Qing Drama Feminist Interpretation Of Cultural Phenomenon

This study focuses on investigating why Court Drama of Qing Dynasty gains considerable popularity from Chinese female audiences in recent decades. In this research, Western Feminist Media Criticism will be applied to serve as the academic resource, four Qing Palace TV Series with extremely high ratings will be adopted as the research materials and the questionnaires from97Chinese female participants will be explicitly analyzed as the authentic research data, in order to reveal that Plays on Qing Imperial Court are not only a mass cultural phenomenon that required to be placed a high value by academic field but also carry rich gender cultural meanings in their spreading process. Qing Palace Drama, as a special cultural form, helps to embody Patriarchy significantly. Specifically, this category of drama is commonly demonstrated with the unique narrative skill, expression mode and entertainment means to efficiently hide and beautify the unbalanced women’s right, which makes a large number of female audiences deeply involved into and highly enjoy this kind of cultural phenomenon.Based on the critical spirit of feminist, this article aims to explore how this particular cultural production attracts the attention of female audiences from the perspectives of women’s pleasant watching experience and interpretation towards the show. It finally uncovers that the enthusiasm from the audiences is a certain kind of appeal with rebellious consciousness, which could be incorporated into the scope of gender politics. In application area, it is a fresh attempt for feminist criticism to reflect the relationships between gender and power in Qing Palace Plays. Moreover, it also provides a deep and rational explanation of the burning spot in contemporary culture.This dissertation is consisted of three parts. It begins by exploring the narrative features of Qing Dynasty Court Drama and then offers a general overview of the current popular TV series’ public cultural identity. It could be concluded that female audiences are the potential target groups for this kind of theme-based drama. In addition, after reviewing western theory resources, Feminist Media Criticism and the academic writings about soap opera by western feminist scholars, this article is founded upon concrete research theoretical basis.Following this, questionnaire as the methodology employed in this research will be demonstrated. This study recruits97female participants with different social identities (university students, university lecturers, housewives, civil servants and white-collars) to collect the research data, in order to find out which factors bring pleasant feelings for viewers during the process of watching Qing Palace Plays. After analyzing the data through theoretical foundation, it is not difficult to reveal that female audiences will be firstly attracted by male performers. The relationships between power and gender will get a transient exchange when female audiences spontaneously pay attention to the actors. Secondly, the narrative style of Qing Imperial Court Drama reflects numerous details of real life, which enables female viewers to be satisfied with their current living states in an easier way, and helps them fulfill their desires and fantasies to favorable living conditions, romantic relationships and warm family spirit. What is more, the special narrative way of this sort of drama owns consistent and fast-moving plots, intriguing female audiences’ subconscious long time consumption. Fourthly, female viewers could acquire various information and knowledge from the series. Therefore, they construct many private topics and discussion groups in their own circle, which makes female get out of male’s utterance control temporarily and gain their own discourse right. Lastly, TV viewers are able to find a vent to lead off their emotional pressure and burden accumulated in their daily life when thinking of the complicated stories happened on the characters in the drama. For instance, bad person receives punishment, justice gets upheld, lovers finally get married etc. It could be concluded that all the factors arousing female audiences’interest contain two points:the misunderstanding of the relationships between male and female, and the incomplete description of female images. In this chapter, it will criticize feminist perspective while investigating the reasons of the high rating phenomenon.In the subsequent part, through analyzing the reasons of female audiences’watching interest, their needs and desires to change the relationships between gender and power could be figured out from this popular mass culture trend. Paying much attention to Qing Court theme-based drama could be regarded as a way to express their dissatisfaction of the depressive current situation in social life for women. However, these appeals have to compromise with the mainstream power because of self-deficiencies and some objective reasons. Therefore, female’s fight against the reality is not powerful enough to reconstruct the unbalanced relationships between gender and right, and to reform the existing historical framework. In this last chapter, it particularly points out the values and drawbacks of feminine viewers’demands, so that they could stay clear minds when influenced by popular cultural trend. To summarize, the reminding and suggestions enable female audiences to examine and receive the popular ideology critically, and to keep their heads awake and active to the unjust relationships during the watching experience in future.