give himself an insulin injection, he sighs as he sticks himself with the needle. The camera pans
out to show the contents of his apartment with a noticeable tiger tapestry that is laying on a
chair.
Within the first few minutes of Dahai’s scene, several important connections and themes
are established. Dahai’s religious commitment to communism and moral values is established
through the images of both the Madonna and the Child as well as the communist leader in the
square of his small town. The repeated religious imagery in Dahai’s story establishes him as a
martyr among the greater communist leaders who liberated China. Dahai thinks of himself as a
Figure 2 Dahai Injects himself.

40
prophet, a tiger who will save his village from the effects of capitalism that have broken down
the collective spirit in his village. However, in the logic of capitalism, Dahai’s commitment to
his dogma turns him into a sick and perverse body.
The horror of Dahai’s story not only reveals his commitment to his ideals, which verge
on insanity, but also how the decaying male body is a sign of abject masculinity. Because Dahai
is a body that is sick and decaying, often bleeding out and with diabetes, his putrefied body is the
antithesis of the suave businessman that he eventually murders. Dahai is the exact opposite of the
muscular, thin, and productive bodies needed for the pursuit of capitalism. Dahai is a body that is
not healthy, it is not producing, it is taking away the life of productive bodies, the antithesis to
the healthy producing capitalistic body.
128
Dahai is a man who has been economically castrated
by a more powerful and wealthy businessman, who has taken away the dividends from the coal
mine they promised to distribute to the village. His story becomes an issue of economic and
social castration of the sick male body that is, through acts of violence, seeking to expel its
putrefied abjection.
129

The current era is marked by what might be called “capitalist realism” where beliefs have
collapsed while rituals and symbols have been replaced only by consumers plowing through the
ruins of the past.
130
In the next scene, Dahai is walking into a room with all the workers as they
take a break from the mines. Covered in dirt, they all eat soup together. Dahai sits down next to
the two miners. They discuss the head of the mine's Audi and Dahai remarks that the Audi

128
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 401.
129
Hyun-Suk Seo, Jinhee Choi, and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, "That Unobscure Object of Desire and Horror: On
some Uncanny Things in Recent Korean Horror Films," in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian
Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 169-170.
130
Steven Shaviro, "Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia," Film-philosophy 15, no. 2
(2011): 90–105, 26.

41
should belong to all of them in the village because he sold the state-owned coal mine to afford it.
One worker says, “Dahai, it’s a pity you weren’t born earlier, in the war years, you’d surely have
been made general.” Dahai would have made a great general to fight for the liberation of the
people during the communist era. As capitalism has taken over China, he is a relic of the
obfuscated past, his anger and resentment misplaced on the coal mine management.
As Steven Shaviro wrote in his studies of post-socialist conditions in Hungary, “history
has not ended so much as it has been worn out and exhausted.”
131
Like the body of Dahai, as a
reflection of China's communist past, he is worn out and exhausted, resentful of the capitalist
system that has kept him, his fellow miners, and villagers out of China’s mass industrialization
and urbanization process. Walking through the snowy hills of Shanxi, Dahai passes by a symbol
of his body in distress. A local villager is seen whipping his horse whose cart has gotten stuck in
a ditch. The horse jumps and jumps but is never able to really move; he is continuously whipped
by his master. Dahai tries like the horse to tell people in the town about the corruption, but no
one will hear his calls.
Dahai’s story in the film is first turned into an instance of body horror at the celebration
of Boss Jiao’s return to Shanxi. At Boss Jiao’s welcome celebration, we see the miners and the
villagers line up and wait for his private plane to arrive. His arrival is a spectacle in the village
and as Boss Jiao walks out, we get a glimpse of his economic splendor. “Let’s progress together”
he laughs as if not noticing the banality of his statement. The villagers chant his name. The
power dynamics of this space are present with the villagers roped off and the Boss given his own

131
Shaviro, "Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia”, 26.

42
carpet to walk across; he is made into a local celebrity reaping off the backs of those who
celebrate him most.
132

When Dahai greets Boss Jiao and picks a fight with him, which is preceded by his own
beating, we see Dahai’s monstrous form clearly take place. His decaying body, which we had
only witnessed on the inside from his abnormal ideals, became reflected in his bodily form.
Dahai attempts to discuss the issue of the dividends with Boss Jiao yet is dismissed. “What are
you staring at?” Dahai yells in a high-pitched voice and everyone moves forward with Boss Jiao
and Dahai stays behind. A man with a shovel comes and strikes Dahai across the head twice.
Dahai doesn’t emote, all he does is stand there with a dazed look on his face as the blood from
his head begins to drip out and he falls over. The man continues to strike him again and again
with the shovel. Dahai is next seen bandaged and in a hospital, his body has now entered a state
of body horror, the blood dripping out of his body, a moment of corporeal disgust.
133

From this point forward, Dahai becomes a masculinized monster, an expression of the
decaying body that has been beaten down by the capitalist system. When Boss Jiao’s henchman
begin to offer Dahai money and flowers at the hospital, all we can hear is Dahai’s labored
breathing. He is a decomposing body, a body that is barely a man. Not only is he a body that
scares us because of its literal decay but also because his fragmented and failing masculinity
makes him into an abject body, a body that deserves the viewer’s pity.
134

Dahai is not only an economically castrated and sick body but also a body that is shown
to have no sexual capital. In the next scene, he visits an old girlfriend who chastises him for not

132
Courtney J. Dreyer, "(Eco)Horror of Masculinity: Confronting Abject Nature in the Films of Robert Eggers," The
Southern Communication Journal, 4.
133
Aldana Reyes, "Abjection and Body Horror," 397.
134
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995), 144.
43
marrying the girl they arranged for him. Dahai holds her hands hoping to receive some sort of
comfort from her, but she obviously turns him down. She calls him hopeless, and he begins to
tear up. She doesn’t believe in him either; she tells him to stop pestering Boss Jiao and the coal
management because she doesn’t believe the lowly migrant Dahai could take them. His sexual
failures and his inability to form a correct nuclear family in his old age are on display; he is
sexually perverted and economically downtrodden. These are all symptoms of his masculine
abnormalities. Dahai is a parasite, or even worse, Dahai might be a self-enclosed and
claustrophobic autopoietic system.
135

Dahai is a monster of capitalism because he murders other producing bodies. Dahai is
the only character in the film directly linked to his character in a Chinese Opera, Lin Chao. The
scene of Lin Chao is followed by an image of Dahai taking off his bandages. As a symbol of his
abjection, the bandages are the only thing keeping his blood inside his body. But as he takes it
off and grabs a gun, pretending to be a warrior, a roar sound effect is played. Dahai is no longer
holding in his abject state; the blood is about to spill out.
As Dahai bleeds, his abject nature, and his want to expel it turns into a killing spree.
Dahai turns from a pathetic man to a cool green coat-wearing vigilante that is ready to fight.
Dahai walks across town confidently smoking a cigarette ready to find his first victim. “Confess”
Dahai demands, as he talks to the accountant who helped falsify the figures that allowed the
Village Chief and Coal Boss to steal from the villagers. The accountant says to Dahai You are
too much of a coward to kill me.” Dahai becomes enraged, his eyes become wide, and he shoots
the accountant in the throat, his body falls back like a piece of meat not human but a weapon, the
very capital that Dahai seeks to kill as a protest.

135
Shaviro, "Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia," 27.

44
The coal mine, in Dahai’s story, is a slaughterhouse and he is merely acting out the
violence that he has experienced from society his whole life as an economically disadvantaged
male. The coal mine system, which profits off the body of miners and other workers, renders
them helpless because they are merely pieces of meat.
136
In modern China, the worker has lost its
“spiritual mystique” because the body has become objectified, and attacking the body becomes
an expression of the horror that arises from subverting this capitalist logic.
137
Workers are pieces
of meat cattle on a farm that seeks to parasite off them, reduced to their bodily capabilities and
away from their own human nature.
138
They are bodies that may be consumed by this system of
labor that discards them once they have been exhausted and used up.
139

Dahai has created his own slaughterhouse where he is the executioner, the killer of
cattle.
140
He has made the bodies into meat, and he mimics the system that has turned him into a
putrefied body by becoming a bestower of the abject. Blood is again splattered on his face. Dahai
has turned to madness and unsettling music plays as he walks down a hallway pensive and ready
to fight. Dahai repeats the very violence inflicted on him to the bodies that he kills. Dahai turns
his victims into meat away from human beings and into just entities of capital that he can kill for
his own revenge. Because the body is a site of capital investment, then hurting or killing bodies
becomes a transgressive act. In the film, body horror is the only form of self-articulation against
a system that monetizes them.
141
This is why images of workers threatening to kill themselves,
immolating their bodies, and cutting off their own body parts in protest have become the only

136
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 104.
137
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 103.
138
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 103.
139
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 116.
140
Huang, Urban Horror, 202.
141
Kyung Hyun Kim, "‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling’: Reading Park Chan-
Wook’s ‘Unknowable’ Old Boy," Korea Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 84–108, 191.

