Discrepancy in Literacy and Spectatorship: Jet Li – Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom by Sabrina Qiong Yu

Sabrina Qiong Yu. 2015. Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom.  Edinburgh University Press. 224 pages.

Reviewed by Wayne Wong

Chinese audiences may find it difficult to abide Jet Li’s latest characterization in Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables 3 (2014), where Arnold Schwarzenegger in the final scene cuddles up to Li as the two are nuzzling into each other, suggesting (as confirmed by the director) a homosexual relationship rarely portrayed by the protagonists of the “hard-core” action genre. Embodied by his name (Yinyang) in the film, Li’s diverse, often conflicting transnational star image – a constant oscillation between masculinity and femininity, hero and villain, and even national and transnational – is a central motif of Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom, Sabrina Yu’s multifaceted examination of Li’s complicated start text. Li’s gender transgressive screen persona, as Yu illustrates, started two decades earlier in Swordsman…