Cinema of Dislocation: the geo-emotional journeys of the suffering women in 21st century Chinese cinema

This thesis argues that there is a genre of film concerned with the travels of disenfranchised women in 21st century Chinese cinema. An identifiable set of film narratives have largely emerged in China’s neoliberal moment since the 1980s; and especially after the 2000s when China has been more engaged with the processes of globalisation, modernisation, urbanisation (Rofel 2007; Ong and Zhang 2008). Such a socio-economic procedure has stimulated massive population flows, spatial transition and development-induced displacement, uprooting and destabilising identity and sense of belonging (Wagner et al. 2014; Chen and Yang 2013). These subjects are often dislocated physically and socially from the dreams of the nouveau-riche and older cosmopolitan subjectivities that surround them. Heroines in such a cinema are either the village/suburban indigenous whose intra-village travels define their status of marginalisation and resistance, the rural migrants who have worked or lived in the city and choose to return, or urban middle-class women who are troubled by urban lives and set off on journeys to remote regions for self-revival. I argue that, in the cinema of dislocation, on the one hand, heroines are all displaced to various degrees by their unique circumstances; on the other hand, the status of dislocation serves as the women’s agency and empowers them, enabling them to seek for a new sense of location, belonging and identity during their travels and search for homecoming. Apart from contextual and thematic exploration, the challenges for this thesis will be to identify the other qualities that will justify defining the Cinema of Dislocation definitively as a genre of Chinese film in its own right: the network of directors, a shared aesthetic, distinctive dislocation narratives and cinematographies, and a degree of flexibility that allows the genre to develop