45
Figure 3 Dahai's final kill
language by which workers seem to be able to get through to management. In capitalist logic, the
body is an asset which is merely a piece of meat.
142

Dahai visits the village Chief who asks him to not shoot him. Dahai’s breath is labored;
he shoots and follows him like a man hunting for animals. He shoots the village chief down, his
body spilled in blood. Finding Boss Jiao’s car, Dahai looks at the Audi and decides to sit inside
waiting for the Boss to finally murder the very person who has made him abject and has stolen
the money the villagers owned. Dahai, sitting in the back of the car, puts his rifle toward the back
of Boss Jiao’s head. Boss Jiao tries to talk to Dahai and offers him money in exchange for his
life. Dahai is not willing to sell out. Dahai shoots Boss Jiao at close range. We aren’t shown this
kill but only the aftermath as Dahai sits in the car, his gun up he sits in the blood that he has
spilled. The blood splatters across the car, on his face, but Dahai sits resolutely and for the first
time we see him smiling. Dahai has overcome his abjection, he has made himself free, by

142
Kim, "‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling’: Reading Park Chan-Wook’s
‘Unknowable’ Old Boy," 191.

46
slaughtering others and by destroying the very system which has turned him into meat and
discounted his masculinity. He repeats the violence by turning his victims into meat, in essence,
regenerating his fragile masculinity through the very repetition of the violence he has
experienced himself.
In the pursuit of the purity of his own body and of communist doctrine, Dahai sees
violence as necessary to clean his deep resentment and regenerate his abject masculinity. Is
Dahai a victim or a monster? The answer is likely both. As Giles Deleuze explains, resentment is
powerful because it is, “not content to denounce crimes and criminals, it wants sinners, people
who are responsible.”
143
Deleuze concludes that resentment is for pitiful people because it is an
inferior mentality that enslaves people in pursuit of its resolution.
144
Dahai’s resentment turns
him into a victim monster.
145
In pursuit of achieving autonomy, the violated male body must also
choose to violate other bodies; but this complicates his subject position by turning him not into a
hero but a victim monster. As much as Dahai is a victim of the system that abjects him, his very
want to expel it, through the pursuit of bloody violence and murderous acts, is something that is
revolting. Paradoxically, these are also the very acts which allow Dahai to put himself closer to
the center of hegemonic masculinity turning Dahai’s revolution into a narcissistic pursuit.
146

Dahai’s murderous acts check his abject nature; it turns his violent acts into a divine and sublime
spectacle of not only supporting hegemonic masculinity, but a form of dogma that he feels has

143
Kim, "‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling’: Reading Park Chan-Wook’s
‘Unknowable’ Old Boy," 197.
144
Kim, "‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu in the Dumpling’: Reading Park Chan-Wook’s
‘Unknowable’ Old Boy," 189.
145
David Greven, "Valdemar's Abjection: Poe, Kristeva, Masculinity, and Victim-Monsters," Studies in Gender and
Sexuality 19, no. 3 (2018): 191-203, 192.
146
Greven, "Valdemar's Abjection: Poe, Kristeva, Masculinity, and Victim-Monsters," 192.

47
degraded in modern capitalism.
147
Just like Jia’s film that attempts to criticize China, Dahai’s
violent acts in the film are not so subversive but markers of preserving hegemonic masculinity
even if he victimizes and becomes a monster in the altruistic pursuit of his ideals.
148

147
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 151.
148
Hunt, Rebel Men, 16.

Chapter 5: Zhou Saner the Vigilante and The Valorization of
Gangster Masculinity

Background to Zhou Saner: The Wolf Warrior Effect, Men, and the Chinese Nation
state
While Dahai is a vision of the abject man who is sick and putrefied, complicating the
productive capitalist body, and killing in the name of hegemonic masculinity, the story of Zhou
Saner is a more direct look at how the patriarchy is epitomized by a more macho form of
masculinity. The Wolf Warrior series, often regarded as China's answer to Top Gun, prominently
depicts a chief representation of macho Chinese masculinity. With glistening tanned muscles, a
focus on brotherhood between comrades, and stories set in exotic locations in need of salvation,
the Wolf Warrior series is a deeply complicated look at how fear of emasculation is tied to the
fear of the waning nation state. After being picked to join the Chinese special forces called Wolf
Warrior, Leng Feng, in each film, travels to an exotic location with his comrades and is tasked
with defending justice and promoting Chinese military power abroad. He fights mercenaries and
eventually forms a romantic relationship with the one strong and cold female character. Leng
Feng excels at combat and is shown to be the ultimate protector who saves women and children
in Africa from shady businessmen and corruption.
149
In each Wolf Warrior film, Leng Feng’s
military masculine formulation, ends with a battle with a white mercenary named “Big Daddy,”
who has brought corruption, piracy, and poverty into Africa. When Leng Feng beats Big Daddy,
all order is restored and China and Leng Feng are celebrated for their altruism and saving power.

149
Tingting Hu and Tianru Guan, "‘Man-as-Nation’: Representations of Masculinity and Nationalism in Wu Jing’s
Wolf Warrior II," SAGE open 11, no. 3 (2021), 1.

49
Much like Leng Feng, Zhou Saner encompasses a kind of cool and hyper masculine masculinity
that glorifies violence.
In the final fight between Leng Feng and Big Daddy, what Zairong Xiong has
characterized as a “sensational pissing game between two Alpha males,” is a metaphorical fight
between China and the West.
150
In the final scene of Wolf Warrior 2, Big Daddy chastises Leng
Feng and attempts to emasculate him by saying “People like you will always be inferior to
people like me; get fucking used to it” to which Leng Feng, in a last effort to beat him, stands up
and replies, “That’s fucking history.”
151
A battle between a white man and a Chinese man is
clearly an analogy for China’s century of humiliation.
152
What Mao called a national shame, the
century of humiliation, which is measured from the opium wars to the end of Japanese
occupation, is when China was held back from its full potential by Western powers, which has
been used to spur xenophobic patriotic fervor.
153
Petrus Liu argues that the Wolf Warrior series is
evidence of a new world order, where the masculine Chinese nation righteously expands abroad
finally beating out its former white colonizers.
154
This problematizes the image of a weak
feminized Chinese man through the communication of violence.
155
This is done through a

150
Liu, P., Rofel, L., Xiang, Z., Viteri, M., Udochi, A., Cai, Y., Amar, P., & Wang, C. (2018). Wolf Warrior II: The
Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics. In P. Liu & L. Rofel (Eds.), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture:
Journal Reviews Web Pubs Blog Bibliographies Video Lectures [Online series]. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from
https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/liu-rofel/.
151
Liu, P., Rofel, L., Xiang, Z., Viteri, M., Udochi, A., Cai, Y., Amar, P., & Wang, C. (2018). Wolf Warrior II: The
Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics. In P. Liu & L. Rofel (Eds.), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture:
Journal Reviews Web Pubs Blog Bibliographies Video Lectures [Online series]. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from
https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/liu-rofel/.
152
Chris Berry, "Wolf Warrior 2," Film Quarterly 72, no. 2 (2018): 40.
153
Berry, "Wolf Warrior 2," (2018): 40.
154
Liu, P., Rofel, L., Xiang, Z., Viteri, M., Udochi, A., Cai, Y., Amar, P., & Wang, C. (2018). Wolf Warrior II: The
Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics. In P. Liu & L. Rofel (Eds.), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture:
Journal Reviews Web Pubs Blog Bibliographies Video Lectures [Online series]. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from
https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/liu-rofel/.

