Revisiting Women's Cinema: Feminism, Socialism, and Mainstream Culture in Modern China by Lingzhen Wang (review)

Abstract

Despite the rich scholarship on socialist Chinese cinema, few scholars have examined it through a feminist lens. Through an in-depth study of four female directors and their films, Revisiting Women’s Cinema critically fills this lacuna by examining the shifting Chinese feminist and mainstream cultural practices during two periods: the Mao era (1949–1976) and the post-Mao era. The broader political and intellectual contexts that Revisiting Women’s Cinema engages with are China’s rapid integration into the world economy since the late 1970s, the dismissal of socialist feminism, and the global ascendence of Western liberal feminism. Influenced by liberal feminism’s emphasis on individualism and essential sexual difference, post-Mao Chinese feminism has long dismissed socialist women’s liberation as “imposed or bestowed from above by the party-state and men” (126) and works by female directors in Maoist China as mere propaganda. Arguing against the “global repudiation of socialist practice” (3), Revisiting Women’s Cinema reveals “the critical relevance of socialist institutionalized feminism and mainstream women’s cinema to contemporary feminist media practice” (4). Two concepts central to Lingzhen Wang’s analysis are “socialist feminism” (社会主义女性主义 shehuizhuyi nüxingzhuyi) and “mainstream culture” (主流文化 zhuliu wenhua). According to Wang, women’s liberation can only be achieved when other political-economic and sociocultural issues are taken seriously—an argument at the core of socialist feminism. Moreover, refuting post-Mao feminists’ dismissal of mainstream culture as “intrinsically conservative and patriarchal” (10), Wang holds that mainstream culture in Maoist China “played the most critical role in combatting traditional conservative ideas and bourgeois ideology and promoting socialist visions and ethics” (14). Together, these two terms constitute the main theoretical framework through which Wang examines Chinese women’s cinema. Organized chronologically, Revisiting Women’s Cinema consists of seven chapters. The first three chapters focus on the period of the 1950s and the 1960s, while the last four chapters examine the period from 1978 through the 1980s. Beyond its chronological ordering, Revisiting Women’s Cinema can be divided into two thematic sections: whereas chapters 1, 4, and 5 explain the changes in Chinese socialist mainstream culture in response to China’s political and economic transformations, chapters 2, 3, 6, and 7 each provide a detailed analysis of one Chinese female director and her films, revealing Chinese women’s crucial role in producing and diversifying mainstream culture. Chapter 1 provides a “revisionist history of Chinese socialist feminism” (17). Wang traces the widespread negative attitude toward Chinese socialist feminism to scholarship published in the United States in the 1980s. Using Judith Stacey’s Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China1 as an example, Wang offers a thorough critique of Stacey’s interpretation of feminism as primarily individualistic and the Chinese socialist revolution as