My current research interests revolve around Sinophone women’s cinema, situating it in local, regional, and global contexts. While at IIAS, I will be doing research on women’s documentary films from Taiwan. Among the major cinematic traditions in Asia, Taiwanese cinema boasts an unsually large number of female documentary directors. Their works provide an interesting lens on Taiwan’s past, present, and future. In my project, I argue that women documentary directors in Taiwan have benefited from the global revival of interest in documentary, the rise and spread of new technologies, the democratization of Taiwan, and, most importantly, the presence of a strong local women’s movement with transnational dimensions since the 1990s. Nevertheless, Taiwanese women’s documentaries are diverse in both content and form. These women documentarians constitute a very diverse group of public intellectuals. Insofar as they are all perceptive of women’s issues and are not constrained by gender prescriptions, they are all feminists in a broadly defined sense. But at the same time, each filmmaker may also be a labor activist, an ethnographer, or an archivist of forgotten histories. Methodologically, they also diverge, showcasing a wide variety of styles. During my time at IIAS, I plan to especially focus on films examining ethnic and national identities and issues of migration and mobility. In addition to researching women’s documentaries, I will also be working on a translation of the poetry of Taiwanese poet Hsi Muren (Xi Murong), especially her writings on her Mongolian heritage.
https://people.cal.msu.edu/tzelan