Cindy

I wrote a college paper once about gender dynamics in Disney films, and part dealt with the emphasis of androgyny in this film. Mulan is an outsider and unsure of her position of the world when she is adhering to both a total feminine role (the matchmaking scene) and a total masculine role (disguised as a male soldier) and it’s only when she’s able to embrace both sides that she is able to fully showcase her abilities and ultimately save the day. 

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.