Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua

Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China's most influential theoreticians and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist, her literary, film and TV commentary has, over the last decade, addressed an expanding audience in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Cinema and Desire presents Dai Jinhua's best work to date. In the book she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, establishes Huang Shuqin's Human, Woman, Demon as the People's Republic's first genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyses the rise of shopping plazas in 1990s urban China as a strange montage in which the political memories of Tiananmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist marketplace are intertwined.

Dai Jinhua is Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Peking University, where she teaches women’s studies, cultural studies and film. She is the author of Breaking Out of the City of Mirrors and Film Theory and Handbook of Criticism.

Jing Wang is S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng’s China.

Tani E. Barlow is a historian of modern China and teaches in the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Washington. She is the founding editor of positions: east Asia cultures critique and author of The Questions of Women in Chinese Feminism.