ABSTRACT
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, women’s cinema emerged as a new concept in Anglophone feminist film theory (cine-feminism), and soon developed into a political counter-cinema challenging mainstream commercialism and patriarchal language. By that historical moment, Chinese women directors had already been practicing institutionalized, socialist cinema for nearly two decades, endorsing the mainstream promotion of gender equality, socialist production, and revolutionary ethics. In the 1980s, however, when China underwent economic reform and its “open-door policy,” after a decade of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the Chinese government and intellectuals turned to the West for a universal model of modernization and cultural discourses. Consequently, the study of Chinese women’s cinema, especially from the socialist period (1949-76), has situated its subject within the terms of debate set by Western feminist critics, centering its criticism on Chinese women directors’ failure to produce counter, minor, or marginalized cinema. The problematic conclusion-that no feminist films were produced during the socialist period-requires a critical re-examination of the relationship between feminism and its specific political and economic contexts. This essay reveals the lasting effects of Western cultural hegemony in the contemporary
world; it also questions the discursive turn in the poststructuralist intervention that reconfigured feminism as a primarily cultural subversion, contributing to cine-feminist dismissals of the social, economic, and political dimensions of capitalism. Finally, and more importantly, this essay emphasizes Chinese socialist feminism as practiced in modern China, highlighting its alternative visions and conceptualizations of gender and cinema during the first seventeen years of the socialist period (1949-76).
