Revisiting Women's Cinema: Feminism, Socialism, and Mainstream Culture in Modern China

by Lingzhen Wang

Overview

In Revisiting Women’s Cinema, Lingzhen Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. She foregrounds their sociopolitical engagements, critical interventions, and popular artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist and postsocialist feminisms, mainstream culture, and women’s cinema. Wang highlights the films of Wang Ping and Dong Kena in the 1950s and 1960s and Zhang Nuanxin and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s and 1990s to unveil how they have been profoundly misread through extant research paradigms entrenched in Western Cold War ideology, post-second-wave cultural feminism, and post-Mao intellectual discourses. Challenging received interpretations, she elucidates how socialist feminism and culture were conceptualized and practiced in relation to China’s search not only for national independence and economic development but also for social emancipation, proletarian culture, and socialist internationalism. Wang calls for a critical reevaluation of historical materialism, socialist feminism, and popular culture to forge an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478009757
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/22/2021
Series:	Camera Obscura Book
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Lingzhen Wang is Professor of East Asian Studies at Brown University, author of Personal Matters: Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China, and editor of Chinese Women's Cinema: Transnational Contexts.

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Socialist Feminism and Socialist Culture Reconsidered: Institutionalized Practice, Proletarian Public Space, and Experimental Mainstream Cinema 23

2 Articulating Embedded Feminist Agency in Socialist Mainstream Cinema: Wang Ping and The Story of Liubao Village (1957) 56

3 Socialist Experimentalism, Critical Revision, and Gender Difference: Dong Kena's Small Grass Grows on the Kunlun Mountains (1962) 83

4 Feminist Practice after Mao: Independence, Sexual Difference, and, the Universal Model 107

5 Film Theory, Avant-Gardism, and the Rise of Masculine Aesthetics: Chinese Mainstream Cinema in the 1980s 132

6 Alternative Experimental Cinema: Zhang Nuanxin's Socially Committed Mainstream Film Practice of the 1980s 149

7 The Black Velvet Aesthetic: Universal Cultural Feminism and Chinese Neotraditionalism in Huang Shuqin's Woman Demon Human (1987) 195

Notes 235

Bibliography 257

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

Lingzhen Wang is the first Chinese scholar writing in English to point out the eerie parallels between post-Mao feminism and post-second-wave Anglo-European feminism as she negotiates the political legacies of two cultures, illuminating the traditions of the one for the other. Revisiting Women's Cinema is likely to rock the history of world cinema and inspire a resurgence of interest in the project of globalizing feminist film and media theory. I can think of no other book on feminism and motion picture film history that is more important to the field than this one.

Jane Gaines

"Revisiting Women’s Cinema is of particular interest and value to scholars and students in film studies and gender studies. Wang’s extensive research and insightful analysis provide a compelling exploration of the representation and contributions of women in Chinese cinema."

International Feminist Journal of Politics - Hasan Gürkan

"Revisiting Women’s Cinema proposes an approach that juxtaposes the classic theoretical tools such as film criticism, and feminist methodology with sociological research methods covering interviews, and fieldwork materials. It concludes that culture, socioeconomic factors, auteurs’ careers, and geopolitical forces jointly constitute female directors’ film aesthetics and their historical significance. Thus, this book should be of relevance to many different fields of social science."

Gender, Place & Culture - Qin Qin

Insisting we hear, listen, and see the voices and actions of women filmmakers in China, Lingzhen Wang provides a nuanced examination of women's cinema and feminism that attends to national and transnational trajectories. She develops theoretically sophisticated and politically incisive critiques of how dominant frameworks in socialist China and throughout the world configured the realms of possibility for making, seeing, and recognizing socialist and Chinese women's mainstream film. An exciting, innovative, and theoretically rich project.

Film, History, and Cultural Citizenship: Sites of Production - Tina Mai Chen

"Revisiting Women’s Cinema is a rich and thought-provoking revisionist account of Chinese women’s cinema. . . . In addition to reinvigorating feminist theory, the book opens up new avenues for exploring the interaction of the political and the aesthetic, the mainstream and the experimental in Chinese cinema."

The China Quarterly - Xiaoning Lu

"Revisiting Women's Cinema is a rich and thought-provoking revisionist account of Chinese women's cinema. . . . In addition to reinvigorating feminist theory, the book opens up new avenues for exploring the interaction of the political and the aesthetic, the mainstream and the experimental in Chinese cinema."--Xiaoning Lu "The China Quarterly" (9/17/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"Lingzhen Wang is the first Chinese scholar writing in English to point out the eerie parallels between post-Mao feminism and post-second-wave Anglo-European feminism as she negotiates the political legacies of two cultures, illuminating the traditions of the one for the other. Revisiting Women's Cinema is likely to rock the history of world cinema and inspire a resurgence of interest in the project of globalizing feminist film and media theory. I can think of no other book on feminism and motion picture film history that is more important to the field than this one."--Jane Gaines, Professor of Film, Columbia University

"Insisting we hear, listen, and see the voices and actions of women filmmakers in China, Lingzhen Wang provides a nuanced examination of women's cinema and feminism that attends to national and transnational trajectories. She develops theoretically sophisticated and politically incisive critiques of how dominant frameworks in socialist China and throughout the world configured the realms of possibility for making, seeing, and recognizing socialist and Chinese women's mainstream film. An exciting, innovative, and theoretically rich project."--Tina Mai Chen, coeditor of "Film, History, and Cultural Citizenship: Sites of Production"

From the Publisher