Centering women on post-2010 Chinese TV

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue on the topic of “Centering Women on Post-2010 Chinese TV” presents a brief review of major topics in the scholarship on televisual representations of women in contemporary China. The issue includes five research articles that, collectively, address research gaps in studies of post-2010 Chinese televisual-cultural discourses to do with ethnic minority women, women’s media authorship, women’s extramarital romance, and national heroines of the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose novel focuses for examining women’s plural roles and subjectivities on and off the TV screen. We thus call for complex understandings that move beyond the predominant attention of existing scholarship on conventional depictions of women as (virtuous) wives, (good) mothers, (inspirational) female professionals or heroines, and masculine feminist girls. Instead, this special issue sheds light on the polyvalent and contested positionality of Chinese women as gendered, ethnicized, (trans)nationalized, and romanticized subjects during a (post-)globalization and (post-)pandemic age.