In Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, Ya-chen Chen discusses gender issues and the limited feminism found in Chinese martial arts movies, which are predominantly made by male directors. According to Chen, in the world of martial arts, women enjoy freedom in “literary, education, critical thinking, talent, ambition, job market, career, and the right to choose their spouses and decide their fate” (p. viii). Through a discussion of “Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism,” the author suggests that the liberation the male filmmakers offer to the female protagonists is incomplete in the martial arts films under examination (p. 1–2). Chen points out that these films maintain patriarchal thought, authority and limitation of women's rights and liberation.

The book is divided into four sections, with an introduction and 14 chapters. The introduction presents a socio-cultural and philosophical context in which the films under examination are produced. For Chen, this broad approach includes Asian studies, film studies, gender studies and literary studies, among other academic fields. Part one consists of seven chapters that analyse the stories and plots in seven martial arts films in order to show the inadequate “feminist liberation” that female protagonists experience, the “male-centered narrative[s],” and that the “chauvinists’ ignorance of gender egalitarianism continue to exist” (pp. viii, 81, 147). The major films examined include: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee); Hero (dir. Zhang Yimou); House of the Flying Daggers (dir. Zhang Yimou); Seven Swords (dir. Tsui Hark); The Promise (dir. Chen Kaige); The Banquet (dir. Feng Xiaogang); and Curse of the Golden Flower (dir. Zhang Yimou).

Part two expands on the films discussed in part one and focuses on the motifs of women's sacrifice as well as the phallocentric teacher–student complex in film narratives. This section includes three chapters. Chapter eight discusses how filmmakers project phallocentric fantasy onto female protagonists’ “selfless and self-sacrificial wishes for men on the silver screen,” therefore constraining women's liberty and freedom to be “so determinative, tactful, independent, strong-willed, and feminist at the beginning of their stories” (p. 158). In a similar vein, the following chapter highlights the patriarchal gender ideology embedded in the teacher–student relationship in martial arts film. Chen argues that this teacher–student hierarchy reveals the interrelation between men's “castration fears” and women's “penis envy,” regarding power, authority and higher status (p. 179). At the same time, the male directors have created self-sacrificing female students who participate in the “unconscious sadomasochist ecstasy in the Sino-Western patriarchal socio-cultural trends that the films include” (p. 191). Chapter ten examines what Chen describes as the “cinematic Pygmalion,” where the puppets are compared to female actresses in the martial arts films under discussion (p. 196). Using the idea from the Platonic cave, Chen combines both “Western theories and Chinese martial arts films” to discuss the partial freedom female protagonists have within the phallocentric paradigm projected by male directors (p. 207).

Part three consists of four interviews. The first is with Chung Ling, King Hu's spouse and screenwriter; the second is with Pan Hua, a female classmate and peer-director of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and others; the third features Tsai Kuo-jung, a co-planner and screenwriter of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and the final chapter is a discussion with Wang Wei, a judge in the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. These four interviewees give information as well as opinions regarding the patriarchal limitations placed on female protagonists in films

Overall, Chen provides a general overview of how male directors perpetuate phallocentric ideology in their presentation of female protagonists in martial arts films. Female director Ann Hui presents an interesting counter-example to her analyses (chapter eight), with Chen discussing how Hui's martial arts films are “far more feminist than almost all the above-mentioned male filmmakers’ kung fu movies” (p. 167). Indeed, the dilemma experienced by female artists and actresses is what Ann Hui tackles in The Stunt Woman (1996), starring the internationally acclaimed martial arts actress Michelle Yeoh (later in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) as a stuntwoman struggling to survive in Hong Kong's notoriously merciless martial arts and action film industry. Because the author has already discussed in previous chapters the contradictory feminism in male directors’ films, it would have been interesting to examine more fully the very act of making-visible and the possible feminist agency in Hui's works. Although most actresses, and even occasionally eminent female stars, are restricted by narrative and direction, they are often participating agents instead of puppets in their films. In fact, Judith Butler's gender performativity has offered various ways to move beyond the theories of gaze and sexual fetishism. The performative power to act out gender is extremely useful as an analytical framework for us to consider images as enactments with embodied subjects rather than inanimate objects for men's viewing pleasure. What remains unsaid and unseen in film narrative can be presented in performance with nuanced subtlety and interpreted within the context of stardom with infinite mutability.