Female roles in Western-style Chinese opera: from Confucianist female archetype and political allegory to postmodern complexity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Borrowing the lens of Western gender theories in exploring the development of Western-style Chinese opera that emerged from the historical backbone of Confucianism and patriarchal traditions, this article examines how female roles were portrayed under the assumed gender binary that is a criterion of heteronormativity with unfaded accents of past feudal Chinese traditions. We identified three periods of Western-style Chinese operatic where the early works in the first two periods (early 1920s–late 1940s and early 1950s–late1970s) reveal that male dominance remains largely at the core led by China’s male-primogeniture tradition, and more often, female protagonists were moulded into political tools for communist and collectivist demands. The latter works, written since the mid-1970s, broke through the ancient feudal shadows of the Confucian Four Books of Women with pluralistic sonic and visual gender expressions that established a schism between past and present Chinese feminism. The outcome reveals how Chinese feminism was portrayed and employed as a political tool in these operas, where female roles were enmeshed between Confucianism and female empowerment, in an ambivalent desire to reconstruct the reality and simulacrum of feminism bounded by political allegory, classical Chinese aesthetics, and Western feminism.