Shitou

Shitou (born 1969) is a Chinese activist, actress, filmmaker, multimedia artist, and gay icon. She has been active in the Chinese gay scene since the 1990s and was the first lesbian to come out on Chinese television.

Biography Shitou (石头) was born in 1969 in Guizhou to an ethnic Miao family and graduated from the Guizhou Art Academy. Shitou was a part of the Yuanmingyuan artist colony in 1992 before its dissolution in 1995. In 2000, Shitou was featured on a Hunan Satellite Television talk show program called "Approaching Homosexuality." According to scholar Hongwei Bao, this was "the first time that a self-identified... lesbian 'came out' in PRC's official media." Shitou became one of the most prominent figures for lesbian activism in China. Scholar Tingting Wei points out that while Shitou's 'coming out' was broadcast on television, cultural attitudes and the PRC viewed homosexuality as a crime and a mental disorder at the time.

In 2001 Shitou had a starring role as Xiaoling in the Chinese lesbian film Fish and Elephant. She later went on to direct several films, many in collaboration with her partner, Ming Ming. Her first was Dyke March (2002). In 2006 Shitou released the documentary/essay film Women Fifty Minutes (女人五十分钟) and in 2015 directed the film We Are Here. Shitou helped found the Beijing Queer Film Festival and the China Queer Film Festival Tour. In the documentary, Shitou and Zhao Jing film and interview attendees who recount how the most controversial topic at the conference was lesbian rights, especially in the context of women's rights at this conference that took place in Beijing, China. Lesbian organizers claim that lesbian rights were not intended to be a part of the conference at all. Shitou is known for using documentary film as a tool for activism and political change, and in her film, she draws attention to lesbian rights issues and highlights how lesbian rights cannot be separated from women's rights. Five movies were screened at the first Beijing Queer Film Festival that took place in December 2001 on the Peking University campus, which is also known as the Beijing University campus. These tactics were shared amongst filmmakers in the region, where they collaborated to learn how to take advantage of DV technology when there was no blockbuster budget available for independent queer filmmakers. DV technology was also widely available, cheap, and an accessible method to produce and create films.

With an educational background in the creative arts, and Shitou created many works in the fields of photography and oil painting, but when it came to filmmaking, she was self-taught. She has made three documentary films. Themes that are often found in her films include feminist and queer histories, and broader social and political issues like the loss of culture and uneven development in different regions in China, as seen in her film Women 50 Minutes (2006). In Dyke March (2002), Shitou uses her personal experience as a Chinese lesbian and a participatory approach to embody what the real-life experience is like for a lesbian.

Modes of production and distribution State censorship was and continues to be a major barrier for queer filmmakers in China. In China, the censorship system for films means that new films must pass inspection from the Beijing Film Bureau and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television. Institutions and organizations within the censorship system have the power to ban queer films from being produced and they can control where and how films are released. To bypass some of the censorship laws, organizers acquired and screened pirated versions of queer films from the black market and various unofficial channels. Domestically produced Chinese queer films like Shitou’s have a better chance of reaching an international audience rather than a Chinese audience due to the strict censorship laws. Both domestically produced and illegally sourced queer films have therefore been distributed in underground channels, such as semi-organized film festivals like the Beijing Queer Film Festival.

Reception Scholar Hongwei Bao proposes that lesbian filmmakers like Shitou were not creating documentaries and queer films with the intent of seeing commercial success for themselves; rather, they were creating films to represent themselves and to create an archival historical record of lesbian existence. Queer Chinese films were met with support and allyship from international audiences and creatives.

Filmography