The female protagonist and tobacco imagery in Spinning Gasing: a new aesthetic in Asian cinema

Abstract

This article examines images of smoking by female stars in Teck Tan’s film, Spinning Gasing. It contends that the on-screen actions of female screen idols creates an aesthetic that reflects broader social, cultural and economic changes in Asia. In the light of a series of studies that indicate an alarming rise in the number of young Asian women becoming smokers, this article therefore draws attention to an area underexplored in media and film studies. While much has been written on the glamorization of smoking in Hollywood films and its use as a visual and narrative device, surprisingly little research exists on the portrayal of smoking in Asian cinema. This chosen text shows that a gendered aesthetic is constructed in contemporary Asian films around the ‘stylized repetition’ (Butler [c.1988] 2003) of smoking as an important factor in issues of body image and cultural identity. With reference to Jean Mitry’s reasoning that any screen image is a ‘materialized invocation’, this article reveals how films from Asia construct glamorized tobacco imagery of empowered female protagonists.