Cinematic Fabulation: Transgender Representation in Zhang Yuan’s Film Miss Jin Xing

This chapter offers a critical reading of the film Miss Jin Xing by focusing on the formal and narrative strategies that the filmmaker Zhang deploys to represent Jin Xing the trans person. I draw on the Deleuzian (2004) concept of fabulation to elaborate on a theory of cinematic representation and mediation. I suggest that Zhang’s film should be understood as an experiment to fabulate, or tell, fantastic stories, and this mode of filmmaking challenges the identity politics often seen in cinematic representation of minority subjects. Through the technique of fabulation, filmmakers focus on dynamic storytelling and their films can often embody the potential for identity change and social transformation that is in tune with the gender fluidity of the trans people. The concept of fabulation, therefore, not only helps us understand Jin Xing the person and her enigmatic life, but also cinema as a narrative vehicle and visual apparatus to open up identities, imaginations and worlds. This chapter begins with the concept of fabulation as a critical heuristic to understand the politics and aesthetics of documentary filmmaking. I then offer a brief genealogy and taxonomy of trans representation in Chinese independent cinema of the post-Mao era. In doing so, I pose questions about how we can overcome the limit of identity politics to think about cinematic representation of minority subjects, suggesting alternative ways to think about identification. This is then followed by textual analysis of the film Miss Jin Xing. I conclude the article by highlighting the productivity of using the concept of fabulation to understand the politics and ethics of filmmaking involving minority subjects.