The image of women in the revolutionary opera films of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

This is an interdisciplinary project that investigates the influence of the Cultural Revolution on the image of women in revolutionary opera films. Because the Cultural Revolution is in a socialist context, relations between gender and power in socialist discourse are different to power relations in feudal or capitalist gender discourse. Previous sociopolitical, anthropological, communication and media studies have focused on Chinese women in the Cultural Revolution. However, there is limited research through a feminist lens to explore how patriarchal power worked in a socialist gender discourse directly formed by Maoist ideology, and ultimately constructed the masculinised representation of women in the Cultural Revolution. Therefore, this is also a cultural and feminist study that aims to explore the influence of Maoist gender politics on women’s identity during the Cultural Revolution. The revolutionary opera films were chosen as an appropriate study to investigate what were the dominant representations of women, and discover how masculinist power worked on the representations of women in the period of the Cultural Revolution. Examining the image of women in films contributes to knowledge about Maoist gender discourse and ideology during the Cultural Revolution. The key methodology employed for analysing and theorising gender and power in this thesis is feminist critical discourse analysis within the framework of constructionist feminism. By using a feminist theoretical framework, this study reveals hierarchal relations between masculinity and femininity, and undertakes a feminist critique of masculinist power and women’s gender identity in the revolutionary opera films. The main argument of this study stresses that Maoist gender politics in the revolutionary opera films is a masculinist politics that produced another form of patriarchy to maintain male dominance. Women were not liberated in the Cultural Revolution but rather identified as a masculine gender and oppressed by masculinist power in the gender discourse of the revolutionary opera films. The key contribution of this study is to fill a knowledge gap in the field where, as a feminist project, I use feminist methodology and epistemology to identify women’s identity, and explore sociological connections between the masculinisation of women and patriarchal (masculinist) power in the context of the Cultural Revolution. A dynamic power relation between femininity and masculinity from traditional China to the Cultural Revolution has also been mapped and elaborated.