Women in East Asian Cinema: Gender Representations, Creative Labour and Global Histories

Published in 2023
375 pages

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Felicia Chan is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester where she researches the construction of national, cultural and cosmopolitan imaginaries in film and media. She is author of Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross Cultural Encounters in East Asian Film (2017), co-editor of Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives (2016) and founding member of the Manchester-based Chinese Film Forum UK.

What is this book about?
Women in East Asian Cinema brings together new and emerging work to highlight and explore the understudied contributions of women to the films and creative industries of East Asia. It is a book which foregrounds the importance of re-historicising women’s creative labour in film, not just as actors on screen, but as voices who have steered the production, circulation and consumption of these films across global contexts.

Over three sections, the book provides perspectives on gender representation in East and South-East Asian cinema; new explorations of women’s labour contributions as directors, screenwriters, and editors; and considerations of the contemporary circulation processes through which such work reaches global audiences.

By recentring women’s film histories within the broader history of cinema and interrogating the geo-political boundaries of what might constitute ‘East Asia’ in the process, this volume makes a robust intervention into studies of East Asian cinema and women in film.