The movie Mulan was released in 1998, where the story opens on the Great Wall of China, where ShanYu (leader of the Huns) invades China for control reasons. and conquest. Mulan, the daughter of a famous but disabled veteran, sets off to meet the matchmaker, where things go horribly wrong. She simply isn't able to maneuver properly and fails the test of what is expected of women. There is a plan for men, and she ultimately decides to take her father's place by cutting her hair and pretending to be a man to do so. Meanwhile, the ghost of her family's ancestors sends help to Mulan who ends up being Mushu, a small dragon with a spotty background. After joining the ranks and a few battles later, she ends up saving the Emperor from Shan Yu and making her father proud. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay To set the stage a bit, Mulan brilliantly depicts the connections between sex, gender, and the state. The opening song "Honor To Us All" is sung by all the characters as Mulan prepares for her doom regarding the matchmaker's visit. The song introduces the gender politics of the story world where they sing "A man bearing arms, a girl bearing sons", in relation to the service of the emperor. Gender norms operating within a culture that relies on militarism distort what it means to be a human being in relation to other human beings. This plays out in Mulan in two ways, linking the symbols of gender and the state to the symbol of family. So you have the emperor as a sort of patriarchal father figure of the nation. He is like a grandfather and has a sort of analog relationship with Grandma Fa. Their analogs, for example, are that they use their knowledge of family power to provide sexual advice to the couple at the end of the film. The emperor said, “You don’t meet a girl like that in every dynasty,” and Grandma Fa said, “Would you like to stay forever?” after Mulan suggests dinner. Gender roles have a family dimension, for example having sons, as well as a political dimension, for example sons having to bear arms. The Fa family is a kind of miniature state of the whole, in which gender plays an important role on each side. Militarism, with its codes of honor and shame, binds all parties together. Shakespeare and his friends knew during the Renaissance that gender is a performance. Mulan as a film is a sort of Shakespearean comedy. Mulan, as a Disney film, surprisingly doesn't place as much emphasis on a romantic plot unlike others. The story revolves around a series of gender performances on the part of Mulan, whose persuasion and lack of persuasion poke holes in the performances of those around her. The story begins with Mulan's unconvincing performance of extreme femininity with the matchmaker. It’s a dramaturgical struggle, right down to the makeup, the costume, the choreography. Even if she's not convincing, she's still a woman. Her dramaturgical failure comes not from being biologically female, but from being marriageable. The fact is that being a woman and being able to marry are in this context considered the same, but Mulan's failure implicitly proves this to be false. There is nothing natural about anything he is asked to do. As previously mentioned, she failed in a performance of extreme femininity. Maybe it's not about romance, but about power and hierarchy. The stakes of everything are based on honor, which in the movie is what you have afterhave played your role according to all political, cultural and moral standards. The opposite is shame, which is at play throughout the film. The majority of the film follows Mulan's second depiction of gender, this time with masculinity in its extreme form. Musho of course tries to give Mulan instructions on how to act around men, and what's great about the movie is that it sets up the matchmaker scene and the boot camp scenes analogous to each other. Men and women are asked to perform something abnormal or toxic, a set of norms that alienate people from their own and others' desires. The problem with activist masculinity is that it maintains itself with a lot of misogyny. So, ultimately, Mulan's performance becomes unconvincing, as Chi Fu makes clear, which brings us to the male performances of masculinity. Chi Fu is definitely a misogynist, but is definitely in between in terms of how he enforces gender codes. This is illustrated during the swimming scene when he comes out, and squeals... he says right before "I don't squeal like a girl". The three friends Ling, Yao and Jin Po, who are insecure about their different masculinities, have no problem at the end of the film when they change their gender performance to dress in drag to help Mulan save the 'emperor. On the other hand, Shang is consistent and resistant to change even if others accept his gender slippage. What this film identifies and describes is the growth of personal identity. Mulan wants to look in the mirror one day and recognize the face she sees. It turns out she's really smart, someone who can defy classic tropes of manhood, in exchange for ingenuity, and accomplish tasks that other physically stronger men couldn't. Mulan as a film and as a character shows how powerful personal identity is, even if you have to cross-dress to achieve it. She uses the army as a platform, not because she wants to fight, but because she sees it as a way to risk her own life, rather than that of her ailing father. The irony of it all lies in a film that puts so much emphasis and song on fighting, war, and all the different traits you need to succeed in both. Having a female lead in the process is what creates this resonant story of self-discovery and self-acceptance. I think this is where feminism comes in more than anywhere else. Too many people (men) accuse feminism of being this hateful, oppressive group when feminists are a minority. In reality, it would be about treating both sexes equally, meaning that the unique and invaluable ways each can contribute to society should be treated equally. In Mulan, it’s the representation of that. Not only because she is welcomed into a male-dominated society, but also because she never feels the need to see herself as more important than others. This is gender equality at its finest, because she and her comrades know it took both to win. Thus, ontology and ethics, being and action, are related to ideas about sex and gender, but differently. Throughout the film, they are in tension with each other. As a woman, Mulan is both subject to a certain way (ontology) and expected to behave accordingly (ethics). The film's job is to deconstruct how duty in the world of cinema and real life is understood as the product of ontology and ethics, when in reality it is something we use to justify way things are.