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Featured Review
| Dorothy Ko. Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. xix, 332. $29.95.
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| "The `three-inch golden lotus' is a historical testament to the bodily and psychological damage that women suffered in feudal society. The sad songs of small feet would never be sung again; so much pain and tears are etched on the wooden lasts." During a ceremony in November 1999 when the last factory producing shoes for bound feet donated its eight pairs of wooden lasts to the Heilongjiang Museum of Ethnography, the curator who uttered these words echoed sentiments that occupy a prominent place in standard narratives of China's early twentieth-century history: the bound foot was the physical and symbolic expression of women's oppression by feudal patriarchy, and its eradication signified women's liberation from their victimized and maimed status. The tiny lasts, as a reporter remarked, "stand as a testament to the progress of Chinese women from being oppressed to being given a new life." Opening her discussion about footbinding as the "embodied experience" of women over more than 900 years, Dorothy Ko argues that this "degrading" view of woman subjugated by male authority and dependent on male creativity for her own liberation has obscured attention to footbinding as a cultural and physical convention of women's daily lives. Footbinding was a painful experience for its female subjects, but simply to denounce it as the manifestation of male privilege or perverted sexual desires prevents any possible understanding of its prolonged and established place in women's experiences, expectations, and subjectivities. It prevents a view of footbinding as productive of social and cultural meanings and possibilities, for both women and men, and imprisons past practices within the often ideologically driven interests of the present. Indeed, so prevalent has been its condemnation that footbinding has been an uncontroversial issue in the history of modern China; instead, writings about footbinding have constructed a history of anti-footbinding. |
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Ko's book, as the subtitle suggest, is a revisionist history of an unwritten story that explicitly seeks to disrupt received truths. It is a very Chinese story. In a wide range of popular and academic media, Chinese as well as English, the footbound woman appears almost stereotypically as a unique marker of the gendered inequities of China's cultural tradition; she appears as an orientalist reminder of the moral and political superiority of the early Western inspired reformist projects of modernity. Yet Ko's relentless questioning of her history intersects with other stories as well, not those that explore commonalities of experience across time and place, or those that seek to right the wrongs of orientalist versions of the "other," but certainly those that seek to uncover the diverse practices and subjectivities of figures long excluded from the received wisdom of the present. Between her daring, her erudition, her imagination, and her endless probing of texts and material, Ko has produced a powerful and lucid analysis in which footbinding emerges as the locus of diverse meanings: of the nationalist shame of republican reformers and their imaginings of a modern future; the nostalgic yearnings of the male urban elite, dispossessed by the abolition of the imperial civil service exams; the inscription of regional landscapes with exotic fantasies; the social and spatial spread of fashion and material culture. Through all these figure the temporal, spatial, and psychological investments of the women subjected by the practice: the mothers who bound their infant daughters' feet, the abandoned wife who soaked her "porcelain-like" tiny feet in cold water hoping to make them grow to satisfy the modern aspirations of her husband, the yearnings for prosperity in the futile attempts of the bandit of the wild northwest to seduce a southern scholar, the older women obliged to suffer the public ignominy and pain of having to unbind their feet. Drawing on a wide range of sources from connoisseurs' writings to women's poetry, material artifacts and photographic evidence, Ko approaches her project through a moving prism of desires and fantasies, shared bonds and aspirations that configured female as well as male subjectivities. There was not one footbinding, she argues, but many, motivated by changing economic, social and cultural forces expressed in different local styles and rituals. |
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