Chinese Women's Cinema Through a Feminist Lens

Drawing on extensive research of 153 feature films by 65 female directors, this book examines the dislocation between Chinese women's cinema and Western feminist theories. The author explores how local feminist discourses in China shape major feminist narratives in contemporary Chinese women's cinema and establishes "China as methodology" in Chinese cinema studies, offering interpretive paradigms rooted in China's history, culture and politics. The author introduces frameworks to decode Chinese women's cinema, including a model of socialist feminist legacies, a liberal feminism that critiques abstract female subjectivity, a consumerist pseudo-feminism characterized by double-distancing, a female homoeroticism that (dis)entangles an indigenous matrix of female bonding and a Western matrix of lesbian sexuality as well as the East Asian mother-daughter relationship underpinned by imperial power dynamics. Chinese Women's Cinema Through a Feminist Lens is essential reading for scholars and students in gender studies, Chinese cinema and cultural studies.

Yang Fan is lecturer of Cultural Creativity and Meida at Hangzhou Normal University. Her research interests are women's cinema, feminism and sexuality on Chinese social media. Her recent publications are "Podcasting women's pleasure: Feminism and sexuality in the sonic space of China" and "Feminist podcasting: A new discursive intervention on gender in Mainland China."

Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Socialist Feminism Revisited: Socialist Feminist Cinema in Post-Socialist China 25 2 Liberal Feminism and Films about Female Subjectivity 46 3 Post-Feminism and Chick Flicks in China: Subjects, Discursive Origin and New Gender Norms 70 4 The Matrices of Female Bonding and Lesbian Sexuality: Female Homoerotic Cinema in Mainland China 92 5 "East Asian" Mother-Daughter Intimacy in Maternal Melodramas 110 Conclusion 129 Appendix 135 Index 141