155
Sabrina Q. Yu, "Introduction," in Jet Li (United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 4.
50
language that prizes more traditional views of masculinity which sees violence, the human body,
and fighting skills as the cornerstone of a tough and morally correct Chinese man.
156

In interviews about the film series, action star and director Wu Jing has stated that China
has never been able to produce any real men like “Tom Cruise” or “Sylvester Stallone” and that
the film industry is too dominated by “pretty boys.”
157
His creation of the Wolf Warrior series
and Leng Feng was to “inspire men to become real men and encourage women to go for real
men.”
158
Wu Jing is claiming that he is rehabilitating Chinese men and by extension concepts of
Chinese masculinity, realigning itself with the Western notion of macho militaristic masculinity
and away from alternate masculinity that favors metrosexual masculinity which would question
the stability of the Chinese nation.
159
Within this argument, if China can redefine its sexual
culture and regenerate its culture of masculinity then the Chinese nation state can rise and
maintain its place among other masculine nations in the West. While Leng Feng might allow
more upper class and educated men to support this new vigilante and paramilitary masculinity,
showing how to concretely participate in hegemonic masculinity, Zhou Saner includes marginal
men into this ideology by using brute force and violence to seek retribution from a system that
violates his masculinity while still supporting the masculine ideology of the nation state.

156
Bowman, "Chapter 2 - Film-Fantasy: The Communication of Screen Violence,” 69.
157
Liu, P., Rofel, L., Xiang, Z., Viteri, M., Udochi, A., Cai, Y., Amar, P., & Wang, C. (2018). Wolf Warrior II: The
Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics. In P. Liu & L. Rofel (Eds.), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture:
Journal Reviews Web Pubs Blog Bibliographies Video Lectures [Online series]. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from
https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/liu-rofel/.
158
Liu, P., Rofel, L., Xiang, Z., Viteri, M., Udochi, A., Cai, Y., Amar, P., & Wang, C. (2018). Wolf Warrior II: The
Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics. In P. Liu & L. Rofel (Eds.), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture:
Journal Reviews Web Pubs Blog Bibliographies Video Lectures [Online series]. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from
https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/liu-rofel/
159
Liu, P., Rofel, L., Xiang, Z., Viteri, M., Udochi, A., Cai, Y., Amar, P., & Wang, C. (2018). Wolf Warrior II: The
Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics. In P. Liu & L. Rofel (Eds.), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture:
Journal Reviews Web Pubs Blog Bibliographies Video Lectures [Online series]. Retrieved June 8, 2023, from
https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/liu-rofel/.

51
The primary reason that China’s national image is going through a military
masculinization process is that masculinity is always tied to the strength of the nation.
160

Scholars Geng Song and Derek Hird have identified that class conflict and increased income
inequality have become engendered by China’s globalization process but are also now typically
understood as masculinizing some men while emasculating others.
161
Anxieties over effeminate
males is a fear over South Korea’s soft power and China’s nascent military prowess, as China
fears the century of humiliation and Western colonization will reoccur. As Song and Hird point
out, toxic military masculinity is no longer a microculture of fringe ideas but an enduring part of
masculinity in China with heroes like Leng Feng inspiring men to act like soldiers for the good
of the Chinese nation.
162

In recent years, the masculinization of the nation state is occurring in China with toxic
masculinity and hypermasculinity becoming a major voice in Chinese media.
163
There is still a
loud and powerful group of patriarchal men who insist Chinese masculinity is in crisis. This
brings into question the real success of more metrosexual forms of masculinity truly being
accepted in China with little to no recourse or backlash. If the state may maintain its monopoly
on violence and legitimize its show of hard power abroad, through economics and military action
over softer forms of power like humanitarianism and media, then the Chinese state demands
more violent forms of masculinity.
164

160
Hu and Guan, “Man-as-Nation: Representations of Masculinity and Nationalism in Wu Jing’s Wolf Warrior II,"
1.
161
Song Geng, and Derek Hird, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, Women and Gender in China
Studies, vol. 6. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 2.
162
Song and Hird, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, 40.
163
Hu and Guan, “Man-as-Nation: Representations of Masculinity and Nationalism in Wu Jing’s Wolf Warrior II,”
5.

164
Hu and Guan, “Man-as-Nation: Representations of Masculinity and Nationalism in Wu Jing’s Wolf Warrior II,”
5.
52
If one were to watch Jia’s films, or the circulation of other types of violent male films, or
even read the comment section of male K-pop groups on Chinese Weibo, it would be safe to
deduce that the patriarchy is not so easily breakable. A recent internet term from China
understands and describes the continuous circulation of violent masculinities and other forms of
traditional macho masculinities as “straight male cancer.”
165
A nonetheless loud and growing
body of men still suffer from this straight male cancer and demand the recognition and
propagation of more macho forms of masculinity as well as obedient and sensible wives who
will submit to their authority.
166
Amidst the ongoing facade of liberalization regarding alternate
masculinities, there exists an underlying utopian notion that the patriarchy and even
economically disadvantaged men do not subconsciously gravitate towards reestablishing the
normative center. Zhou Saner's story effortlessly exemplifies this phenomenon.
The character of Zhou Saner is an obvious iteration of a type of Leng Feng paramilitary
masculinity that combines violence with masculine independence and a Chinese understanding
that prizes drifters and vigilantes.
167
Zhou Saner is a symptom of a new form of hegemonic
masculinity called Haohan.
168
Haohan are characterized by low economic status, drifting, and
crime, among other types of social transgression, that seems like a subversion of traditional
forms of transnational business masculinity for their rebellion against work and family
responsibilities.
169
In Zhou Saner’s story, we see him riding across rural areas of China. As a
vigilante, he never stays in places long. He simply makes his money and moves on. During

165
Hunt, Rebel Men, 104-106.
166
Hunt, Rebel Men, 106-107.
167
Hunt, Rebel Men, 106-107.
168
Hunt, Rebel Men, 106-107.

169
Hunt, Rebel Men, 55-56.
53
Figure 4 Zhou Saner riding a motorcycle
Chinese New Year, he returns to see his family and attempts to reconnect with them. After
leaving his village again and despite his wife’s protest, Zhou Saner watches a woman exit a
bank, follows her from behind, shoots her in the head, and steals her purse. As Zhou Saner’s
story will show, marginalized masculinities are still paid patriarchal dividends; their subversion
is because as men they are able to travel to exotic locations enacting violence on others while
women must stay back in the village. As a result, traveling, drifting, and violence all become an
expression of masculinity that strengthens traditional gender roles even for those on the margins
like Zhou Saner.
170

Analyzing Zhou Saner: The Psychopath and Lone Vigilante
As the Haohan, Zhou Saner epitomizes a form of masculinity that is based on drifting
and violence. In Zhou Saner’s first scene he is riding on a motorcycle across a highway in Shanxi
and he is stopped by three men who yell at him to stop. But Saner is unfazed, he shoots one man
immediately in the head and then proceeds to shoot another. Finally, we see the third man

170
Hunt, Rebel Men, 101.
54
terrified, his breathing becomes labored, as Saner follows him and fatally shoots him in the back
as he rides away. This initial shot establishes an important fact about Zhou Saner. When Zhou
Saner kills he does not emote, when he sees his family, he does not emote, his violence has
turned him into an alien species, an AI. Even though he is a drifter, Zhou Saner conforms to a
brand of para-military masculinity that hinges on his lack of humanity.
In search of an escape from his abject nature, Zhou Saner has turned into a new post-
human monster. Like a robot, Zhou Saner is unable to form real relationships; he is a stranger to
his friends and family.
171
As Saner gets off the train, he travels to the outskirts of Chongqing, his
crumbling village standing in stark contrast to the tall modern city. Saner arrives during the
Chinese New Year at the 70th birthday party that his brothers are throwing for his mother. The
woman in the front, with a small boy, suddenly looks nervous and begins to tidy herself. Saner
comes and stands by the woman, his wife, and their young son. The small boy looks afraid of
him. When Saner sees the boy, he grabs his cheeks pinching it so hard that the boy begins to cry
and run away. Saner grabs him and holds his neck bowing to his mother as the little boy sobs.
If the abject is essentially a want to redraw the boundaries between what is human and
what is non-human, then Zhou Saner stands as the perfect monster, an expression of the in-
human.
172
Saner is unable to truly understand his friends and family; he seems unattached to
them and the only way he can communicate with them is through acts of violence and
aggression. Saner not only challenges the corporeality of the body, as an expression of body
horror, but also how human beings are meant to form relationships with others. Saner is
presented as the worst kind of killer in the horror genre; he is a psychopath who brings about

171
Paul Bowman, "Chapter 2 - Film-Fantasy: The Communication of Screen Violence," in Contemporary Cinema 5
(2010): 67, 104.
172
Wadenius, "The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness," 130.

