Racial Science

Ellis, Cristin

doi:10.1017/9781316569214.025

Cited by 1 publication

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References 4 publications

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“…17 As one mode of flow (trade) failed, almost all other aspects of Chinese culture and society came to be seen as a mark of stagnation, singling China as a place of despotism wherein all, including the mind, is treated "like the feet of the women, cramped by the bandages of habit and education, till it acquires an unnatural littleness." 18 This image of the bound foot repeats time and again in such observations. This persistence, even if only as an illustration at the margins of an argument, attests to its significance.…”

Section: Historical and Conceptual Framingmentioning

confidence: 52%

Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes

Kotef

2015

Political Theory

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This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global (imperial) and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we see that European freedom-as-movement emerged on the backdrop of two imperial contrasts: (1) images of nomadism (in the contexts of America, and later Africa and the Middle East), which are only marginally considered in this paper, and (2) an assumed stagnation, that presumably prevailed in the East. Yet surprisingly, the image was often evoked to say something about Europe itself, rather than about its "others." Therefore, it also reveals the corporeal dimensions of a concept of freedom that has underlaid a long liberal tradition. The crushed and squeezed feet of girls in China thus marked both a gendered and an imperial divide between those who can move freely, and therefore rule, and those who cannot rule because of their Kotef 335 lack of mobility; yet at the same time, it undid this division by allowing the East and its stationariness to permeate Europe through a multiply foreign body: feminized, racially alien, and geographically distanced.It is quite perplexing, Dorothy Ko once observed, that foot-binding, "a practice in a land five thousand miles away and that ended over half a century ago, still exercises such a grip on our imagination." The practice, whose origin is unclear and whose particularities are so diverse that Ko warns us against seeing it as a single practice, 1 can generate-indeed has generatedmany stories and inquiries. It evokes questions of sexuality (questions of beauty, desirability, or kinship); of sexuality as oppression (but, Ko proposes, also as a mode of finding one's power within an oppressive framework: a secret language of women, cultivating female networks in a man's words); of orientalism (the image of the East and its eroticization in the justification of imperial formations); of disability (questions concerning health, physical (im)mobility, and willful maiming); and of global distribution of both national and gender-based modes of domination. In this brief essay, I mark one narrow path, traversing some of these questions. Within this path, I refer not to the practice itself, but its circulation in the West, and in particular the deployment of the image in a specific lineage within Western political thought.Following a brief framing, the three main sections of this essay are largely organized alongside five main layers. First, via this image, I show the corporeal dimensions of the liberal concept(s) of freedom. 2 "Compressed and hindered from its due expansion," as Locke would put it, 3 the bound foot is often an index for the lack of freedom. It is this tie between freedom and able, unimpeded movement that I want to examine here. Bo...

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Section: Historical and Conceptual Framingmentioning

confidence: 52%

Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes

Kotef

2015

Political Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Racial Science

Cited by 1 publication

References 4 publications

Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes

Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes

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