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.

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.