55
body horror through his senseless acts of violence on innocent people for no particular reason.
173

Zhou Saner is a monster masquerading as a human being; it walks in plain sight, not a disruption
but part of the norm, an empty shell.
174

In the following scene, we see Zhou Saner try to connect with his son while his young
son watches the fireworks being shot off for New Year’s. He tells his son “Shall we set off a
firework?” The son agrees and Saner raises his gun in the air and shoots it. Saner cannot connect
with his son at all, except through expressions of violence, it is the only thing that his masculine
body can use to communicate. Zhou Saner represents a new age for the monstrous male body,
away from the putrefied body of Dahai, and towards the mind games of a sociopath.
175

The scene cuts back to Zhou Saner and his wife in bed talking. She wonders where he
wants to go after he spends time with them in Chongqing. Their distance from each other seems
unnatural as he reaches over to hug her and says is “You’ve looked in my bag” his wife’s eyes
grow larger, and she looks nervous. He tells her that he can’t stay in the village because it is
boring. The only thing that isn’t boring, he says, is “shooting guns.” Zhou Saner has a fascination
with guns. He is more attached to his weapons than his wife, who he earlier refused to buy a
phone for so he could call her more. The only thing that feels real to Saner, the only thing that
allows him to have any sort of reaction besides ambivalence, is violence.
176

Zhou Saner enters a shop at the train station, asks for the bathroom, and asks the store
woman to watch his bag. Next Saner steals the coat of the welders at the factory. He takes a cart
and goes upstairs watching for people who are taking out money from the bank. We get a

173
Huang, Urban Horror, 7.
174
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995), 4.
175
Aldana Reyes, "Abjection and Body Horror," in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, 407.
176
Reyes and Gaunt, Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, 124.

56
glimpse of his cold and calculated stare, as he watches the bank of Chongqing and identifies a
woman. Covering up his face, he sees the woman carefully walk out and go on her way. She says
hello to a friend and plays with a baby in a stroller. The whole time, Saner is lurking in the
background, he suddenly pulls out his gun and shoots her in the head so he can steal her purse.
People around him began to scream but Saner is cool and collected. He goes back to the shop,
grabs his head, and methodically gathers his stuff and goes on his way.
In a peculiar scene, Zhou Saner is grouped with cattle in a truck on the highway, Zhou
Saner’s hat which he has worn the whole film, also has an image of a bull. Now, Zhou Saner
follows bulls trapped in a truck as he rides his motorcycle. The image of the chained bulls in the
truck complicates Zhou Saner’s image as free from the constraints of society even as he partially
lives up to the ideals of para-military masculinity. In the end, his self-sufficiency and vigilante
nature are not necessarily an escape from the structure of violence and subjugation that he so
seeks, but rather a repetition of it.
177
If Zhou Saner is seeking to escape his abject nature and a
cycle of consumption and production as the bull, a fearless person who stays out of the docility
and suppression of life in the village and in the traditional familial structure. He finds himself
still chained unable to truly escape. Zhou Saner is still an abject male body because he is the

177
Huang, Urban Horror, 115.

57
monstrous double of the very system which subjugates him, turning his vigilante status not into a
subversion but a monstrous repetition of it.
178

It is characters like Zhou Saner and Dahai who, through the expulsion of their abjection,
are nothing but a monstrous double-imagination of China’s system of emotionless capitalist-
faced utilitarianism, that commodifies and destroys productive bodies, in the name of
regenerating themselves. In Zhou Saner’s last scene, he is on a bus watching an action film. The
sounds of guns, shooting, and explosions permeate the scene. Zhou Saner demands to get out, the
gun sounds continue, and Zhou Saner walks out.
As Paul Bowman writes in his work on violence in Gangster films, gangster
organizations, and other vigilante structures or para-military masculinities, often mirror the very
hegemonic forms they seek to subvert.
179
They support its violence by handing out the cruelty
they receive making it an act that supports these forms.
180
Zhou’s attempts to reject his

178
Bowman, "Chapter 2 - Film-Fantasy: The Communication of Screen Violence,” 106.
179
Bowman, "Chapter 2 - Film-Fantasy: The Communication of Screen Violence,” 110.
180
King, "It Cuts both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony," 370.

Figure 5 The caged bulls
58
responsibilities and become an amoral and inhuman vigilante who roams the country mirror the
numbness and brute violence that the capitalist system exerts on his crumbling village. Zhou
Saner, as the caged bull, is an expression of para-military masculinity that is also abject and
chained; he is a prisoner to those who violate him even if he spends his life running away or
fighting it.

59
Chapter 6: Xiaoyu’s Intimate Dystopia, Violence on Female Bodies,
and the Slasher Film

Background to Xiaoyu: Abjection and Male Violence on Women
Although migrant men are violated by the capitalist system and left caged to a system
that emasculates them, violence on female bodies helps them regenerate a form of
heteronormative masculinity that many fail to live up to because of their difficulty forming
relationships with women.
181
Facing impossible barriers to finding love and belonging with
women, migrant men often purchase sex to, in some form, practice heterosexual masculinity
while also fulfilling their need for intimacy.
182
As Eileen Tsang observed among migrant men
who engaged in purchasing sex, an overwhelming number enjoyed engaging in rough sex
practices and sadomasochist tendencies.
183
Tsang argues that this is in reaction to a system of
labor in factories where migrant men are not allowed to be assertive but instead feel docile, non-
individualized, and monotonous which causes violent outbursts.
184

In a society guided by capitalism, migrant men feel a sense of failure that they reassert
through purchasing sex and engaging in rough sex.
185
Many of Tsang’s respondents also reported
that they liked that the sex workers they engaged with made them feel masculine, by performing

181
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 236.
182
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 236.
183
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 236.
184
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 228.
185
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 229.

60
highly submissive femininity, and fawning over them.
186
It allowed these men to feel a sexual
validation they don’t often experience.
187
As many of Tsang’s respondents reported, one of their
biggest issues was the continuous feminization of factory work as well as the rising role of
women in the factory; thereby, there needed to be a way for them to misidentify with a system
and work that continuously makes them feel feminized.
188
Needing to dispel an abject feminized
side of themselves, these men must often turn toward violent masculinity to regenerate
themselves. The best way to get rid of their abject feminized sides was to inflict violence on the
very women who display the characteristics that they fear most.
Committing acts of violence with other men is a major way that migrant men cement
homosocial bonds and regain their lost masculinity. As Eileen Tsang has observed, in her study
of male migrant workers who consume sex work, many men enjoyed committing acts of
violence with other men.
189
By committing acts of sadomasochist violence with other men, they
are able to engage in a competitive and extravagant masculinity that manifests masculinity as a
spectator sport.
190
In this way, they are able to regenerate their masculinity not only through
creating a power dynamic that gives them the upper hand as a victimizer but also by cementing
their masculine identity by proving it to other men. Many migrant men reportedly enjoyed
befriending pimps and gang members who were actively involved in sex work because the

186
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 232.
187
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 232.
188
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 230-231.
189
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 236.
190
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 236.

61
macho masculine affect allows them to take on markers of an illegal crime-ridden masculinity
that overrides mainstream masculine values that emasculate them.
191

Analyzing Xiaoyu: Xiaoyu’s Intimate Dystopia and The Slasher Girl
At the beginning of Park Chan Wook's film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, there is a shot
of men masturbating to what they think is the sounds of sex coming from the room next door.
While they pleasure themselves together, the camera pans over to show that the moans they hear
from next door are a woman screaming from acute kidney pain, without money to pay for
dialysis and in need of a donor, she thrashes around screeching.
192
This episode reveals the
intimate and connected relationship between sex, violence, pain, and pleasure in the film which
is an essential theme of the third vignette of A Touch of Sin. While male characters like Zhou
Saner, Dahai, and Xiaohui have a direct connection to the problem of abject masculinity, as both
a victim and perpetrator of it, Xiaoyu emerges as an unfortunate casualty of the dystopian nature
of gender and class belonging that has emerged in contemporary China.
Xiaoyu will be analyzed in terms of what Erin Huang has identified as an intimate
dystopia. As described by Erin Huang, intimate dystopias seek to map out the cycle of
dispossession that traps women in interior spaces and into a cycle of heterosexual reproduction
and consumption that disenfranchises women’s bodies.
193
Huang argues, that within this gender

191
Tsang, "Being Bad to Feel Good: China's Migrant Men, Displaced Masculinity, and the Commercial Sex
Industry,” 236.
192
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a 2002 film by Park Chan Wook which is the first installment of his vengeance
trilogy. The story of Ryu a deaf and mute factory worker who is trying to pay for his sister who is in need of a
kidney transplant. Willing to go to any length to save his sister the story revolves around themes of revenge,
violence, and dehumanization.
193
Huang, Urban Horror, 76.

