Female Directors and Girls Always Happy highlight aspects of the cinematic gaze that resonate with the global #MeToo moment as well as with other features of contemporary visualizations of gender in Chinese cinema. The power differential between teachers and students in higher education, the monetization of female sexuality, the routine acceptance of sexual exploitation in the film industry, the push-and-pull of camaraderie and competition among women in their personal and professional lives, and the pressures placed on women within the family to fulfill idealized roles assigned to mothers and daughters emerge as key themes in Yang’s Beijing-set films as well as other films from the PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and throughout the diaspora. In the wake of #MeToo, female sexuality on screen steers between demands for the recognition of erotic desires and the critique of voyeuristic exploitation of female bodies for economic gain.

Set against the backdrop of higher education, The Ghost of Sister Ping (2017), a multi-screen video installation by Hong Kong-based scholar and media artist Katrien Jacobs, shares some similarities to Yang Mingming’s stories about young women at the periphery of the vision of the men they desire. Taking up the story of a female academic romantically entangled with a more established university professor, the installation chronicles the psychological disintegration of Sister Ping (Sandy Liu Ho Nam), whose bi-sexual boyfriend leaves her abruptly for a male lover. Jacobs collaborated with mainland Chinese LGBTQ+ activist and filmmaker Fan Popo to create some of the homoerotic sex scenes in the installation.