Female warriors: a reproduction of patriarchal narrative of Hua Mulan in The Red Detachment of Women (1972)

Abstract

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the CCP officially claimed that Chinese women achieved an equal position as men, and the Confucian patriarchal family was deconstructed. This article is an ongoing exploration of Maoist gender discourse by analysing the image of female warriors in the revolutionary opera film, The Red Detachment of Women (1972) which was made and popularised during the Cultural Revolution. This article finds that Maoist gender discourse failed to deconstruct the Confucian patriarchy. The image of female warriors in the revolutionary opera films was a reproduction of the patriarchal narrative of Hua Mulan, which served an ethical symbol of loyalty and filial daughter in the discourse of Confucian patriarchy. Similar to Mulan, the masculinised image of female warriors in the revolutionary opera films cannot be identified as a feminist representation yet a cultural and ethical symbol of filial daughter that leads to women’s subordination to men’s needs.