Translating the woman warrior: kung fu cinema, self-defence and feminism in the 1970s

This paper looks at the take-up of martial arts imagery within second-wave feminist debates on violence and self-defence in the UK and America in the wake of the ‘kung fu craze’ of the early 1970s. Drawing on a long iconography of women warriors in Chinese martial literature, theatre and cinema and with magnetic performances by stars such as Angela Mao, Cheng Pei-pei and Hsu Feng, these films introduced startling images of women empowered to fight on equal terms with men. However, I argue that their reception in the new context of American and British feminism involved an act of ‘translation’, whereby these images were mapped onto a set of existing debates and concerns about gender, violence and self-defence perhaps quite alien to the films themselves and the histories that produced them. In wuxia movies and novels, women warriors often fight not to defend themselves but simply because (like their male counterparts) they are, as warriors, concerned with the business of the martial world. And whilst in Euro-American traditions, self-defence is primarily envisioned in individual terms, motifs of self-defence in Hong Kong cinema are often filtered through ideas of collective defence and the experience of colonialism. Although in both China and the West, ‘self-defence’ is imagined in terms that gender ‘Asianicity’ feminine, the implications of this are very different. To analyse the nature of this act of translation (and the unfolding of post–kung fu debates on women’s self defence), I look in particular at two editions of the seminal British feminist magazine Spare Rib where the topic was discussed at length, one from October 1973 and the other from February 1977. These articulated an ambivalent relation to media-inspired fantasies of martial arts as they grappled with complex questions about gender and violence, and what might constitute an appropriate feminist position with regard to this.