The Big Heroine Genre: Gender Politics in Postsocialist Chinese Culture

Chelsea Wenzhu Xu

Advisor: Alison Landsberg, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Roger Lancaster, Huwymin Liu, Fan Yang

Johnson Center, #334E
April 10, 2026, 12:30 PM to 02:30 PM

Abstract:

Over the past three decades, the Chinese state has institutionalized “social stability” (weiwen) as a central governing mandate, equating national prosperity with social harmony and emotional order. Stability, in this framework, is not merely administrative but affective: citizens are encouraged to cultivate positivity, resilience, and self-regulation as contributions to collective continuity. This dissertation examines how contemporary popular culture responds to that mandate within a postsocialist structure of feeling marked by alienation and precarity.

Through case studies of maternal melodramas, time-travel romances, urban migrant narratives, and films about aging women, I argue that the “big heroine” (BH) genre becomes a crucial cultural arena in which social stability is both articulated and destabilized. These narratives position women as essential to sustaining family life, labor markets, and affective order, even as they endure exhaustion, bodily trauma, romantic disillusionment, spatial insecurity, and the continued mobilization of their reproductive and emotional labor across the life course. Through close readings of filmic techniques, narrative structures, genre conventions, and moments of aesthetic rupture, alongside attention to reception and circulation, I show how structural contradictions are reframed as intimate emotional dilemmas. Yet the realism, melodrama, and affective intensity of these texts allow alienation and precarity to surface collectively. Employing repetition, spatial composition, surrealist interruption, and the depiction of non-romantic female coalitions, big heroine culture reveals the fragility of the stability project itself. The airing of personal grievances generates broader reflection on the structural conditions that produce them, unsettling the fantasy of a harmonious and stable Chinese society.