Silence Across Screens: A Dual-Method Analysis of Gendered Emotional Labor in The Farewell

Abstract

This article examines how The Farewell (2019), directed by Lulu Wang, constructs and circulates gendered emotional labor within a transnational Chinese family. While the film is frequently discussed through binaries such as collectivism versus individualism or truth versus filial piety, this study shifts the focus to a less examined question: who performs the emotional labor required to sustain the family’s decision to conceal a terminal diagnosis, and how is that labor culturally interpreted? I argue that the film frames emotional labor as feminized, unpaid, and structurally necessary work that sustains intergenerational and transnational cohesion. Through silence, restrained gesture, mise-en-scène, and narrative concealment, women—daughter, mother, aunts, and grandmother—are positioned as emotional regulators who absorb and redistribute affective labor across cultural and generational divides.

To explore both representation and interpretation, this study adopts a dual-method approach. First, drawing on feminist film theory and the work of Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, Arlie Hochschild, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, it conducts a close textual analysis of the film’s cinematic strategies. Second, it employs grounded theory coding to compare audience reception on Douban (China) and Metacritic (United States), examining how viewers interpret the film’s central “deception” through distinct moral frameworks. The findings reveal that emotional labor functions as a culturally mediated “currency” of belonging: Chinese audiences tend to frame concealment as relational care, while many American reviewers interpret it through lenses of individual autonomy and psychological transparency. By integrating film analysis with reception study, this article demonstrates that gendered emotional labor is not only cinematically encoded but also differently valued. across cultural contexts.

Keywords: East Asian cinema, gendered emotional labor, transnational identity, audience reception

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