Women portraying themselves: feminism in China at the start of the 20th and 21st centuries

Abstract

This thesis examines the differences between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries, regarding the construction of women’s identities and images by visual culture. Discourse analysis is used as the methodology for this research, which focuses on the construction of women's identities in the dominant commercial and statist discourses presented in magazines in the early twentieth century. The multiple ideologies presented women as ever-changing identifies in a series of fantasies and desires in commercial magazines: symbols of modern identity, objects to be gazed at, symbols of elegance and advanced civilisation, and patriotic heroines. It embodies a 'Realist temptation'. At the same time, these discontinuous images and identities reflect the overall political and economic environment in China. However, there is a conflict between the identities produced by these dominant discourses and the discourse of woman artists' portraits. The female artist Pan Yuliang serves as an example to describe how to breaks down the docile body under this realist temptation through her work. This thesis focuses on how she challenges the objectified gaze of the commercial sexy girl and the image of the patriotic new woman in terms of her re-programming of traditional space and nonresponse to the subject's gaze in her self-portraits and portraits. Secondly, the thesis illustrates the possibilities for Pan Yuliang to embrace the call to produce subversive discourses within established masculine artistic norms in the shaping of the subject. It reveals that the performativity of gender and self-contradictory gender identities can be negotiated within the same subject. A further elaboration of the pluralistic gender temperament in her self-portrait interferes with the dominant ideal woman figure that dominates the hegemony. Finally, this thesis contrasts contemporary selfies with 1930s woman self-portraits and commercial advertisements. It discusses how visibility, desire and agency are redefined and altered in the context of social media. The thesis illustrates that Social media mobilises 'post-feminist sensibilities' and closely links with the notions of social success. This is argued to be the dominant culture and desire that social media gradually produces, which limits the capacity for dialogue in the selfie. Summoning a new kind of female subject under the demands of individualism and social media collaboration, it leads to the observation of how social media re-produces gender culture. At the same time, it discusses how women use post-feminist discourses of self-empowerment to internalise aesthetic labour and reshape unequal activities.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Yidan Wei: orcid.org/0000-0002-5399-2838

ORCID for Sunil Manghani: orcid.org/0000-0001-6406-7456

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