62
construction, violent masculinity is prized, and women’s bodies are reduced to their reproductive
capabilities at the expense of their subjectivity.
194
The female body, in the capitalistic mingling
between the family and the market economy, asks women to have children as the ultimate form
of labor. Huang argues that the only way to rise above this cycle of reproduction and
consumption is to destroy one's biological body; thereby, destroying their ability to produce in a
capitalist sense.
195
Intimate dystopias are necessarily a violent reproduction of space that
necessitates participation in it or the violent dispossession within this system.
The intimate dystopia of Xiaoyu’s story lies in her want to be part of a heteronormative
structure despite her abjection within the Chinese capitalist patriarchal structure. This extends
her story and its violent results into an expression of dystopia. At the beginning of Xiaoyu’s
scene, she is seen with her lover and boss, Youliang, discussing how she wants to have a family
with him. Xiaoyu is interested in participating in the intimate utopia that Huang identifies as a
cycle of consumption and reproduction that engenders male and female physical bodies to their
reproductive capacities.
196
Xiaoyu envisions herself in the domestic space caring for children and
keeping a house while her husband produces capital. This vision of male-female relationships
conforms to the visions of the familial structure in hegemonic masculinity.
However, what makes Xiaoyu an abject body is her inability to conform or ever
participate in this patriarchal capitalist nuclear family that lies at the heart of China's post-
socialist imaginaries. Xiaoyu is not a legitimate wife that can be recognized as a partner to
Youliang. She is an outsider, a secret who consorts with him only in private. If Xiaoyu is going
to participate in the gendered construction of the nuclear family, their relationship that exists in

194
Huang, Urban Horror, 73.
195
Huang, Urban Horror, 73.
196
Huang, Urban Horror, 73.
63
the private sphere must also extend to the public sphere.
197
Thereby, turning Xiaoyu’s
relationship and want for a family into an intimate dystopia because she is unable to match her
internal wants to insert herself into this structure and her external reality as the mistress.
Xiaoyu’s participation and eventual turn toward monstrosity is a recognition of her
abjection, which is tied to her inability to be inserted into the Chinese vision of a
heteronormative coupling. In an uncanny scene, Xiaoyu is seen walking toward the spa where
she works as a receptionist, the same spa her boyfriend Youliang owns. Next to a bus with
colorful flashing lights, a man stands out announcing the amazing snake woman. The gray and
drab pollution that inhabits Hubei stands in stark contrast to the lights emanating from the bus
and even the bright red of Xiaoyu’s pants. After this encounter, Xiaoyu is seen to have an
uncanny relationship with snakes. Snakes slither by her in several scenes as she walks along the

197
Huang, Urban Horror, 76.

Figure 6 Xiaoyu and the Snake Woman
64
road. The symbol of the snake paints Xiaoyu as a temptress and a seductress who is polluting
Youliang’s ability to conform to the heterosexual family structure.
Once Xiaoyu is attacked by her boyfriend’s wife, we see her monstrosity come to life. In
the scene directly after she sees the snake woman, she is violently attacked by her boyfriend’s
wife. The wife slaps her and then the henchman she hired throws Xiaoyu against a car. Xiaoyu
crawls away from the scene. With nowhere else to go, she retreats into the bus with the snake
woman. The snake woman is sitting alone in the bus and a clear glass container below her feet
traps her with snakes slithering around her. She stares blankly at Xiaoyu. They sit across from
each other staring into one another’s eyes. Taking a wider camera angle, they are presented as
mirror images of each other. Xiaoyu, unable to be part of the heterosexual nuclear family she so
desires, is forced to look at the reality of her abjection reflected at her; she is like the snake
woman, a temptress trapped in a glass cage commodified for the viewing of her higher-class
boyfriend.
This scene makes Xiaoyu realize her abjection and her inability to fulfill her dream; thus,
turning her into a feminine monster and temptress who inflicts violence. Xiaoyu lives in a system
that benefits from the violent subjugation of women. She is an example of the crisis of feminine
subjectivity. As the abject female character, she is unable to assert her own subjectivity. Xiaoyu
cannot be defined as feminine without the use of the masculine and, although she might have the
guise of free choice, she has no real subjectivity of her own.
198
To cast away her alienation and
lack of subjectivity, she must expel her feminine characteristics and embrace more masculine
ones. The monster that Xiaoyu becomes is a result of her realization of her abjection and her

198
Jenni Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," in Representations of
Femininity in Contemporary South Korean Women's Literature, 172.

65
rejection of her femininity in favor of taking on masculine characteristics that turn her into a
monster.
The massage parlor that Xiaoyu works in, and where she commits her violent acts, is a
heterotopia for violent male tendencies enabling her to take on male characteristics. In Foucault’s
definition of heterotopia, it is a place where the ills of society are hidden; they are designated for
people and actions outside of what is considered the norm like prisons or institutions.
199

Heterotopia contains within them chaos that, if left out of the every day, would result in a
disruption of the social order.
200
Kristeva has called this phenomenon in her writing,
jouissance.
201
Similar to heterotopias, jouissance is epitomized by the carnival; it is a place in
society where both pain and pleasure can be released together but in an ordered structure.
202
The
purpose of a place that has jouissance or a heterotopia is that human beings can have the
opportunity to release their transgressive emotions without challenging state policy or societal
equilibrium.
Because the spa in Xiaoyu’s story is a heterotopia, it becomes a perfect place for the
release of male aggression. The spa becomes a microcosm of the violence against female bodies
that exists under capitalism. In China, the spa is known for the exploitation of its female workers
who are forced to engage in sex work. A place where the toxic nature of hegemonic masculinity
and masculine jouissance can be practiced and implemented. The spa objectifies and violates its
female worker’s bodies in a system that monetizes their sexuality while allowing upper class

199
Marko Lukić and Tijana Parezanović, "Heterotopia Horrors," in Clive Bloom, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of
Contemporary Gothic (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020), 1139.
200
Lukić and Parezanović, "Heterotopia Horrors," 1139.
201
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 9.
202
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 9.

66
men to return to their nuclear families. In this way, the spa allows men to act out their fantasies
with sex workers while still bringing the social order back to equilibrium once they return to
their wives and families. This both contains male aggression against female bodies while also
still supporting the guise of gender equality.
Because Xiaoyu will eventually subvert her female identity by taking on and acting on
violent male tendencies, her body is shown as fragmenting. In the space of the heterotopia, a
place where the patriarchy is able to be practiced and implemented in a more direct way, Xiaoyu
is seen fragmenting in various mirrors throughout the spa. The mirror epitomizes the tenets of
heterotopia because the mirror image is always subject to change and subversion.
203
The mirror
image is unreliable and subject to distortion, and we are unable to use our own subjectivity to
subvert its reflection.
204

203
Marko and Tijana, “Heterotopian Horrors,” 1139.
204
Marko and Tijana, “Heterotopian Horrors,” 1139.

Figure 7 Xiaoyu's mirror image.
67
But the mirror is always subject to shattering, and Xiaoyu’s image and her feminine
subjectivity shatter before her eyes.
205
Rather than representing her utopia, Xiaoyu’s mirror
represents her dystopia. In several scenes, Xiaoyu notices her reflection in the mirror and stares
back. Her image is fragmenting before her eyes in broken mirrors of the spa or with her body
double, the snake woman. She is able to understand that her femininity is disintegrating, that she
is just as caged and abject as the snake woman she reflects. Because her feminine image is
fragmenting before her eyes, as she feels more and more disillusioned by the gender system that
turns her from a mistress to an undesirable woman, she must resort to violence.
206
While as an
economic precariat in modern China, her feminine subjectivity is abjected. The feminine can
only be enacted with and in service of the masculine and because it cannot exist on its own, the
only way to have one’s subjectivity is to take on characteristics of the masculine.
207

205
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 171.
206
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 171.
207
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 171.

