Divided Women and the Chinese Dream: Gender, Sexuality, Modernity, and the Nation in Anna & Anna (Aubrey Lam, 2007) and Lotus (Liu Shu, 2012)

Abstract

As the People’s Republic of China wrestles with enormous social and economic changes in the twenty-first century, women increasingly symbolize the divided lives that cross tradition and modernity, socialism and capitalism, the mainland and its periphery, the porous national borders of the diaspora, and the boundaries between the domestic and the public spheres. Chinese women experience what W. E. B. DuBois might call a “double consciousness” as they navigate a male-dominated world plagued by ideological, class, ethnic, linguistic and other schisms. Set against the backdrop of post-Mao China’s economic and political ascent on the world stage, two female-directed films, inspired by Kieślowski’s post-socialist parable The Double Life of Veronique (1991), Anna & Anna and Lotus, illustrate the ways in which narratives about divided women can allegorize the Chinese nation’s troubled relationship with modernity through stories about female sexuality.