Embedded Feminist Agency: Wang Ping and Early Chinese Socialist Cinema

Lingzhen Wang will examine the first Chinese socialist female film director and her most representative film: The Story of Liubao Village (1956), re-theorizing female cinematic authorship

Lingzhen Wang, Brown University

Lingzhen Wang will examine the first Chinese socialist female film director and her most representative film: The Story of Liubao Village (1956), re-theorizing female cinematic authorship as a contingent articulation embedded within dynamic interactions among a multiplicity of historical forces. Her analysis will address three critical issues in Chinese studies: the dismissal of socialist cinema as mere propaganda; the Cold War influence on the study of socialist China and women since the 1980s in American academia; and a reductive post-socialist adoption of poststructuralist theory in the research on Chinese women’s film. Professor Wang will re-historicize/construct the practice of early Chinese socialist cinema (1949-1957) as experimental and situate Wang Ping within that dynamic filmmaking context to reconfigure women’s cultural agency as an historical effect of multi-force significations.

Lingzhen Wang is associate professor at Brown University. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, gender studies, film studies, and transnational feminist theory. In addition to articles in both English and Chinese, she has published a monograph, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth  Century China (2004), edited and co-translated an anthology of Wang Anyi’s work Years of Sadness (2009), and edited a critical anthology, Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts (2011). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the Chinese journal, Gender, Theory, and Culture (2009- ) and the guest editor of a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (forthcoming 2013). She is the Brown director of the Nanjing-Brown Joint Program in Gender Studies and the Humanities.