Figure 8 Xiaoyu as Slasher girl
68
Xiaoyu might be understood as the final girl or the last survivor in a slasher film. The
final girl in a slasher film is the final woman who doesn’t die; she witnesses the subjugation of
other women and their violent downfall and she, after being chased and mutilated herself, rises
above and is able to kill those who are violating her with a knife.
208
As Carol Clover has
observed in her studies of female protagonists in the horror genre, the final girl's ability to kill
her male aggressor is because she herself subverts gender norms. While Xiaoyu is washing her
clothes, two government officials come in demanding Xiaoyu give them special services. When
she refuses, they begin to push her down onto the couch repeatedly, the camera follows her every
time she stands up and is pushed down by one of the government officials. Finally, he begins to
slap her with his money calling her derogatory names and demanding her for sex. Xiaoyu gets
angrier and angrier. Angry at a system that belittles her and robs her of her dream of a
heterosexual family she must become the slasher girl, the monstrous woman becomes like a man
as a form of self-articulation.
In the slasher film, sex is a metaphor for violence.
209
Men who die usually do so because
they go after sex in a morally reprehensible way.
210
The officials wanting to pay for sex with
Xiaoyu becomes an act of violence against her personhood. Their weapon is not a literal one but
the monstrous male body that must resort to acts of violence to achieve their sexual pursuits.
211

As they hit Xiaoyu with cash repeatedly, she finally can no longer take the system which has
allowed men like this to reduce her body and femininity to a price without ever having the

208
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 53. Clover explains that in slasher
films usually the weapon of choice is something like a knife, a shovel, or a chainsaw, murder is usually done with
sharp objects rather than a gun.
209
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995), 154.
210
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 34.
211
Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, 156.

69
opportunity to be able to find love and belonging. Using the fruit knife given to her by her
boyfriend, another man who has used her body and abused her for years with the promise of a
nuclear family, she takes it out and slashes the man across the chest. The background music is
uneasy and foreboding. Suddenly, the man fragments literally, rather than Xiaoyu. He becomes a
man in crisis, his subjectivity begins to fragment, and he takes on the subordinate position that
Xiaoyu once had. If sex was once used to violate her, now the knife in her hand, the phallic
image, is used to push her victimizers into submission as she becomes the dominant masculine
entity, the hero of the castration fantasy.
212

Even though Xiaoyu has escaped the heterotopia and gained her subjectivity through
embracing masculine violence and inflicting body horror, she still cannot escape her femininity.
The final girl is in essence only a figurative male.
213
Women cannot easily turn into men.
214

Xiaoyu may have picked up a knife and inflicted violence to subjugate men, but for society to
return to normality, she must still return to her femininity.
215
Xiaoyu is the only character in the
film with a final resolution that does not end in her acts of violence. She is the character who will
take the viewer to the end of the film. In Xiaoyu’s last scene, Xiaoyu, after having fled from
Hubei, attempts to apply for a job at a factory. Her hair now short, as it was formerly extremely
long, appears calm and reposed. She is now back in society attempting to rehabilitate herself and
go back into the docility that once must act out in a factory; she is again a laboring body, a part
of China’s capitalist machine no longer an inflictor of body horror. She comes across a scene
from a Chinese opera, the actor asks, “Do you know your sin?” Xiaoyu’s eyes begin to well up
and she is emotionally moved by the statement.

212
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 32.
213
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 32.
214
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 32.
215
Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, 156.
70
The reason Xiaoyu is the only character with an ending to her story lies in Carol Clover’s
observation about the final girl as the “congenial double” for men.
216
While Xiaoyu looks
feminine, she still gratifyingly acts out male masochistic fantasies that use body horror.
217
In the
end, she still must eventually return to her femininity so that male sexuality and identity remain
the same.
218
Because Xiaoyu tried, in the end, to find a job at a factory, it marks her eventual
reincorporation into the existing capitalist patriarchal system. Her existence is again made banal;
she is there for the regeneration of the original system taking the viewers through the moral
message that Jia hopes to communicate. By returning, Xiaoyu rehabilitates herself back into this
system of labor that prizes docility. Women are reincorporated as objectified and docile objects
because Jia repeats the very violence, she experiences from the patriarchal system into his film
by using her for the maturation of the viewer.
219

While many argue that gender in the horror genre is post-human, Xiaoyu shows that once
the violence is released society must again be brought back to equilibrium by characters
returning to their gendered expectations.
220
There is no breakdown of the original system or more
alternate expressions of gender, Xiaoyu returns, the system is again upheld, and the patriarchy
again reigns supreme.
221
The feminine cannot exist without the masculine and there is no
language where the feminine exists on its own; it only exists in the film to show what the
masculine lacks or for the maturation and regeneration of male viewers.
222
Femininity is not only
shown as excess but also as something which must be subjugated. Xiaoyu is pushed back into a

216
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 55.
217
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 55.
218
Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 55.
219
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 180.
220
Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, 144.
221
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 166.
222
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 166.

71
society that can only contain her if she becomes a subordinate feminine body that does not
question or revolt against the norm.
223
Xiaoyu must always be shown as returning to her original
female identity because she can never truly escape. She must still exist to keep the masculine
alive and to support the patriarchy as an object that helps sustain its border. Xiaoyu is forced into
the perpetual cycle of suffering, never being able to have her own subjectivity, but only living to
support a system that, for women and men like Xiaohui, is nothing but a living death.
224

223
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 188.
224
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 188.

Chapter 7: Xiaohui’s City Without Bodies, Urban Horror, and
Suicide

Background to Xiaohui: Urban Horror and Cities without Bodies
While we have analyzed the ways in which Dahai, Zhou Saner, and Xiaoyu have all
experienced abjection and were left living in what can be constituted as a living death, Xiaohui’s
story shows how the literal urbanization of modern China's cities dematerializes bodies and
inflicts body horror. Through a network of infrastructure, the modern Chinese class system
prioritizes elite bodies over bodies of the working poor. The dispossession of a class of precariat
workers like Xiaohui, in favor of infrastructural buildup, results in these bodies' disappearance.
In “The Condition of the Working Class in England” Engels wrote, “Everything which
here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.”
225

Writing about the sights and sounds of infrastructure in 19th century Manchester, Engels
identifies the ways in which the mass buildup of infrastructure, urbanization, and sights of
industrial production created spaces that dematerialized bodies into a large network of dirty
urban slums that arouse a feeling of horror.
226
In Erin Huang’s 2020 work called Urban Horror,
she identifies what Engels wrote about in 20th century Manchester as a specific affect that arises
in the continued urbanization of modern China that dematerializes bodies.
227
Huang argues that
urban horror arises when the violence embedded in the production of space creates a divide
between the reality of the class disparities of urban living and the neoliberal logic that asks all to
word towards conforming to a capitalist ethos.
228
Capital is essentially, as Marx has argued, a

225
Huang, Urban Horror, 9.
226
Huang, Urban Horror, 9.
227
Huang, Urban Horror, 9.
228
Huang, Urban Horror, 11.
73
social relationship of production, essentially a network of human bodies whose very relations
become mapped onto urban places.
229

Chinese cities, especially in the Pearl River Delta, the space where Xiaohui’s story takes
place, have become spaces of urban horror where the bodies of migrants like Dahai, Zhou Saner,
Xiaoyu, and Xiaohui disappear just as new skyscrapers spring up. This is because cities like
Dongguan, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen have all become subject to different techniques of
possession and dispossession that have resulted in a violent production of space that prizes some
bodies over others.
230
While some cities are made hyper visible as meccas of the success of
neoliberal capitalism and post-socialist Chinese urbanization, some places and people are made
precarious.
231
China and China’s ever-growing expansion of economic zones shows a gap in
cognition from the glittering skylines of Shenzhen, Beijing, and Shanghai, while simultaneously
hiding the dark alleyways of life in cities like Dongguan and the dispossessed and nihilistic
people who inhabit these places.
232
It is bodies like Xiaohui, which help build and expand
Chinese urbanization, that are also the same bodies that are pushed out in an ever-growing
network of dispossession that supports a new highly mobile and masculinized urban class.
233

As Erin Huang shows, the future of China is filled with zones of exception where
precarious life is delved out in various zones of possession and dispossession.
234
Hong Kong,
Shenzhen, and even Dongguan is essentially just a name for a series of protocols where China
creates new varying levels of possession and dispossession meant to serve a highly elite upper
class while excluding lower classes. As Huang has noted, as cities in the Pearl River Delta

