Crossing Time and Space: Female Desire in Yan Yan Mak’s Butterfly

Abstract

The chapter explores Yan Yan Mak's 2004 feature Butterfly as a film that merges different temporalities as it presents sexual relations between women as not only an event of the past but also that which imagined in the future. The chapter suggests that Mak's film employs Thirdspace, in which familiarity and estrangement coalesce, as way of problematising both coming out narratives and the act of looking. Finally, the chapter explores Mak's positioning of postcolonial Hong Kong as a translocal and transnational queer space.