Rural Women and Social Change in New China Cinema: From <i>Li Shuangshuang</i> to <i>Ermo</i>

Tang, Xiaobing

doi:10.1215/10679847-11-3-647

Cited by 27 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…This comedy enjoyed nationwide popularity in 1962, lively depicting a female commune member Li Shuang Shuang who always put collective interests before her individual interests. 69 In a particular scene, Shuangshuang and her friends discussed how to mobilise their peers in their village to join in the construction of a drainage system, which represented a public service in a socialist countryside. The audiences complained that many of the scene's words were incomprehensible, especially when the women spoke so fast that 'it was like shooting a machine gun'.…”

Section: Propagating Socialist Gender Equality: Female Projectionists...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Female projectionists on the move: Exhibiting socialist gender equality in rural China (1949–1966)

Guo

2022

Gender & History

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The gender discourse in Maoist China can be summed up in Mao's famous motto ‘men and women are the same’. Images of women operating various technologies were massively propagated in the 1950s and 1960s, illustrating that men and women were not only equal in political status but also in physical strength with the help of technology. In reality, however, women working in technical jobs were not on the same footing as their male counterparts. Taking female projectionists as the research subject, this article investigates how new professional women, assigned by the state, overcame gender bias in rural areas where a patriarchal culture prevailed. By examining the inconsistency between the Chinese Communist Party's gender policies that encouraged women's public participation and the rural culture that derided women in public space, this article contends that female projectionists’ experiences of performing screening techniques played a significant role in opening up new spaces for women's repositioning in the patriarchal society. While operating technology did not naturally give women the same social status as men, it was through female projectionists’ bodily practices that the socialist ideas of gender equality were disseminated in rural areas.

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Section: Propagating Socialist Gender Equality: Female Projectionists...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Female projectionists on the move: Exhibiting socialist gender equality in rural China (1949–1966)

Guo

2022

Gender & History

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“…The World's antimodern(ization) message of social critique has been similarly conveyed by other recent films from China that feature rural migrant women. 18 These films in turn follow a long-established convention in modern Chinese literature, film, and television of using the figure of the rural woman as a ''barometer of social ills'' (Marchetti 2006:89) and focal point of social change (e.g., Chow 1991;Donald 2000;Rofel 1994;Sun 2002;Tang 2003;Yan 1999). From its opening scene, The World identifies rural women as an embodiment of the nation suffering the deleterious effects of globalization.…”

Section: Rural Woman and Ethical Modernitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An untimely death could turn one into a ghost who could achieve revenge or justice on the living through supernatural means. 18 For example, Ermo (Donald 2000:121-123;Sun 2002:21-42;Tang 2003) and Women from the Lake of Scented Souls (Marchetti 2006;Tang 2003). 19 To a lesser extent, so too does Li Hong's documentary Out of Phoenix Bridge (1997;Marchetti 2006:69-89).…”

Section: Rural Woman and Ethical Modernitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rural Woman and Modernity in Globalizing China: Seeing Jia Zhangke's The World

Gaetano

2009

Visual Anthropology Review

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In this article, I consider Jia Zhangke's 2004 film The World (shijie) as a tool for critical thinking about the challenges of modernity and globalization for internal migrants in contemporary China, especially young rural women working in Beijing, and the gender politics of their representation. A close reading of the film, juxtaposed with ethnographic studies on China's internal migration and rural women, demonstrates that The World's visual and narrative techniques provide valuable insight into the disjuncture between transnational imaginaries and local material conditions, which together contour migrants' experience of globalization. However, to effectively deliver its critique, The World relies upon a chauvinistic convention of using “rural woman” as a sign of social ills, rather than an agent of social change. I suggest that deconstructing the gendering of modernity and national identity by recognizing rural migrant women as agents of globalization can mitigate the dire message of The World that, ultimately, rural woman and modernity are incompatible, as are, allegorically, China and globalization.

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The Cultural Hybridity of Chineseness

Gibbs¹

2021

Prism

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This article looks at three contemporary novels where songs sung by rural women from the border region of northern Shaanxi Province evoke cultural and temporal hybridities, fusing social continuity with the threat and promise of change. The novels alternately portray untamed others—ranging from a Xiongnu soldier to a mountain bride to a country girl—as invasive threats and purveyors of potentially beneficial hybridities, adapting tropes of ethnic alterity to rethink the rural-urban divide and challenge both urban-centered and rural-centered discourses of progress. The wild brings vibrancy to the civilized, the center is drawn to the periphery, and the rural and urban are alternately desired and dismissed. In the end, these rural women's songs erase hierarchical notions of center and periphery and bring together alternative worldviews and visions of progress as only songs of the borderland can.

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Rural Women and Social Change in New China Cinema: From Li Shuangshuang to Ermo

Cited by 27 publications

References 4 publications

Female projectionists on the move: Exhibiting socialist gender equality in rural China (1949–1966)

Female projectionists on the move: Exhibiting socialist gender equality in rural China (1949–1966)

Rural Woman and Modernity in Globalizing China: Seeing Jia Zhangke's The World

The Cultural Hybridity of Chineseness

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