Indigenous Feminist Frameworks: Cultural and Historical Trajectories of Chinese Womens Cinema

This paper takes the notion of indigenousness (or endogenousness ) as a point of departure to examine the cultural and historical trajectory and theoretical construction of Chinese womens cinema within its distinct cultural context. Unlike Western feminist cinema, which is often framed around well-defined theoretical concepts such as the male gaze and gender oppression, Chinese womens cinema bears the deep imprint of Chinas unique historical and cultural conditions, familial structures, processes of social transformation, identity formation, and, crucially, the emergence of female self-awareness shaped by these intersecting forces. By tracing the development of Chinese womens cinema, this study outlines the construction of a uniquely primordial form of female subjectivityone that is deeply rooted in the indigenous cultural and historical conditionsand explores the distinctive cinematic strategies through which this subjectivity is expressed. The analysis highlights how Chinese womens cinema articulates a culturally embedded female consciousness through its original and context-specific narrative forms.