Crouching women, hidden genre: an investigation into western film criticism's reading of feminism in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

By drawing on critical literature on Ang Lee's swordplay (wu xia) film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and earlier wu xia films, in addition to a close textual analysis of the film and its English-language subtitles, this paper investigates western film criticism's assertion that the film is feminist because of its strong female warrior protagonists. It suggests that it is in the ambivalent conventions of the wu xia genre, where Confucian patriarchal and hierarchical order are strongly present in the wu xia world of disorder, that an environment for this feminist reading is created.