Date: October 28, 2019
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Location: CCIS 1-14
All are welcome to attend!
Lingzhen Wang is a Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown University, specializing in modern Chinese literature and film, critical theory, and transnational feminist and media studies. She is the author of Personal Matters: Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China (Stanford UP, 2004) and Revisiting Integrated Socialist Feminist Practice: History, Geopolitics, and Mainstream Women's Cinema in Modern China 1949-1987 (forthcoming from Duke UP).
Post-Mao Chinese feminist film scholars had bemoaned the lack of feminist or female films in the history of Chinese cinema until 1987, when Huang Shuqin's Woman Demon Human was released. The film has since received critical acclaim, considered by many as "the highest achievement of Chinese women's cinema," "full of female consciousness," and "the only feminist/female film in Chinese film history." What does it mean to designate Woman Demon Human as the first or only feminist/female film in Chinese history? What kind of female consciousness does the film articulate? And what is the film's relationship to the influence of Western post-Second Wave feminism, the rise of a masculine mode of cultural reflection, and the return of traditional values in the late 1980s when China moved steadily to a market economy? This talk explores these questions and offers a revisionist analysis of the film by particularly examining, among other things, the film's essentialist (xieyi) aesthetic.