Visual Significations of Invisible Resistance: Mother–Daughter Subjectivities in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Cinema

HRMARS - This study examines how contemporary Chinese women’s cinema after 2010 constructs female subjectivity and enacts resistance within the patriarchal ideology of jia-guo tonggou (the integration of family and state). Combining narrative analysis with Peircean semiotics, the research focuses on two representative works, Yang Lina’s Spring Tide (2019) and Yang Mingming’s Girls Always Happy (2018), both of which confront intergenerational conflict, gender governance and the intimate negotiations of female agency. The findings reveal three intergenerational modes of female subjectivity articulated through narrative construction and semiotic expression: contradictory maternal subjectivity, critical subjectivity and negotiated subjectivity. By marginalising or erasing paternal figures, amplifying women’s voices and reconstructing kinship through sisterhood and intergenerational emotion, these films expose the internal tensions and negotiability of the patriarchal logic inherent in jia-guo tonggou. Integrating Foucault’s three modes of resistance, namely resistance within power, counter conduct and care of the self, with the patriarchal ideology of jia-guo tonggou, this study proposes a localised analytical framework to demonstrate how Chinese women’s cinema performs micro level practices of resistance while negotiating structural power. The research aims to expand both the textual and methodological understanding of Chinese women’s cinema while underscoring its aesthetic and political interventions within the context of post socialist gender governance.