| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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First, I analyze Chou’s Click, My Baby which explores the issues of child-birth, sexuality, and heterosexual relationships on the Internet. I Want You Before Sunrise represents the issue of multiple gender identities. Chou’s De ja vu (written by Ji Wei-Ran) deals with the male gaze and female body as something more than a reproductive machine.
In Chou’s I Want You Before Sunrise, the characters’ gender is represented as performance. Judith Butler in Gender Trouble asserts, “the gendered body is performative” (73). From this viewpoint, gender is actually “a corporeal style, an act” (76).10 So, gender is established as a performance consisting of a stylized repetition of acts. In this production, the audience can witness the gender performance through the characters’ costume and the stylized repetition of acts.
Within the institution of heterosexual marriage, the characters break out of the boundaries of heteronormativity. Applying Jill Dolan’s notion of “not … but” to the female body, Chou’s theatrical representation presents the Woman as no longer the object of the male gaze, but part of the discourse of watching that the performance promotes. Freud’s notion of associating women with the illness of hysteria is outdated and I would argue that the female body should no longer be a place representing hysterical spectacles. Woman should be staged as a subject, an independent person who has her own point of view. Thus, Dolan’s view can break the binary opposition between man / active versus woman / passive. A woman can transgress the gender boundary. A woman is not an image, not an icon, and is more than a passive object. The gender identity for women can encompass other possibilities, such as the bisexual and lesbian subjects. For example, in Chou’s production I Want You Before Sunrise, the leading character is a married film director, who is a “not … but” subject and explores her sexual desires beyond conventional boundaries.