Rising Stars? Degenerate Women?: Female Movie Stars In Republican Shanghai, 1920s

Movie actress was a new type of woman born in 1920s Shanghai. Their rise to fame depended on a visual oriented mass media revolution as well as the construction of the public discourse. Female movie stars were not only the objects of culture consumption, but also the important force of culture production. As some of the most upwardly visible women who had to lead a life under the gaze of the public, they were endowed with several different meanings.In this essay, I'll focus on the female move stars in 1920s Shanghai and discuss the questions as followed: What context were movie actresses born in? How the discourses that produced by culture elite and urban male audience to construct the female movie stars, as they became clearly a prominent social and culture force in late 1920s? How the movie actress themselves to use the varying discourses to build own public image? My resources are main newspapers, movie magazines, memoirists and tabloids.Besides the instruction and the conclusion, the main body of this thesis consists of five sections. The first section traces the context what the movie actresses were bom in; The second section describes the rise of the female move stars in mid-1920s Shanghai; The third section discusses how the elite discourse to shape the public image of the female move stars; The fourth section discusses how the urban male audience to represent female movie stars; The fifth section dissertates How the movie actress themselves to use the varying discourses to build own public image.