ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the question of woman in Chinese cinema partakes of larger modern theoretical discourse about femininity and mediatized visuality. In his famous analysis of commodity fetishism at the beginning of Capital, Karl Marx provides the influential conceptual framework for thinking about capital's inhumane appropriation of human labour. Although their contribution is essential to the production of commodities, Marx writes, workers are typically alienated from their own labour by being denied the profits derived from the sales of such commodities, which go instead to enrich capitalists. The figure of the prostitute complicates Marx's analysis by foregrounding the dimension of sexuality. Outside mainland China the highly visible sign of woman in the Chinese film industry was part and parcel of the processes of modernization and urbanization. In film theory, one of the ground-breaking events is the critique, made collectively in the 1970s and 1980s by feminists of the Anglo-American world, of the conventional modes of objectifying woman in cinema.