229
Huang, Urban Horror, 11.
230
Huang, Urban Horror, 23.
231
Huang, Urban Horror, 23.
232
Xiaoping Wang, "Hedonism and Nihilism in the Consumerist Wasteland: Unknown Pleasures (2002) as a Fable
of Drifters in a Market Society," in China in the Age of Global Capitalism, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2020), 56-71, 68.
233
Huang, Urban Horror, 23.
234
Huang, Urban Horror, 150.
74
expand upward, they increasingly become cities without bodies.
235
The very infrastructure that
China builds becomes an instance of body horror, as those who have built it, are violently
dispossessed and erased in favor of a new elite class.
236

Analyzing Xiaohui: Precarious Life, Cruelty, and Suicide in the Pearl River Delta
As a Hunanese worker in a factory with little skills and education, Xiaohui also becomes
one of the bodies which build, create, and serve those in China’s elite economic archipelagoes in
the Pearl River Delta. Within this violent process of dispossession, the body horror of Xiaohui’s
story lies in the fact that he becomes dematerialized by the city and the flows of capital around
him. Unable to participate in transnational business masculinity or form a heterosexual
relationship he is stuck working menial jobs and living in China’s overcrowded slums, Xiaohui
becomes desperate. This causes Xiaohui to one day get out of his bed in his dormitory at a
factory in Dongguan and jump out of the fifth story plummeting to his death.
In the effects of urban horror, Xiaohui’s suicide could be looked at as a way to map the
destruction of the working class onto the body of Xiaohui. This makes urbanization and the
buildup of infrastructure an instance of body horror because the body of the working class is
destroyed by the construction of the city. Xiaohui’s suicide could be understood as an effort to
escape the destruction of the working class and the state ideology, which asks him to sacrifice his
body for a system that seeks to destroy him. As a disenfranchised and abject male body, the last
frontier is to use his body as a way in which to articulate himself. This is why, migrant workers
often self-immolate, threaten suicide, and endanger the sanctity of their bodies. Reduced to
people with no social or sexual capital, the body is the only speculative site of resistance.

235
Huang, Urban Horror, 151.
236
Huang, Urban Horror, 151.
75
Xiaohui’s masculine abjection rests on his stance as an economic precariat. In the age of
neoliberal capitalism, economic precariats are a large segment of the population who are only
partially involved in the labor force.
237
They exist with little to no economic or job security and
often go from gig to gig just to survive.
238
In Xiaohui’s first scene, he is in a factory steaming
clothing on a production line. Like a symphony, each body in the factory moves in unison as the
camera pans over them in a straight line. They appear as automated robots, their bodies and
identities entrenched by the sound of buzzing machines and the steam rising from the
machines.
Xiaohui is immediately shown to subvert the monotonous nature of the factory. During
working hours, he goes up to his friend to talk to him about going to Dongguan. Distracted by
the conversation, Xiaohui’s friend accidentally cuts his hand on a fabric cutting machine, a pool
of blood forms on the piece of white fabric. It is a salient symbol of the bodily sacrifice the
working class is giving toward the production of goods and a foreboding symbol of the body
horror implicit in capitalism. This is because China's productive capacity and new economic
archipelagos are built off the blood of the body of the working class. Their bodies bleed out as
they risk their lives to build and produce for new China. In response, the management
reprimanded Xiaohui and required him to work for his friend's wages. Rather than give up his
body continuously to his friend and to the factory, Xiaohui gets up and leaves making his way to
Dongguan.

237
Seungwon Nam, "The Decaying Dreams of Capitalism in The Great Gatsby and Parasite," 문학과영상 22, no. 1
(2021): 431–455, 437.
238
Nam, "The Decaying Dreams of Capitalism in The Great Gatsby and Parasite," 437.

76
In Dongguan, Xiaohui goes to see his friend who works at a local factory and introduces
him to the head of a hostess club and hotel in Dongguan. Serving businessmen from Hong Kong
and Taiwan mainly, Dongguan’s hostess club called the Golden Age is a shocking experience for
Xiaohui. Xiaohui is shown to all the waiters, who are dressed in black and white tuxedos and are
learning how to greet the guests. The waiters are instructed to call them distinguished guests in
Mandarin, Cantonese, and English with Xiaohui innocently trying to mimic them. Xiaohui and
the workers speaking in unison became a symbol of the robotic and collective consciousness
required for China’s unskilled labor force.
Xiaohui’s abject male body and ill-fated relationship with Lianrong is a practice of the
cruelty of capitalism. The reason cruelty is associated with a class of economic precariousness
and body horror is that bodies that desire love and care beyond basic sustenance are constituted
as wasteful for China’s production capacity.
239
In capitalism, precarious bodies are turned into
animalistic creatures. This is because China requires its labor force not to desire to be human but
to be robotic contributors to China’s economy. This is the reason that punishments in society

239
Huang, Urban Horror, 202.
Figure 9 Xiaoyu and Lianrong with goldfish
77
tend to deprive the body of essential aspects of its care as a human and why body horror is
communicated so effectively through cruelty and deprivation.
240

While the lower classes are economic precariats and turned animalistic for their inability
to really produce on their own, the upper class is also seen as parasites to a system that supports
their capitalist accumulation. In one of the first scenes at the Golden Age, we are shown all the
sex workers marching across dressed as scantily clad communist soldiers while the wealthy
businessmen peer at them. Jia appears as one of the businessmen in his film talking to Lianrong,
he clucks at her and then taps her on the shoulder as she goes to serve him. This scene shows that
migrant bodies are no longer valorized but made for the enjoyment and servitude of China’s
upper class, who consume migrant bodies as entertainment.
241

The cruelty of Xiaohui’s story lies in his economic castration that leads to his inability to
form a relationship with Lianrong. Xiaohui and Lianrong are shown to have a rapport with each
other because of their shared Hunan heritage. On an early date between the two, they walk along
the lake at a Buddhist temple and release some fish that Lianrong was keeping. A visual image of
their animalistic captivity as non-human workers meant for the consumption of the working
class, Xiaohui and Lianrong will never truly be released from their economic captivity like the
fish. They are now allowed to dream of a life beyond their value to the upper class. Xiaohui will
never have a real relationship with Lianrong. Instead, Xiaohui is left bowing to wealthy
businessman, welcoming them to the Golden Age, and smiling at the few dollars they give him.

240
Huang, Urban Horror, 202.
241
Wang, "Hedonism and Nihilism in the Consumerist Wasteland: Unknown Pleasures (2002) as a Fable of Drifters
in a Market Society," 62.

78
While they sit together in a car, Xiaohui stares at Lianrong. The rain around them is
pouring. Xiaohui tries to kiss her to which she obviously rebukes him. He says to her “I like you
very much” in Cantonese, clearly pretending to be like the Cantonese speaking Hong Kong
businessman Lianrong is forced to serve. “Let’s leave Dongguan,” he says. “Where will you take
me?” Lianrong says. The viewer looks at Lianrong’s eyes as she rebukes Xiaohui. She does not
believe in his romantic notions of fleeing this place together. Lianrong looks him in the eyes and
says, “There is no love in sex work.” She must constantly sell her body to the highest bidder.
Even if they find love, there is no freedom from their economic precarity, their situation does not
allow them to want love and to have desires that are human.
242

Xiaohui’s masculine body is a site of his inadequacy as he is unable to conform to the
hegemonic transitional businessmen monster.
243
Lianrong is still shown as having more agency
than Xiaohui because she is more resigned to her precarious existence and can more directly
monetize her body.
244
As Xiaoping Wang wrote in his article on Jia’s film Unknown Pleasures,
Jia’s characters tend to be resigned to their nihilism and do not seek to challenge the system but
merely continuously work in it because there is no escape from the grips of capitalism.
245
While
Lianrong is clearly resigned to her fate, Xiaohui is shown as the uncontrolled unmanageable
male body, a liability to the capitalist system, because he still seeks idealistic pursuits and a life
beyond work.

