Women in East Asian Cinema brings together new and emerging work to highlight and explore the understudied contributions of women to the films and creative industries of East Asia. It is a book which foregrounds the importance of re-historicising women's creative labour in film, not just as actors on screen, but as voices who have steered the production, circulation and consumption of these films across global contexts.
Over three sections, the book provides perspectives on gender representation in East and South-East Asian cinema; new explorations of women's labour contributions as directors, screenwriters, and editors; and considerations of the contemporary circulation processes through which such work reaches global audiences.
By recentring women's film histories within the broader history of cinema and interrogating the geo-political boundaries of what might constitute 'East Asia' in the process, this volume makes a robust intervention into studies of East Asian cinema and women in film.
Contributors List of Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Women in East Asian Cinema: Gender Representations, Creative Labour and Global Histories - Felicia Chan, Fraser Elliott and Andy Willis Part I: Gender Representation A Cinema of Pleasure: He Xiaopei’s Home Video Aesthetics and Queer Feminist Politics - Hongwei Bao Work Ethic(s) of Being a Woman: Images of Female Labour in Hong Kong Cinema (1950s–1960s) - Fiona Law ‘Functioning on the Fringes’: Interrogating New South Korean Womanhood and Millennial Trauma in Microhabitat (2017) - Dave McCaig The Female Gaze in Xu Jinglei’s Letter From an Unknown Woman (2004) - Bérénice M. Reynaud Ichi (2008): Female Stars and Gender Representations in the Zatoichi Franchise - Jonathan Wroot Agency and Subjectivity of the Female Protagonists in Qiong Yao Films - Xuelin Zhou Part II: Creative Labour Japanese Documentary Filmmaker Haneda Sumiko: Authorship and Gender Perspective - Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández, Marcos Centeno and Irene Gonzalez-López A Challenge on Every Page: Female Screenwriter-directors in the South Korean Film Industry - Monika Kukolova The Film Star and Her Husband: The Collaboration between Takamine Hideko and Matsuyama Zenzō - Till Weingärtner Angie Chen: Hong Kong Film Pioneer - Andy Willis Her Own Feminism: Authorship and Editing in Ning Ying’s Filmmaking Practice - Francesca Young Kaufman Part III: Global Histories Figurations of the Nyonya: The Uses and Abuses of Peranakan Chinese Representation in Film - Felicia Chan Temporally Performing a Region: A Feminist Analysis of Southeast Asian Women’s Filmmaking - MaoHui Deng Celebrating Women in Global Cinema: Disruptive Programming and East Asian Women on International Screens - Fraser Elliott
Felicia Chan is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester where she researches the construction of national, cultural and cosmopolitan imaginaries in film and media. She is author of Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross Cultural Encounters in East Asian Film (2017), co-editor of Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives (2016) and founding member of the Manchester-based Chinese Film Forum UK. Fraser Elliott is Lecturer of Film, Exhibition and Curation at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Chinese Film Forum UK. His research specialises in the circulation of Chinese-language film in the UK and the histories of Hong Kong cinema. He is a member of the Chinese Film Forum UK, Festival Consultant for the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh; collaborator with the Hong Kong Film Festival UK; and co-editor of Full-throttle Franchise: The Culture, Business and Politics of Fast & Furious (2023). Andy Willis is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford, UK and Senior Visiting Curator: Film at HOME, Manchester. Amongst his publications he is the co-editor, with Jonathan Wroot, of Cult Media: Re-packaged, Re-released and Restored and DVD, Blu-ray and Beyond: Navigating Formats and Platforms within Media Consumption (2017), with Felicia Chan, of Chinese Cinemas, International Perspectives (2016) and with Wing Fai Leung, of East Asian Film Stars (2014). In addition he has curated a number of seasons and programmes of East Asian films, including, CRIME: Hong Kong Style (2016) and The Original Ass Kickers: Hong Kong Cinema's Female Action Heroes (2019), and with Sarah Perks, Made in Hong Kong (2007) and Visible Secrets: Hong Kong's women filmmakers (2009).
Reviews for Women in East Asian Cinema: Gender Representations, Creative Labour and Global Histories
This expertly edited volume puts East Asian women’s filmmaking into conversation with world cinema by focusing on feminist-queer aesthetics, female spectatorship and the female gaze. Women too often fail to get credit for the jobs they do as filmmakers, and this anthology helps to redress that disparity by shining a light on the often neglected work by Asian women filmmakers. -- Gina Marchetti, Pratt Institute This volume examines women’s creative labour across the spectrum of writing, acting, directing, and more in Asian film. With the global film environment always in mind, the authors brilliantly challenge Western models and bring out the often unrecognized role of women in developing original cinema traditions for new places and sensibilities. -- Wendy Larson, University of Oregon
