‘Woman’, fetish, particularism: Articulating Chinese cinema with a cross-cultural problematic

Since the 1920s and 1930s, commodified screen presences of ‘woman’ have fascinated Chinese film audiences. When communism became the reigning ideology in the People's Republic, Chinese cinema elsewhere continued to thrive by investing in the power of women as fetishized objects. In the new era of prosperity since the 1980s, mainland Chinese filmic representations, now often reflecting the influences of Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Hollywood, seem to have returned to such objectification with a vengeance, with female superstars cannibalizing attention not only as actresses but also, frequently, as multi-million-dollar screen goddesses promoting high-end merchandise. By juxtaposing key moments in Chinese cinema's approach to ‘woman’ with critiques of the (hetero)sexual politics of representation in 1970s and 1980s Anglo-American feminist film theory, this essay asks how relations among film, ‘woman’ and commodity fetishism might be rethought in a cross-cultural context in which (the rhetorical claim to) particularism has become so morally dominant.