Chinese National Opera in the Perspective of Feminism

Since the early 1980s, "feminism" was firstly introduced into China from the field of literature, but compared with this trend in literature, art and film, feminist music criticism in Chinese music criticism has been in a nearly blank situation. Even if there are a few pieces of literature on the subject, most of them focus on gender politics and the struggle for women's rights as reflected in the meaning of the scripts of music and theatre works, but do not go deeper into the music itself. In addition, among all kinds of musical works, opera is the most suitable text mode, the script has the gender differentiation of musical roles, and the content of the opera is expressed through the form of theatre, which can better explore the gender connotation of the musical elements. In this paper, we will collect and organise the literature, take the feminist perspective as the landing point, synthesise the scholars' viewpoints, and discuss the diversified development of feminist music research, the embodiment of feminism in opera, and the study of the opera "The White Haired Girl" under feminism.