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

Women in East AsianCinema 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.

University of Manchester

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.

Fraser Elliott is Lecturer of Film, Exhibition and Curation at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Chinese Film Forum UK. His research specialises in the circulation of Chinese-language film in the UK and the histories of Hong Kong cinema. He is a member of the Chinese Film Forum UK, Festival Consultant for the Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh; collaborator with the Hong Kong Film Festival UK; and co-editor of Full-throttle Franchise: The Culture, Business and Politics of Fast & Furious (2023).

University of Salford

Andy Willis is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford, UK and Senior Visiting Curator: Film at HOME, Manchester. Amongst his publications he is the co-editor, with Jonathan Wroot, of Cult Media: Re-packaged, Re-released and Restored and DVD, Blu-ray and Beyond: Navigating Formats and Platforms within Media Consumption (2017), with Felicia Chan, of Chinese Cinemas, International Perspectives (2016) and with Wing Fai Leung, of East Asian Film Stars (2014). In addition he has curated a number of seasons and programmes of East Asian films, including, CRIME: Hong Kong Style (2016) and The Original Ass Kickers: Hong Kong Cinema’s Female Action Heroes (2019), and with Sarah Perks, Made in Hong Kong (2007) and Visible Secrets: Hong Kong’s women filmmakers (2009).