Feminism and Nationalism: Women and the National State in the Anti-Japanese War Red Classics Novels and Its Screen-adaptations

Abstract: Unlike the Western feminism movement, the women’s liberation movements in the third -world countries have always been under the male leadership to cooperate with the country’s resistance to wars, subordinating to nationalism. Taking a batch of anti-Japanese war Red Classics novels such as Kucai Flower（《苦菜花》）, Gun Shots on the Plain（《平原枪声》）, and Behind Enemy Lines（《敌后武工队 》） that were published during the early days of the People’s Republic of China, and the subsequent screen-adaptations as the research objects, this article analyzes the dominant position of nationalism in different medias during different times; and how the feminism idea expresses itself with minced words in those works. Having been constantly rewrote, the ways those works interpreted the concept of feminism in the process of adaptation have never been able to break its subordinated position. This analysis goes through a national vision of the three role positions of female – as labors and battle forces, as mothers sacrificing for their children and as female who were peeped into by male but have always suppressed their individual sexual desires.