This commentary is so curious to me because it’s such an excellent example of white/western cultural bias in portrayals of other cultures. Because fans by themselves are a gender neutral object in Ancient China, especially the large type that Mulan uses in this particular scene is actually masculine if you must code it historically, and in Chinese hands would be used as a tool to support her masculinity and not the other way around. These paper fans are used in general by (male) scholars and artists who decorate its surface with art and calligraphy. It is a symbol of (masculine) intellectual power and the intellectual elite. And if you look to Asian martial arts films, they are a common and almost exclusive weapon of men.
Yet the movie takes this deeply cultural object and either willingly or ignorantly makes it an object of womanhood or femininity. To the extent of my knowledge, this is mostly reflective of western social history. And draws from the coquettish ways Georgian? Ladies would use the fan to signal their romantic interest and all the history and influence around it. The equivalent object for the Chinese lady would in fact be the handkerchief, or a hairstick if you want something pointy.
And it’s all the more curious because at the end of the day it’s a western depiction of a foreign story made for western consumption. It is not a story made by and for Chinese little girls, but to empower and inspire those in the West. Which provides the context for the above (excellent) analysis. It does not need to fully take Chinese history into context because it was never made for us, despite being explicitly about us.
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