From Stereotypes To Sophistication:Transformation Of Chinese Female Images In Hollywood Films

Hollywood movies as a form of forceful, influential and ubiquitous entertainment have been presenting various images of people and promoting ideologies underlying these images. Chinese females, as an important part of the image of China and the Chinese, have always been portrayed as the mysterious, exotic sirens and powerless victims or the subordinates. In order to uncover the mechanism beneath these stereotyped images and the new trends of their development, this thesis is designed as an exploration of the trajectory of Chinese female images in Hollywood movies analyzing the roles featuring actresses with Chinese background, and examining the political, ethnical and cultural implications embedded in the role transformation of the actresses, which is the core of this thesis.Based on the existing studies of the roles of Chinese women in Hollywood movies, the present research mainly looks at three types:the sexual pleaser, Chinese Cinderella and the Eastern Spider by analyzing the films concerned. Though having some overlaps, each stereotype serves as a unique perspective of Western gaze towards China. By comparing the female images and the actresses who have starred these stereotyped roles, the research points out that the emergence of new images helps to subvert and overthrow the conventionalized fantasies about China and the Chinese.Drawing the theories of Said's Orientalism, Greenblatt's New Historicism, Mulvey's film feminism, Stuart Hall's expositions of Cultural Identity as well as Homi Bhabha's Otherness, the thesis contends that the analysis of the metamorphosis of Chinese female images in Hollywood movies represents in a unique way the history of the cultural and political relationship between the East and the West, showing their tension, suspicion and final competition and cooperation. And the White-male dominated gender relationship is taking on a diversified and complicated ambiguity.The odyssey of Chinese women in Hollywood reveals that the pursuit and the construction of their cultural identities are fabricated with the post colonial approaches of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity. And their search for identity, like the roles of Chinese women on screen, is still subject to transformation.