‘Why am I still imprisoned in your eyes?’: Re-visioning ‘leftover women’ and the female gaze in Send Me to the Clouds

Abstract

This article studies how a recent Chinese women’s film Send Me to the Clouds (2019) explores different ways of looking as innovative cinematic strategies of constructing and empowering the precarious female subject against a postsocialist patriarchal ideology that dominates gendered narratives and audio-visual codes of the mainstream Chinese cinema. The film is centred upon a 30-year-old ‘leftover woman’ Sheng Nan’s distressful life experiences and her anger at the prevailing sexism and ageism. Rather than being tamed or domesticated, throughout the film the angry and restless woman is shown to be constantly on the motion, making every effort to experiment with alternative looking relations that seek to destroy the voyeuristic pleasure and disciplinary power of the privileged male gaze, as well as to explore possibilities of creating a self-reflective and critical female gaze. A contextualized critical study of the female authorship and agency on and behind the screen will shed new light on how contemporary Chinese women filmmakers take on ‘concrete and various negotiations’ with the structure of domination and its representational system via ‘their socially and politically conditioned cinematic practice or performance’.