97 Views
Inter-area/Border Crossing
Organized Panel Session
What is the relationship between gendering the city and post-socialist Chinese urban filmmaking? Rather than approaching urban cinema through a city’s disembodied exterior representations (i.e. landmark, urban expansion, and aerial view), this paper examines the commodified dreams of the interior and the concept of the post-socialist home. The home is not a neutral space, but rather a contested cultural site that mediates the boundary between public and private space, and consumption and production. It is also the primary scene where masculinity and femininity are socially constructed and recoded. Based on woman filmmaker Li Shaohong’s commercial blockbuster films on romance, love, and urban living that are produced in the 2000s—Baober in Love (2004), Stolen Life (2005), and The Door (2007)—I historicize and theorize the emergence of intimate dystopias that unravel the spectacle of Chinese post-socialist and masculinist phantasmagorias of the interior. Adding a gendered twist to Walter Benjamin’s Marxist critique of the phantasmagorias of the interior, I examine Li’s feminist interior that portrays a post-socialist masculinist bodies-cities network, where women are seen as displaced, homeless, and disappeared—physically, psychologically, and symbolically. The films introduce a unique urban aesthetics that centers on the everyday, the intimate spaces of gendered domestic life, and the post-socialist logic of interior design in urban apartments and lofts. Drawing upon Li’s ambivalent relationship with socialist (state) and post-socialist (market) feminisms in films about women and China’s megatropolis, this paper thinks through the possibilities and complexities of Marxist-feminist filmmaking in the era of the “post.”
Erin Huang
Princeton University