Cambridge Scholars Publishing The Taiwanese Cinematization of Feminine Writing

A number of Taiwanese scholars gate-kept, filtered, selected, and strategized to transfer Luce Irigaray’s, Hélène Cixous’s, and Julia Kristeva’s French feminist theories into their own national context by exerting their cross-lingual and cross-cultural academic power in the 1990s. They also reshaped, localized, acculturated, marketed, and Taiwanized these French feminist theories, which was essential for Taiwanese academia. According to French feminist literary theories, écriture féminine (“feminine writing”) refers to women’s own written self-expression used to escape from the patriarchal language system. Beginning with a description of the acculturation of French feminist literary theories, this book highlights how women’s own spoken voices or autobiographical written expressions appear in Taiwanese cinematic works when the camera is compared to the cinematic pen. It analytically digest the écriture féminine of parler-femme in the Taiwanese films The Butcher’s Wife, Taste of Life, Sex Appeal, and Ghosted. About the Author Ya-chen Chen, PhD, is Associate Professor at China Medical University and a Visiting Scholar in Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. Her publications include The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism; Women and Gender in Contemporary Chinese Societies: Beyond the Han Patriarchy; Farewell My Concubine: Same-Sex Readings and Cross-Cultural Dialogues; and (En)Gendering Taiwan; Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium. She is also the author of New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics: The Centennial of the End of the Qing Dynasty; Women in Taiwan: Socio-cultural Perspectives; and Early 21st-Century Power Struggles of Chinese Languages in US Higher Education, among others.