A visual review: a study of gender power in Taiwanese cinema

TL;DR

This paper reviews how gender power is portrayed in Taiwanese cinema from the 1950s to 2024, using visual tools to summarize research trends.

Contribution

The study introduces a visual method to analyze and present gender power dynamics in Taiwanese cinema research.

Findings

Gender power studies in Taiwanese cinema often focus on queer themes, followed by women and men.

Intersectional analyses involving class, ethnicity, and politics are common in recent studies.

Visualization tools like bubble charts are proposed to better represent research trends.

Abstract

After the war and the gradual recovery of the economy and social construction, Taiwanese cinema also began to step into regular development. From the 1950s to the 2020s, Taiwanese cinema has undergone more than 70 years of development, from regional to international, and has become one of the major nameplates of Chinese-language cinema. As a country at the forefront of gender equality in Asia, Taiwanese films, regardless of period, have consistently paid special attention to gender. Following the turn of the new century, the portrayal of gender in Taiwanese cinema has become even more complex and diverse. However, academic research on Taiwanese cinema still focuses on Taiwan New Cinema and author films, and the attention paid to the study of gender in cinema is loose and unsystematic. This study aims to screen, analyse, and summarise gender power studies in Taiwanese cinema through an extensive literature search, focusing on the dynamics of gender power studies in Taiwanese cinema in the last five years (2020–2024). The analysis reveals that gender power studies in Taiwanese cinema are primarily based on director- or period-oriented film analyses, with intersectional studies being more prevalent, encompassing class, ethnicity, immigration, disability, politics, sexuality, and other related dimensions. Studies on gay and lesbian (queer)1 are the most numerous, followed by women, and finally, men. This study aims to present the review through bubble charts, utilizing visualization to provide a more graphic representation of the research dynamics of gender power in Taiwanese cinema. It will offer an overview of existing research issues, provide guiding suggestions for future research directions, and establish a research paradigm for film literature reviews.

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