242
Wang, "Hedonism and Nihilism in the Consumerist Wasteland: Unknown Pleasures (2002) as a Fable of Drifters
in a Market Society," 64.
243
Wang, "Hedonism and Nihilism in the Consumerist Wasteland: Unknown Pleasures (2002) as a Fable of Drifters
in a Market Society," 69.
244
Wang, "Hedonism and Nihilism in the Consumerist Wasteland: Unknown Pleasures (2002) as a Fable of Drifters
in a Market Society," 68.
245
Wang, "Hedonism and Nihilism in the Consumerist Wasteland: Unknown Pleasures (2002) as a Fable of Drifters
in a Market Society," 66.
79
At the end of his relationship with Lianrong, Xiaohui gets cuckolded by a man who asks
Lianrong to dress like a train attendant and calls him the conductor. Xiaohui watches on as
Lianrong offers him her services, and his economic and sexual castration becomes explicit to
him. Afterward, he immediately leaves the Golden Age and goes back to work at the factory. His
mother calls him and demands that he give her money. When he explains to her that he doesn’t
have any, we see Xiaohui begin to tear up. Again, he is battered and rejected by a woman;
although, this is his mother. “Can I live on nothing?" he says to her. He stares despondently as
she accuses him of wasting money and he begins to cry.
In films that use body horror, the body of the mother is usually abjected. Children first
experience abjection when they need to move away from identification with the mother and form
their own selfhood.
246
However, because the mother cannot define herself without her child, she
becomes something that is abject and discarded by the child.
247
When we see Xiaohui argue with
his mother, another person who clearly only sees her son as a human ATM machine, we are
reminded of her abject quality. In a reversal of the mother-child relationship, Xiaohui’s mother
turns him into a person that only exists as a commodity for his mother to use.
248
Xiaohui can
never be really detached from his mother because she needs to leech off his productive body. His
mother has abjected him and turned him into a monstrous extension of herself.
249

246
Creed, "Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection," in The Monstrous-Feminine, 18-25 (Routledge, 1993), 11-12.
247
Creed, "Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection," in The Monstrous-Feminine, 11-12.
248
Creed, "Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection," in The Monstrous-Feminine, 13.
249
Creed, "Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection," in The Monstrous-Feminine, 13.

80
Because Xiaohui’s story is a practice of the cruelty of capitalism and its inability to
recognize workers as humans, it leads to Xiaohui committing suicide. Kristeva points to suicide
as a major part of abjection in her discussion of Dostoevsky’s novels.
250
She argues that in the
absence of any morality or meaning, a pervasive nihilism takes root and suicide becomes the
only way to rid the self of their abjection.
251
Kristeva notes that in Dostoevsky's works, the lost
or subverted father figure makes young men into figures who are consistently repudiated by
maternal figures.
252
This necessitates Xiaohui’s violent acts, not only to escape a world that he
feels has no meaning and does not represent him as a person, but also a world where he is
consistently made to feel more abject by a system where the patriarchy and capitalism
intermingle.
253

After returning to work at the factory, Xiaohui has a blank stare on his face, he is a shell
of a person he once was. With the buzzing sounds of machines behind him, which sounds more

250
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 18.
251
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 18.
252
Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 18.
253
Creed, "Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection," in The Monstrous-Feminine, 10.

Figure 10 Xiaohui's dead body
81
like an arcade game rather than anything else, Xiaohui gets up and throws the weapon he was
wielding on the floor, leaping off the fifth story of his dormitory. A girl is seen watching him
jump and looking down from her balcony at Xiaohui’s dead body on the ground. The factory is
simultaneously shown to keep working. The factory’s work goes on and his suicide is seen as a
minor disturbance in the buzz of the factory’s busy day.
The beginning of Xiaohui’s suicide seems to suggest that Xiaohui is poised to wield a
weapon and start inflicting violence on others. However, he begins to inflict it on himself. To
understand the body horror of Xiaohui’s suicide and his unfortunate ending, it’s central to
understand that before men become monsters, they must first inflict acts of violence on
themselves.
254
Self-mutilation becomes central to the articulation and understanding of the
monster who is usually plagued by feelings of inadequacy and trauma.
255
Rather than hurt others
and delve deeper into an array of cruelty and punishment, which will subjugate his selfhood,
Xiaohui chooses to hurt himself as an escape from his monstrosity.
The real monster in Xiaohui’s story is a faceless monster that one might call hegemonic
masculinity. By killing himself, Xiaohui has merely helped feed the growing monster.
256
As a
victim of the monster of hegemonic masculinity, Xiaohui does not fight it but ultimately feeds
into it by removing himself from its throws and the system that is cruel to him. Death might
release him from the cycle, but it does not threaten the monster. Just like the factory that keeps
going even as Xiaohui dies, Xiaohui is not released from the system that victimizes him because
he is just a minor impediment.
257

254
Aviva Briefel, "Monster Pains: Masochism, Menstruation, and Identification in the Horror Film," Film Quarterly
58 (3): 16-27, 16.
255
Briefel, "Monster Pains: Masochism, Menstruation, and Identification in the Horror Film," 16.
256
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 189.
257
Elfving-Hwang, "Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic," 189.

82
Xiaohui represents a future urban imaginary, an urban horror that his story ultimately
represents. In urban horror, the body serves as a nodule point to grasp the future of the Pearl
River Delta, yet it also becomes a manifestation of body horror, as its cities are not designed to
accommodate actual human bodies.
258
Xiaohui’s suicide is only evidence of the disappearance of
the working class in China’s economic archipelagoes. Instead, the new urban centers of
contemporary China will exist to serve the monstrous masculine a group of highly elite men who
are extremely mobile. China’s capitalist and gender system is extremely socially Darwinian: the
death of individuals like Xiaohui, while helping them escape the cycle of capitalism, still feeds
the monster of hegemonic masculinity by removing themselves from the patriarchal capitalist
system.
259
The body horror of Xiaohui’s story is mapped onto the infrastructure that he helps
maintain by obliterating his physical body and supporting a system that builds enclaves for
hegemonic transnational business masculinity. The future of cities in China are cities without
bodies where the dispossession and disappearance of the working class contrast with the highly
mobile and elite urban class that inhabits the skyscrapers of the Pearl River Delta.
260

258
Huang, Urban Horror, 153.
259
Wang, "Hedonism and Nihilism in the Consumerist Wasteland: Unknown Pleasures (2002) as a Fable of Drifters
in a Market Society," 62-63.
260
Huang, Urban Horror, 152.

83
Chapter 8: Conclusion Toward a Theory of the Monstrous
Masculine and Abject Masculinity in China

There is no escape from the classist dimensions of hegemonic masculinity and its
continued tie to capitalist accumulation. Migrant bodies like Dahai, Zhou Saner, Xiaoyu, and
Xiaohui are consistently forced to recreate their very subjugation through a system that ensures
their continued suppression. As docile bodies in contemporary China, they are needed for
China’s continued urbanization and expansion economically, which creates the continued
possession of a group of transnational businessmen, at the expense of millions of others. Their
very bodies are consistently violated by a system that profits off their subjugation; they are left,
nonhuman mere precariats who are not allowed to desire love and care.
However, as this thesis seeks to show, the classist dimensions of hegemonic masculinity
are critical in understanding the ways in which the patriarchy continues to work. As Dahai, Zhou
Saner, Xiaohui, and Xiaoyu have shown, economic subjugation is central to abject masculinity.
Abject masculinity must exist for the continued creation of the monster of hegemonic
masculinity. Within this system, violence is naturally a step for regeneration, and it is through
violent acts that each character is able to expel their abject qualities and re-support the monster
of hegemonic masculinity. Because the monster of hegemonic masculinity is supported through
bodies and body horror, by inflicting violence on other men or on themselves and by challenging
the corporeality of productive capitalist bodies, each character can reject their abject nature and
get closer to supporting the unconscious monster—the spectator of hegemonic masculinity that
continues to haunt them. Each character in Jia’s film is ultimately not subversive; rather, they are
being paid patriarchal dividends by continuously helping support hegemonic masculinity through
acts of violence. This does not subvert the problem but creates the very problem itself. Jia’s film
84
does not emerge as a subversion of the valorization of violent masculinity or the patriarchal
system but as another iteration. The patriarchy will not die so easily, and, through his film, Jia
shows the ways that even the working class can contribute to the horrors of the patriarchy
through their unconscious desire to conform to its standards. The real horror of the monstrous
masculine is that it communicates itself through body horror, even when it tries to subvert it, by
destroying productive bodies. The monster of hegemonic masculinity as a system sustains itself
through violence against women and other more abject bodies. Even downtrodden and
economically disadvantaged men and women can feed the monster of hegemonic masculinity,
whose hunger and desires are regenerated through acts of violence.

85
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Creator Ramirez, Hanna Rachel (author)

Core Title Unmasking abject male bodies and China's corporal dystopias: violent masculinity and body horror in Jia Zhangke's A touch of sin

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