105 Views
China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
By the time of the 1950s, the vast population in rural China started to have the chance for outdoor film viewing several times per year. Guided by the Leninist view on propaganda and the Maoist thought on art, that is, culture and art should serve workers, peasants, and soldiers, a large amount of mobile projectionist teams were sent down to the countryside for teaching the underprivileged with Party’s ideology. Female projectionist teams were soon established in the 1950s to respond that trend as well as to echo Mao’s summons of women hold up half the sky.
However, this paper is not a eulogy for women’s liberation in Maoist China but careful reflection upon women’s situation in the rural area during the overturning transition period. Female projectionist as a new professional position in the 1950s offered a group of literate women the chance to mobile freely among rural villages and propagate state policy such as marital law to the rural public. This study takes Shaanxi as a research site where CCP initially established its base. Relying on archival resources and life stories of female mobile projectionists, I am about to investigate what kinds of obstacles women were facing when they dare to transgress private border and enter the rural public realm and how they negotiated with that challenges. Moreover, I will examine how women’s assess to the operation of film technologies help to reconstruct women’s position both in and out of the rural patriarchal culture.
Yanping Guo
South China Normal University, China (People's Republic)