Indigenous Feminist Frameworks: Cultural and Historical Trajectories of Chinese Women’s Cinema

Abstract

This paper takes the notion of “indigenousness” (or “endogenousness” ) as a point of departure to examine the cultural and historical trajectory and theoretical construction of Chinese women’s cinema within its distinct cultural context. Unlike Western feminist cinema, which is often framed around well-defined theoretical concepts such as the “male gaze” and “gender oppression,” Chinese women’s cinema bears the deep imprint of China’s unique historical and cultural conditions, familial structures, processes of social transformation, identity formation, and, crucially, the emergence of female self-awareness shaped by these intersecting forces. By tracing the development of Chinese women’s cinema, this study outlines the construction of a uniquely primordial form of female subjectivity—one that is deeply rooted in the indigenous cultural and historical conditions—and explores the distinctive cinematic strategies through which this subjectivity is expressed. The analysis highlights how Chinese women’s cinema articulates a culturally embedded female consciousness through its original and context-specific narrative forms.