New Women of the Silent Screen: China, Japan, Hollywood (Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies)

Examining constructions of gender, nationalism, and modernity in films produced in China and Japan in the 1920s and early 1930s, this special issue of Camera Obscura is the first collection of feminist research on Asian cinema of the silent period. Actresses emerged for the first time in the Asian public sphere in the late 1910s, making the convention of the female impersonator obsolete and giving human faces to the many social transformations of urban modernity. During this period, filmmaking started to establish itself as a product of mass culture that circulated globally, creating conduits of cultural exchange in which the modern New Woman became a principal figure of currency. In the silent cinemas of China, Japan, and Hollywood, where Asian women appeared as key representations of nativist and orientalist ideology, early women stars became the focus for competing discourses of gender and modernity and played a key role in the construction of modern Asian identity.The collection in..