Abstract This dissertation will analyze a set of film texts of the Butterfly Lovers' story in order to identify how masculinity and gender have been represented; and by extension how certain forms of naturalized gender politics and performatives can be both interrupted and sustained. This dissertation will identify, analyze and theorize this dynamic relationship between power and discourses and categories of gender, as they are manifested and represented in a selected group of Chinese films, which focus on the same influential story of the Butterfly Lovers. Issues such as subjectivity, masculinity and femininity, sexuality, and desire are going to be thoroughly discussed within film contexts, some of which both involve homosexual relationships and problematize heterosexuality. Methodologies found in cultural and media studies, such as genealogical studies, discourse analysis, genre analysis and visual analysis will be utilized. This dissertation is going to provide considerable material which will be used to develop the sophisticated arguments about how subjectivity, gender identity and gender politics has been represented, understood, constructed, and deployed within the context of recent and contemporary popular Chinese film. It is argued that different genres have framed, tailored, created and propagated certain versions of the story and culture of the Butterfly Lovers. This motif has been utilized, appropriated and reconstructed by numerous social groups and forces, in order to realize certain aims and meanings. It has been constituted as both feudalist and anti-feudalist, and as a tale of feminine virtue and a tragedy within different discursive regimes. From the modern period onward, the reconstruction and reformulation of the Butterfly Lovers' story has become more complicated. Within this historical, social and cultural process a kind of new Chinese masculinity has been constituted and has developed dynamically. However, it is pointed out that the fundamental distinction between masculinity and femininity is not sexuality and physicality understood as value, but the process/mechanism whereby sexuality as gendered identity decides and normalizes who can and cannot be a subject.