Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts ed. by Lingzhen Wang (review)

Chinese Women’s Cinema will find a welcome place on the bookshelves of many scholars, including those interested in film studies, feminist film criticism, and Chinese history and culture, in addition to gender studies and transnational culture and media studies. For many, the initial appeal of the volume will be that it is the first English-language volume entirely focused on Chinese female filmmakers. Following recent scholarly work that understands “Chinese” simultaneously as both a multiply located geopolitical category and a racial-ethnic category, the volume includes female filmmakers from the 1920s to 2007 who make their homes in the People’s Republic of China; Hong Kong; Taiwan, Republic of China; and the diaspora. This diversity provides rich comparative case studies through which to understand how Chinese female filmmakers negotiate the intertwined sociopolitical dynamics that arise out of local and global contexts.

This volume, however, is not content with locating its value in an inclusionary framework that simply increases knowledge of Chinese films and filmmaking by ensuring that women filmmakers are recognized. Rather, the book compellingly argues for transnational feminist theoretical approaches to the study of women and cinema. In the introduction, Lingzhen Wang beautifully details what is at stake for the fields of film studies, feminism, and Chinese film when they attend to transnational feminist theory. Wang distinguishes transnational feminist theory as a mode of inquiry and theoretical approach from the transnational dimensions of filmmaking (e.g., education, training, funding, production) as an object of study. Transnational feminist theory, she reminds us, developed out of “a confluence of critical discourses and activities like intersectionality theory, third-world feminism, postmodernist discourse, and postcolonial studies in the early 1990s, but at the same time it critically revised these positions, committing itself to the critique of modernity, capitalism, and different forms of patriarchy, and Western imperialism.”¹

The introduction moves from the development of feminist film theory through transnational feminism and feminist film discourse to women’s cinema and the history of Chinese women’s filmmaking. The simply stated but wonderfully nuanced review of each of these fields weaves through formative debates and critiques to move us from critiques of female cinematic authorship to “women’s cinema” as a productive category of analysis. Never losing sight of the feminist politics that motivate feminist scholarship, or discounting the insights of scholars with whom she eventually disagrees, Wang builds a case for deeply contextualized studies of Chinese female filmmakers as women working within specific historical and discursive conditions. This is an introduction that will surely appear in many course syllabi and be considered essential reading for students of film and feminist theory. One of the strengths of this volume is that the theoretical and political interventions superbly articulated in the introduction are explicitly taken up by each of the contributors. By approaching Chinese women’s cinema as historically constituted, the contributors to the volume examine twenty-five Chinese women filmmakers to “assess women filmmakers’ lives and experiences in relation to their cinematic practices and conduct analyses of women filmmakers’ cinematic texts and language.”²

Each chapter addresses the ways in which women directors participated in the aesthetic, political, and filmic production of female subjectivity. The chapters all engage in close textual readings of specific films while simultaneously locating female directors and their authorial choices within the relevant discursive structures. As a result, the volume provides important insights into the gendered representations at work in particular films, as well as into the relationship between these film texts and broader gender politics, heteronormative practices, and patriarchal formations. The contributors share a commitment to feminist critique, and they do not shy away from examining both resistant and nonfeminist elements in the films. With great empathy (but never apology), the contributors explain why, in certain instances, the cinematic texts and languages of some female filmmakers appear less radical than the viewer or critic may desire. The commitment throughout the volume to deep historicization of the...