Tomboy Performativity in Contemporary Western and East Asian Queer Films

Tomboy figures have become increasingly visible in contemporary queer cinema, yet their cultural and political meanings remain deeply ambivalent. Positioned at the intersection of subversion and containment, the tomboy simultaneously embodies gender nonconformity and remains vulnerable to visual discipline and narrative normalization. Drawing on feminist and queer revisions of gaze theory (Mulvey in Screen 16:6-18, 1975; Kaplan in Women and Film, Methuen, London, 1983; Doane in Screen 23:74-88, 1982; Straayer in Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996), alongside film semiotics and performativity (Barthes in Myth Today, Routledge, London, 2014; Metz in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1981; Butler in Gender as Performance, Routledge, London, 2013), this article examines how tomboy subjectivity is constructed, regulated, and occasionally reclaimed through cinematic form. Adopting a comparative qualitative methodology that integrates semiotic analysis and close textual reading, the study analyzes four films from distinct cultural contexts: Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019), Yes or No (Saratsawadee Wongsompetch, 2010), and The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016). Focusing on visual signifying practices, such as costume, bodily gesture, spatial occupation, camera framing, and symbolic objects, the analysis investigates how tomboy masculinity is alternately eroticized, desexualized, domesticated, or framed as autonomous agency under different regimes of looking. The findings reveal a clear cultural divergence. In Western queer films shaped by female or queer authorship, tomboy figures are more likely to be situated within structures of reciprocal gaze and embodied subjectivity. By contrast, in East and Southeast Asian commercial contexts, tomboy masculinity is frequently softened into a politically neutral, marketable image shaped by censorship and commercial logic. Auteur cinema, however, occupies a liminal zone in which tomboy performativity is caught between patriarchal fetishization and queer reclamation. Rather than constituting a stable identity category, the tomboy emerges as a culturally regulated cinematic sign whose meaning is continually produced through visual power relations. By synthesizing gaze theory, semiotics, and performativity within a cross-cultural framework, this study demonstrates how tomboy representation functions not merely as a marker of gender difference, but as a critical site where visibility, discipline, and queer agency are negotiated in contemporary screen culture.