Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on Romanization
- 1 Introduction: #MeToo and the Visual Politics of Transnational Chinese Cinema
- 2 The Look and the Stare: Looked Over and Overlooked in The Truth About Beauty (2014), My Way (2012), and Unfinished (2013)
- 3 The Leer and the Glare: Voyeurism and State Surveillance in Hooligan Sparrow (2016) and Angels Wear White (2017)
- 4 A Glimpse of the Glance: Women Scrutinize Men in Female Directors (2012) and Girls Always Happy (2018)
- 5 The Queer Gaze across the Gay-Straight Generational Divide: Small Talk (2016) and A Dog Barking at the Moon (2019)
- 6 The Alienated Gaze and the Activist Eye: Gender, Class, and Politics in Lotus (2012) and Outcry and Whisper (2020)
- 7 Oppositional Optics: The View from Hong Kong
- 8 From Activism to Exile: Our Youth in Taiwan (2018) and To Singapore, with Love (2013)
- 9 Viral Visions: The Pandemic Archive in Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017) and Many Undulating Things (2019)
- 10 Conclusion: The View from the Chinese Diaspora in The Farewell (2019)
- Bilingual Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The Alienated Gaze and the Activist Eye: Gender, Class, and Politics in Lotus (2012) and Outcry and Whisper (2020)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 February 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on Romanization
- 1 Introduction: #MeToo and the Visual Politics of Transnational Chinese Cinema
- 2 The Look and the Stare: Looked Over and Overlooked in The Truth About Beauty (2014), My Way (2012), and Unfinished (2013)
- 3 The Leer and the Glare: Voyeurism and State Surveillance in Hooligan Sparrow (2016) and Angels Wear White (2017)
- 4 A Glimpse of the Glance: Women Scrutinize Men in Female Directors (2012) and Girls Always Happy (2018)
- 5 The Queer Gaze across the Gay-Straight Generational Divide: Small Talk (2016) and A Dog Barking at the Moon (2019)
- 6 The Alienated Gaze and the Activist Eye: Gender, Class, and Politics in Lotus (2012) and Outcry and Whisper (2020)
- 7 Oppositional Optics: The View from Hong Kong
- 8 From Activism to Exile: Our Youth in Taiwan (2018) and To Singapore, with Love (2013)
- 9 Viral Visions: The Pandemic Archive in Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017) and Many Undulating Things (2019)
- 10 Conclusion: The View from the Chinese Diaspora in The Farewell (2019)
- Bilingual Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract: Filmmakers depict women in the post-socialist neoliberal Chinese economy using practices associated with the Cinema of Precarity as well as activist film techniques. Liu Shu’s drama Lotus (2012) features a divided heroine who holds a number of professional and pink-collar service jobs as she moves from a small town to the capital city of Beijing. In Outcry and Whisper (co-directed by Zeng Jinyan, Huang Wenhai, and Trish McAdam, 2020), the lives of female migrant workers run parallel to an autobiographical reflection by director Zeng, who navigates moving from mainland China to Hong Kong. Both films spotlight issues of precarity, alienation, and class stratification at the intersection of gender expectations and sexual exploitation.
Keywords: Migrant labor; doppelganger; Brechtian distanciation/A-effect; cyborg; Kino-Eye; minjian
Economic precarity serves as a central theme in many films made by women in the second decade of the twenty-first century. As noted in chapter 4, films such as Yang Mingming’s Female Directors and Girls Always Happy fall within the orbit of what Lauren Berlant (2011) termed the Cinema of Precarity that takes up stories about characters navigating the treacherous waters of global neoliberalism. Even with the growth of the mainland Chinese economy, a series of regional and global financial crises, from the 1997 Asian currency crisis through the 2008 Global Recession to the post-2020 COVID-19 downturn, place women, often financially marginalized by systems rigged against them because of their gender, at a particular disadvantage. Rebecca Karl eloquently summarizes the twenty-first-century economic picture in the PRC as follows:
Huge overall economic growth and new global sway has led to vast environmental degradation, resource extraction and exploitative relations of production that mimic, if not yet in scope then in essence, Euro-American imperialism at its height. Also left out of this story are the consequences of labour commodification; the re-subordination of the rural population to non-agricultural concerns; the relegation of women within society, particularly rural women; and the control of populations in peripheral regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet (2021).
The entry of Chinese workers into the global labor market, in fact, provides Guy Standing’s very first example in The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011). In The Cinema of the Precariat: The Exploited, Underemployed, and Temp Workers of the World, Tom Zaniello (2020) devotes a chapter to Chinese migrant workers and another to female members of the global precariat.
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- Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2023