El Reino de las mujeres en Viaje al Oeste: aspectos culturales chinos de un pueblo femenino
Abstract
As a masterpiece of classical Chinese literature, Journey to the West (西游记) is a paradigmatic representative of the narrative of deities and demons. In the episode of the Female Kingdom, Wu Cheng’en constructs a feminine utopian world. In both text and visual representation, the Female Kingdom in Journey to the West continues to show how, beneath the appearance of female primacy, it is still difficult to escape the social structure of patriarchy rooted in Chinese society. Therefore, this article takes the novel and its film adaptations as objects of analysis and examines the female characters and the structure or narrative form of the Female Kingdom in Journey to the West within the framework of semiotics. The analysis reveals that in both the linguistic and iconic stratum, the apparently matriarchal textuality reproduces the patriarchal archetypes of the Confucian social imaginary.
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