Chinese women's cinema through a feminist lens 2000-2020

There are 62 female directors in mainland China who have been producing at least 146 feature films since 2000, an unprecedented scope in the history of Chinese women’s cinema. Post-2000 women’s cinema has not been studied as an organic whole, but rather in scattered case studies on a couple of prominent female authors. Moreover, the established scholarship of Chinese women’s cinema is rather Western-centric, which is dominated by liberal feminism. If we replace the liberal-humanist parameters with local discursive trajectories when studying films directed by women after 2000, what complexities of gender narratives, previously concealed, can be restored and how can they be revalorized? This thesis aims to reveal comprehensive landscape of feminist narratives in Chinese women’s cinema in the 21^st century through the lens of local feminist discourses. I will argue that feminist narratives in Chinese women’s cinema are constructed by local feminist discourses, which are shaped by the social-political condition in mainland China.
The corpus of Chinese women’s cinema is divided into five sub-genres for in-depth analysis: socialist feminist cinema, liberal feminist cinema, chick flicks, female homoerotic cinema and maternal melodramas. Socialist feminist cinema inherits the narrative of anti-capitalism and anti-patriarchy in the socialist cinema, and reconnects with the socialist icon and institution, while distinguishing from the socialist cinema in terms of spectatorship and vision. Liberal feminist cinema foregrounds female autonomy of sexuality, marriage and reproduction, while, to certain extent, distancing from local political-economy and historical reality. Female homoerotic cinema narrates homosexual-maternal transferability, homosexual normality and coming-home strategy.