Rather than treating these contexts as discrete historical episodes, the panel approaches them as structurally comparable “in-between” formations where political regimes, social norms, and cultural meanings were actively renegotiated. In such moments, the instability of ideological frameworks opens up new possibilities for cultural expression while producing tensions, negotiations, and the risk of institutional resistance. It is within these conditions that new ways of describing and inhabiting the body and narrating the self become possible.
Attending to these dynamics, the panel intervenes in ongoing debates across Sinophone studies, media history, and feminist materialism. While foundational scholarship has mapped the macro-political narratives and industrial transformations of these periods, the gendered body is often treated as a passive reflection of such shifts. Challenging purely symbolic or reflectionist approaches, the panel instead positions the body and its representations as active, contested sites. By bringing object studies, female self-narration, and cultural sociology into dialogue, this session demonstrates how the body operates as a critical medium for navigating shifting regulatory regimes of modernity.
The three papers trace these transformations across a structured progression of historical moments and scales of embodiment, moving from the material body to the textual self and the cinematic image.
Beginning at the level of physical and material practice, Qilin Cao examines women’s hair in Republican China as a “quasi-object” situated between body and thing. Engaging with feminist materialism and object studies to move beyond conventional representational analyses, Cao shows how practices such as cutting and perming turned hair into a site where bodily boundaries were negotiated. These practices articulate new forms of bodily autonomy and modern identity, while generating anxieties over gender norms, technological intervention, and social order.
Moving to the textual construction of the self, Xianda Huang analyzes Liu Xiaoqing’s 1983 autobiography My Road. Building on Lingzhen Wang and Jing Wang’s scholarship on Chinese female self-writing, Huang shows how women’s self-narration in the early PRC reform era negotiated the boundary between socialist moral frameworks and emerging market-oriented celebrity culture. The text articulates a form of agency enabled and constrained by state discourse, revealing the complex entanglement of individual subjectivity and institutional power.
Finally, shifting to cinematic representation, Ruoyi Bian examines the transformation of erotic imagery in 1980s Hong Kong cinema following the decline of the fengyue (erotic and sensual) film cycle. Addressing a gap in Hong Kong cinema studies, she notes that while scholarship has documented the era’s stylistic and industrial developments (e.g., Bordwell, Teo, Chung), it has largely overlooked the trajectory of adult media. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field, she shows how erotic representation was reconfigured as a mobile visual language under pressures of industrial restructuring, transnational media flows, and political uncertainty surrounding the 1997 handover. The cinematic body thus becomes a site where broader social anxieties, forms of violence, and shifting identities are negotiated.
The panel brings together scholars at different career stages and institutional contexts across China, the United States, and Europe, fostering dialogue across diverse academic traditions and methodological approaches. Taken together, these papers show that cultural production in modern Sinophone contexts unfolds through conditions of instability that generate both constraint and possibility. Across cinema, self-writing, and material forms, the body emerges as a key site where these tensions are negotiated, actively reshaping how gender, embodiment, and subjectivity are understood.
The session is structured for a seventy-five-minute format, with three presentations of approximately 15 minutes each, followed by a 10-minute response and 15 minutes of discussion. The respondent, Dr. Chang Liu (Heidelberg University), whose work on Liu Xiaoqing and women’s stardom in post-socialist China engages questions of gender, media, and female subjectivity, is well positioned to synthesize the papers. As guest editor of a forthcoming special issue on Liu Xiaoqing Studies in Women’s Studies, he brings both subject-specific expertise and a broader perspective on gender and media in modern China, facilitating discussion by drawing out key connections and differences across the presentations.