CFP: Women Filmmakers in Chinese Film History
Women Filmmakers in Chinese Film History
Call for Papers for _Journal of Chinese Cinemas _Special Issue
Hidden Luminaries: Obscure Actresses and Women Filmmakers in Chinese Film History
Guest Editors: David John Boyd (University of Glasgow) and Jessica Siu-yin Yeung (Lingnan University)
Associate Editor: Yiman Wang (University of California, Santa Cruz)
This issue will contribute to the field of Chinese women’s cinema, with studies on individual actresses and women filmmakers who have either faded from cultural or institutional memory, or who are significant in their own region but are under-studied in Anglophone scholarship.
In “The Life of the Obscure” (1924–25), Virginia Woolf proposes that the biographies of obscure and common people who led fascinating lives is crucial for recovering silenced histories. These obscure lives gain their significance through their collective worth of historicity, hence shifting the paradigm in life-writing practices from dominant, single lives of Great Men to minor, group lives of ordinary civilians. One of the roles of these forgotten individuals, to Woolf, is to introduce new perspectives on “greatness” and “lives.” This issue takes its cue from this approach and invites contributors to democratise Chinese-language film history, archive the historiographies of women film workers in contemporary form, and further problematise the notion of “Chinese” actresses and filmmakers in existing discourse.
Recently, there has been a surge in new studies on women’s cinema in the Chinese-language context, such as Yiman Wang’s forthcoming monograph, To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World (2024), Yunte Huang’s Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History (2023), Zhen Zhang’s Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema (2023), Gina Marchetti’s Women Filmmakers and the Visual Politics of Transnational China in the #MeToo Era (2023), Fiona Y.W. Law’s “Work Ethic(s) of Being a Woman: Images of Female Labour in Hong Kong Cinema (1950s–60s)” (2023), Andy Willis’s “Angie Chen: Hong Kong Film Pioneer” (2023), Felicia Chan’s “Figurations of the Nyonya: The Uses and Abuses of Peranakan Chinese Representation in Film” (2023), S. Louisa Wei’s “Women Screenwriters of Early Sinophone Cinema: 1916–1949” (2023), Yau Ching’s “Nüxia in a Migrating Jianghu: Yam Pang-nin and Wu Lai-chu in 1940s Hong Kong” (2022), and Chun-chi Wang’s “Self-Representation as a Form of Empowerment: A Documentary-making Workshop for Female Marriage Immigrants in Hualien, Taiwan” (2018), there are still many significant actresses and women filmmakers, screenwriters, producers, and editors remained under-researched, especially in the Anglophone scholarship. A handful of these names who deserve their own study include Chin Tsi-ang 錢似鶯, Angela Mao 茅瑛, Yu So-chow 于素秋, Pak Yin 白燕, Tang Bik-wan 鄧碧雲, Connie Chan 陳寶珠, Mona Fong 方逸華, Nansun Shi 施南生, Mary Stephen 雪美蓮, Zero Chou 周美玲, Mimi Lee 李美彌, Laha Mebow 陳潔瑤, Barbara Wong Chun Chun 黃真真, Yam Kim-fai 任劍輝 and Bak Sheut-sin 白雪仙, Helena Law 羅蘭, Lily Ho 何莉莉, He Xiaopei 何小培, Yang Li-hua 楊麗花, Fu Yue 傅榆, Nora Lam 林子穎, and Feng-I Fiona Roan 阮鳳儀.
As such, we acknowledge the importance of those who have attained the status of Ann Hui 許鞍華, whose name is nearly synonymous with “women’s cinema,” but we are more interested in those “hidden luminaries” who have thus far been largely obliterated in the current discourse. We therefore invite contributors to use their selected actress or woman filmmaker as a case study to propose novel methods or to challenge existing frameworks regarding our received wisdom of their lives, works, and legacy of these women film workers.
While current scholarship explores pertinent questions concerning the transnational, the Sinophone, the nationalist, auteurist, or social forms of activism pertaining to race, class, and gender, we would particularly encourage theoretical approaches that offer creative readings of filmic recuperation of these ‘hidden luminaries’ in Chinese women’s cinema historiography and/or its cultural imprints. These include: archival studies; adaptation studies; affect and body studies; audience and reception studies; authorship studies; documentary film theories and practices; fan studies; women and film-philosophy; genre studies; memory studies; interdisciplinary life-writing studies; intermediality and film in women’s culture (fashion, graphic arts, music, radio, stage, social media, etc.); production analysis, policy and history; star and celebrity studies; and other theoretical or textual forms of film analysis that offers unique readings of overlooked figures in Chinese women’s cinema.
We hope this issue can promote ground-breaking scholarship by featuring a constellation of significant women film workers in Chinese cinema from various regions, so that we might also illuminate their contribution to Chinese film history, especially in Anglophone scholarship. In this process of sharing new voices in Chinese women’s cinema, we also would like to consider the ontology, subjectivity and cultural formulations of ‘Chineseness’ in these contributions, so to first denaturalise any monolithic conceptualisations of cultural identity, and to further identify the historical, linguistic, regional and political differences that may have shaped the lives and legacies of these Chinese women film workers.
We offer historiographic and theoretical questions to consider for contributions:
- In what way do these unexamined figures of Chinese women’s cinema contribute to or resist the development of a general academic or filmic canon?
- How can we rethink the epistemological question of historical contribution and significance if archival resources are limited, or the provenance of works are unknown, fragmentary or lost?
- How does a subject qualify as a ‘hidden luminary’ in Chinese women’s cinema, and under what standards should their film historical impact be judged?
- To what degree is an “obscure” figure in Chinese women’s film history, and does it vary by scope, evidence or historiographic definition?
- What ideological barriers exist while recuperating lost voices of Chinese women’s film, say, in the archival process? How does the archive pose a question between (perceived) objective truths and subjective memories or individual narratives?
- In seeking to expand the knowledge of Chinese women’s cinema in the Anglophone field, what challenges are posed in the process of cultural and linguistic translation?
- What local, regional or global afterlives did the works of said hidden luminaries maintain? What influences or impacts did they have on other cultural or creative forces?
- What delineates the Chineseness of a chosen figure in Chinese women’s films, and does that affect their relationship to Chinese film history or broader historiographic situations?
- What other historiographic methods might aid in recuperating lost voices in Chinese film history, aside from archival research? ****
- Are there current theoretical models (say, post-structuralist, phenomenological, auteurist, queer or LGBTQ+ approaches, for example) that might help refocus a broader spotlight on certain luminaries hidden in plain sight in Chinese women’s cinema?****
The above questions are not exhaustive. Other lines of inquiry are welcome.
Please send an abstract of no more than 400 words and a biographical note of no more than 200 words to David John Boyd (University of Glasgow) and Jessica Siu-yin Yeung (Lingnan University) at dr.david.john.boyd@gmail.com and jsyyeung@hotmail.com by May 31, 2024. Please also send your questions, if any, to the above email addresses.
Timeline
May 31, 2024: Abstracts of no more than 400 words and biographical notes of no more than 200 words are due
By June 30, 2024: Authors of selected abstracts are notified
By March 31, 2025: Full manuscripts of 6,000 to 8,000 words are due
By June 30, 2025: Return internal review feedback and revisions
July to November 2025: External peer reviews and revisions
December 2025 to August 2026: Revisions, second round of external peer reviews, proofreading, typesetting, and galley proofs checking
September 2026 to January 2027: Online publication of accepted articles
Late 2026/mid-2027: Print publication of the special issue