《她·SHE》· / Xinyang Li (2025)

This dissertation investigates how dance film can articulate embodied resistance to gendered regulation in contemporary China. Focusing on my short film 《她·SHE》, the project adopts Practice-as-Research (PaR) as its central methodology, complemented by feminist methodology, autoethnography, and the lens of the bodyas-archive. Across cycles of rehearsal, filming, editing, and reflective writing, each creative decision became both an artistic choice and a form of inquiry, generating knowledge through practice (Nelson, 2013; Smith & Dean, 2009). The film constructs three symbolic figures—the young girl, the woman affected by domestic violence, and the career woman—to render visible tensions arising from family expectations, marital institutions, and workplace inequalities. These figures are situated within the histories and contemporary debates of Chinese feminism, including the impact of consumer culture (Ueno, 1994), the “divorce cooling-off period” (Xinhua, 2021), and persistent structural barriers to women’s leadership (UN Women, 2024). By placing the film in dialogue with feminist theory and artistic practices (e.g., Deren, Schneemann, Butler, Kristeva, Ingold, Deleuze), the dissertation demonstrates how embodied practice can produce critical knowledge. In doing so, it contributes to feminist performance studies and Chinese cultural discourse, while offering a case study of dance film as both creative practice and academic research. Keywords: Dance Film, Chinese Feminism, Practice-as-Research (PaR), Body as Archive, Autoethnography