Send message to Filmmaker

Film short abstract

Chinese Gender Studies students abroad navigate tensions between Western theory and lived experience, examining their position as "outsiders-within" global academia through cross-dialogue in Mandarin, challenging linguistic hierarchies and proposing decentering as critical practice.

Film synopsis

This project explores how Chinese Gender Studies students abroad navigate tensions between Western gender theory and their lived experiences in Chinese society, while negotiating their position as "outsiders-within" in global academic spaces shaped by racial, linguistic, and epistemic hierarchies.

Using documentary practice as both research method and theory-making, the film draws on visual narrative inquiry and feminist standpoint epistemology. Through in-depth interviews with 13 Chinese students across the Europe, United States, Australia, and Asia, it examines how gender knowledge travels and transforms across borders. A cross-dialogue editing method allows voices to respond to and contradict one another, foregrounding collective experience embedded within broader institutional and geopolitical structures.

Three themes organize the documentary: motivations for choosing Gender Studies within Chinese educational contexts; struggles and possibilities of being "outsiders-within" Western classrooms marked by language barriers and racialisation; and the ambivalent experience of privilege, where elite education abroad coexists with guilt and uncertainty about political responsibility.

The documentary is filmed in Mandarin Chinese—a deliberate epistemic choice that preserves affective nuance and challenges English as the default medium of academic knowledge. This linguistic decision contributes to decolonial debates on multilingual knowledge production.

Drawing on feminist standpoint theory, the project treats marginalized experience as critical for mapping institutional power rather than extractable data. It contributes to scholarship on transnational education and feminist pedagogy while advancing cross-dialogue editing as a decentering research strategy. Rather than offering solutions, the film proposes "de-centering" as an ongoing practice of unsettling fixed centers of language, theory, and authority.