Through Chinese Women's Eyes

A film by Mayfair Yang

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SYNOPSIS

"THROUGH CHINESE WOMEN'S EYES offers an insightful journey into the transformations in the lives of Chinese women over the 20th century. In a fascinating overview, anthropologist/director Mayfair Yang documents the attempts to erase gender differences under Mao, today's changing ideas of femininity, and the crystallization of Chinese feminism at the UN Women's conference in Beijing. As propaganda films and news footage of the 1960's, present day television images, and interview footage from the 1990's mingle in a rich visual history, teachers, karaoke singers, organizers, and others share their lives. This sensitive portrayal of the daily experiences and historical memories of Chinese is essential to an understanding of contemporary feminisms." - Faye Ginsburg, New York University

PRESS

"A visual and conceptual compilation of incredible interest and a fascinating exploration of the contradictions and satisfactions of Chinese feminism."

Janet Walker UC Santa Barbara

"A remarkable and complex visualization... compelling both as image and scholarship."

Shirley Lim UC Santa Barbara

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Mayfair Yang

Prof. Yang received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley and has taught at and assumed research fellowships at University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Beijing University.
Yang is interested in issues of modernity, such as the break with traditional orders and the collective anxieties, ordeals, and insanities of modernity. She also works on the Anthropology of the State: the proliferation of the cultural logic of the state in modernity, state forms of organization, ancient state forms, and everyday forms of civil society and counter-state movements. With a five-year National Science Foundation research grant, she conducted fieldwork in rural southeast China on the revival of popular religion and non-state organizations.

Another research interest is the development of mass media and popular culture (print, film, television, videotape, telephone, Internet, etc.), their social impact especially in non-Western contexts, and the construction of new transnational forms of subjectivity through transnational movements of media. Yang's interest in media is not merely from the point of view of textual analyses of media, but also in the production end of media. She has made two ethnographic/documentary videos, one on the revival of popular religion in rural China, the other on urban women in China which was presented at the Creteil Women's International Film Festival in Paris, France.

She has also published and taught on issues of gender and feminism, such as the gendered domestic and public spheres, consumer sexuality, and the question of transnational feminist movements. Finally, Yang's cultural and geographical region of specialization is China and it's offshoot cultures and diaspora in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the West.

She teaches the core graduate seminar (Anthro 229C) "Contemporary Issues in Cultural Anthropology," and other courses such as "Anthropology of Gender," "Mass media, Gender and Transnationalism," "Modernity and East Asia," "Anthropology of the State," "Elements of Traditional Chinese Culture," and "Contemporary Chinese Society." Her book on gift and state economies in China won the American Ethnological Society First Book Prize in 1997. (09/09)

Subject Areas

Woman Being

In a critical examination of changing concepts of beauty and sexuality in modern China, WOMAN BEING illustrates how a flood of Western pop culture is adversely affecting women's expectations and self-worth. Revisiting her hometown Chengdu after a long absence,filmmaker Wen-Jie Qin traces the impact of a newly booming beauty industry in a country where thirty years ago women were beat up for wearing makeup. Combining interviews and footage from glamour photo studios and television, WOMAN BEING explores the rise of a new super-feminine, highly sexualized ideal. "This hard-nosed look at women in contemporary China makes a persuasive case for how the economies of pleasure, beauty, and consumption are transacted through exploiting women's bodies and images. It provides a sobering prognosis of what 'freedom' might mean for women in China today." - Marina Heung, Baruch College, CUNY

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Out of Phoenix Bridge

This groundbreaking work from Li Hong, China’s first independent female documentarian, follows two years in the lives of four young women from the countryside who have come to Beijing for jobs. Although they work long hours as maids or street vendors and share a tiny room no bigger than a closet, they savor these years— between living as a daughter at home and returning to the village to marry —as probably the freest time of their lives. Documenting both her deepening relationship with these women and the gulf of experiences and opportunity that separate them, Hong carefully charts their hopes for a better future and dreams of self-determination. In interviews and intimate footage, Hong elicits remarkably candid and complex testimony from her subjects as they frankly discuss their work, pressures from home, and experiences with men. A remarkable achievement, this touching film is a fascinating look at the lives of women whose experiences are rarely explored. As they straddle traditional and modern roles, their stories uniquely exemplify the conflicts between the swift changes in women’s roles occurring in China and around the developing world.

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Nu Shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China

In feudal China, women, usually with bound feet, were denied educational opportunities and condemned to social isolation. But in Jian-yong county in Hunan province, peasant women miraculously developed a separate written language, called Nu Shu, meaning "female writing." Believing women to be inferior, men disregarded this new script, and it remained unknown for centuries. It wasn't until the 1960s that Nu Shu caught the attention of Chinese authorities, who suspected that this peculiar writing was a secret code for international espionage. Today, interest in this secret script continues to grow, as evidenced by the wide critical acclaim of Lisa See's novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, about Nu Shu. NU SHU: A HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF WOMEN IN CHINA is a thoroughly engrossing documentary that revolves around the filmmaker's discovery of eighty-six-year-old Huan-yi Yang, the only living resident of the Nu Shu area still able to read and write Nu Shu. Exploring Nu Shu customs and their role in women's lives, the film uncovers a women's subculture born of resistance to male dominance, finds a parallel struggle in the resistance of Yao minorities to Confucian Han Chinese culture, and traces Nu Shu's origins to some distinctly Yao customs that fostered women's creativity.

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The Women's Kingdom

Keepers of one of the last matriarchal societies in the world, Mosuo women in a remote area of southwest China live beyond the strictures of mainstream Chinese culture – enjoying great freedoms and carrying heavy responsibilities. Beautifully shot and featuring intimate interviews, this short documentary offers a rare glimpse into a society virtually unheard of 10 years ago and now often misrepresented in the media. Mosuo women control their own finances and do not marry or live with partners; they practice what they call "walking marriage." A man may be invited into a woman’s hut to spend a "sweet night," but must leave by daybreak. While tourism has brought wealth and 21st century conveniences to this remote area, it has also introduced difficult challenges to the Mosuo culture – from pollution in the lake, to the establishment of brothels, to mainstream ideas about women, beauty and family. This finely wrought film is a sensitive portrayal of extraordinary women struggling to hold on to their extraordinary society.

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