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

Revisiting Women’s Cinema explores 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. It highlights the Chinese socialist institutionalization of class and gender equality and socialist women’s sociopolitical engagements and mass-oriented artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist feminism and mainstream women’s culture.

The study of socialist feminism and women’s cinema in today’s academy, however, requires confronting three deeply entrenched research paradigms that posit, 1) the political and propagandistic nature of socialist cultural practice; 2) the patriarchal character of socialist revolution; and 3) women’s cinema as a marginalized practice, subversive of mainstream patriarchal culture.

This talk focusses on tracing and analysing the historical, geopolitical, and theoretical underpinnings of these rooted paradigms, discussing their continued global influences, and reevaluating the significance of socialist feminism and popular culture in forging an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.

About the speaker

Lingzhen Wang is Professor at Brown University, specializing in modern Chinese literature and film, comparative cultural studies, and transnational feminist theory. In addition to Chinese publications, she has authored and edited the following English books: Revisiting Women’s Cinema: Feminism, Socialism, and Mainstream Culture in Modern China (Duke UP, 2021), Other Genders, Other Sexualities: Chinese Differences (Duke UP, 2013), Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts (Columbia UP, 2011), Years of Sadness (Cornell East Asian Press, 2009), and Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China (Stanford UP, 2004).

Registration

This online seminar will take place online via Zoom. Complete this form to register.

Chair: Dr Xiaoning Lu, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, SOAS University of London.

Organiser: SOAS China Institute

Contact email: sci@soas.ac.uk