Aftershock from Another Site
Aftershock
However, the situation of feminism in China is very unique, because China has had an epic and long-fought revolution for national and social liberation in which changing women’s place in society was high on the agenda. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party launched a series of measures of social change that improve and protect women’s rights, including abolishing the arranged marriage system, banning prostitution and re-educating prostitutes, encouraging women to step out of their family to work and attend social events, enforcing laws that ensure women to have equal rights with men, and founding the half-government run organization – Chinese Woman’s Association (Dai Jinhua, 89). Since an external force instead of the women themselves mainly propelled this revolution, Chinese women’s political, legislative and economical rights have greatly improved while their cultural awareness and consciousness were left-behind. As women benefited so much from the socialist revolution instead of self-motivated feminist movements, they tended to immerse themselves so deeply in its ideology of gender equality, along with an ignorance and indifference of feminism. According to Shuqin Cui in her book Women Through the Lens, Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema, the promise of emancipation and the bestowed identity have created the illusion that an autonomous female self can be obtained only in relation to the well being of the nation-state (Cui, 175). Therefore, in the guise of women who hold up half the sky, a motto brought about by Chairman Mao, the fulfillment of the liberation of Chinese women was miswritten as a past tense event in the mainstream Chinese cultural discourse. In the early socialist cinema, female sexuality or the sensuality of the female body is replaced with a genderless and sexless symbol that signifies the sociopolitical collectivity.
However, with the marketization, pluralization,
However, the situation of feminism in China is very unique, because China has had an epic and long-fought revolution for national and social liberation in which changing women’s place in society was high on the agenda. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party launched a series of measures of social change that improve and protect women’s rights, including abolishing the arranged marriage system, banning prostitution and re-educating prostitutes, encouraging women to step out of their family to work and attend social events, enforcing laws that ensure women to have equal rights with men, and founding the half-government run organization – Chinese Woman’s Association (Dai Jinhua, 89). Since an external force instead of the women themselves mainly propelled this revolution, Chinese women’s political, legislative and economical rights have greatly improved while their cultural awareness and consciousness were left-behind. As women benefited so much from the socialist revolution instead of self-motivated feminist movements, they tended to immerse themselves so deeply in its ideology of gender equality, along with an ignorance and indifference of feminism. According to Shuqin Cui in her book Women Through the Lens, Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema, the promise of emancipation and the bestowed identity have created the illusion that an autonomous female self can be obtained only in relation to the well being of the nation-state (Cui, 175). Therefore, in the guise of women who hold up half the sky, a motto brought about by Chairman Mao, the fulfillment of the liberation of Chinese women was miswritten as a past tense event in the mainstream Chinese cultural discourse. In the early socialist cinema, female sexuality or the sensuality of the female body is replaced with a genderless and sexless symbol that signifies the sociopolitical collectivity.
However, with the marketization, pluralization,