The “model theater” produced during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China (1965-1976) is generally viewed as the dead-end of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s political and ideological appropriation of art, or as an artistic weapon serving the Party’s propagandistic purposes. This dissertation proposes a revisionist reading of model theater’s position in China’s cultural history, and asserts its significance in subverting hegemonic Party ideology.
Through a close reading of its texts, this study argues that model theater is, in its cultural essence, a feminist literary production. Its feminism lies in its systematic construction of heroic women’s images against the background of CCP history, and it lies in its strategic appropriation of class and political identities to escape subordinate gender identities. Within a discourse of class struggle, model theater creates a feminist utopia where androgyny and a womanhood – ci , the social form in which women can have an ungendered identity, are very much prevalent.