front cover of Women Filmmakers and the Visual Politics of Transnational China in the #MeToo Era
Women Filmmakers and the Visual Politics of Transnational China in the #MeToo Era
Gina Marchetti
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Manoeuvring around mainland China’s censors and pushing back against threats of lawsuits, online harassment, and physical violence, #MeToo activists shed a particularly harsh light on the treatment of women in the cinema and entertainment industries. Focusing on films from the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora, this book considers how female directors shape Chinese visual politics through the depiction of the look, the stare, the leer, the glare, the glimpse, the glance, the queer and the oppositional gaze in fiction and documentary filmmaking. In the years leading up to and following in the wake of #MeToo, these cosmopolitan women filmmakers offer innovative angles on body image, reproduction, romance, family relations, gender identity, generational differences, female sexuality, sexual violence, sex work, labor migration, career options, minority experiences, media access, feminist activism and political rights within the rapidly changing Chinese cultural orbit.
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front cover of Women Filmmakers in Mexico
Women Filmmakers in Mexico
The Country of Which We Dream
By Elissa J. Rashkin
University of Texas Press, 2001

Women filmmakers in Mexico were rare until the 1980s and 1990s, when women began to direct feature films in unprecedented numbers. Their films have won acclaim at home and abroad, and the filmmakers have become key figures in contemporary Mexican cinema. In this book, Elissa Rashkin documents how and why women filmmakers have achieved these successes, as she explores how the women's movement, film studies programs, governmental film policy, and the transformation of the intellectual sector since the 1960s have all affected women's filmmaking in Mexico.

After a historical overview of Mexican women's filmmaking from the 1930s onward, Rashkin focuses on the work of five contemporary directors—Marisa Sistach, Busi Cortés, Guita Schyfter, María Novaro, and Dana Rotberg. Portraying the filmmakers as intellectuals participating in the public life of the nation, Rashkin examines how these directors have addressed questions of national identity through their films, replacing the patriarchal images and stereotypes of the classic Mexican cinema with feminist visions of a democratic and tolerant society.

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front cover of Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema
Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema
Zhen Zhang
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the most innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes in Chinese-language cinema as well as global women’s cinema. Their narrative, documentary, and experimental film practices from the 1980s to the present, along with their work in sister media such as dance, theater, literature, and contemporary art, their activities as scholars, educators, activists, and film festival organizers or jurors, have significantly reshaped the landscape of Sinophone film culture and expanded the borders of world cinema.
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front cover of Women Filmmakers of the African & Asian Diaspora
Women Filmmakers of the African & Asian Diaspora
Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood’s constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking.

Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers.

Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing [in the words of bell hooks] ‘an oppositional gaze’"; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity; cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker"; and Mira Nair, a Black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.

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