Xiaohan’s research examines how contemporary women’s cinema, particularly films by East Asian female filmmakers, reconfigures gender identities, power relations and female agency through a distinct female gaze. While cinematic apparatuses have historically been dominated by the male gaze, positioning women as passive spectacles within patriarchal narratives, her research foregrounds tacit, culturally specific and socially attuned modes of looking, including nunchi (Korean) and yanli (Chinese), as alternative visual and narrative strategies. These modes enable female characters to negotiate objectification and reclaim subjectivity.

Grounded in an interdisciplinary framework that encompasses feminist film theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory and semiotics, Yi’s research explores how Confucian-inflected norms shape the cinematic articulation of female consciousness in East Asia, how an East Asian female gaze reconfigures dominant gender representations and how female agency is constructed through cinematic form.