Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Postfeminist Cinderella Narrative in Crazy Rich Asians

2021; Canadian Comparative Literature Association; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/crc.2021.0018

1913-9659

Kaby Wing-Sze Kung,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

The Postfeminist Cinderella Narrative in Crazy Rich Asians Kaby Wing-Sze Kung Adapted from Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel, Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians (2018) turns the original story from a satire and parody (Lies) to a romantic comedy with a Cinderella motif. Kwan's original story is about Chinese-American professor Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), and her romantic encounter with an Oxford graduate Singaporean Chinese professor Nick Young (Henry Golding). Their relationship goes smoothly when they are in New York; however, they face challenges when Rachel and Nick embark on a journey to Singapore to attend the wedding of Nick's best friend, Colin Khoo (Chris Pang). In Singapore, Rachel realizes that Nick comes from a prestigious and super-rich family, and the Young family rejects her. The story ends with the reconciliation of the couple without the blessing of the Young family. It is indeed Kwan's love story between a "comparatively lower" (middle-class) woman and an upper-class man that inspired Jon M. Chu to give the film adaptation a Cinderella setting; as Carol Dole points out, "The Cinderella story has long provided an outlet for female fantasies of a raise in social class coupled with romance and a new wardrobe, as it did in Pretty Woman (1990) and Maid in Manhattan (2002)" (60). These Hollywood Cinderella variants, including Crazy Rich Asians, reimagine their respective protagonists. Instead of passively waiting for the prince to marry them, they choose to have a say in their marriages at the end of the films, and such twists make these films "postfeminist romantic comedies" (Soer), as the notion of "choice" plays a significant role in postfeminist romance films (Schreiber 4). Based on Rosalind Gill's argument on "postfeminism as a sensibility," Georgina Isbister coined the term "postfeminist fairy tales," a subgenre of fairy tales that incorporates and reconfigures both traditional and feminist fairy tale discourses in popular postfeminist culture. She defines postfeminist fairy tales as fairy-tale-like stories that depart from "traditional fairy tale forms in [their] incorporation of postfeminist twists on [End Page 219] the fairytale's transformations of the self-the realization of the ideal 'true self'," a woman capable of "having it all (education, career, economic independence, love, and family)" (Isbister). This article investigates how Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians incorporates features of postfeminist fairy tales by changing the characterization of the main female characters and altering the ending to a "happily ever after" one, as well as through Rachel's quest to search for her "true self" via her journey to the East, specifically to Singapore. In addition, since Crazy Rich Asians was "the highestgrossing romantic comedy since 2009 and was the first major studio film to center an Asian American story in 25 years" in Hollywood (Yap), this article will also discuss the significant role of the film in Hollywood cinema, particularly in postfeminist American cinema. To introduce the context of rewriting fairytale films in a postfeminist context and the features of postfeminist fairy tales, the first section of this article provides a general outline of the idea of postfeminism. The Rise of Postfeminism In the 1980s and 1990s, many feminist scholars, such as bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, found that then-current feminist theories did not reflect the needs of many women. The idea of feminism at the time was suggested by white, middle-class females, and these authors were concerned that it would not necessarily appeal to women of different classes or races. Furthermore, the rapid development of the idea of feminism resulted in greater numbers of women aspiring toward sexual equality and the development of their self-identity. Nevertheless, these feminist ideas were not comprehensive enough, and perhaps in some cases too radical for, the actual lived situations of women in the contemporary world. According to Susan Faludi, "it is more likely that the feminist revolution has petered out, leaving so many women discouraged and paralysed by the knowledge … [that] the possibility for real progress has been foreclosed" (qtd. in Whelehan 222). In light of this, a new feminist theory was developed, one that incorporated new insights for present...