Cinderella's sisters : a revisionist history of footbinding
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Cinderella's sisters : a revisionist history of footbinding
(A Philip E. Lilienthal book)
University of California Press, c2005
Available at 6 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-320) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and spread to gentry families, brothels, maid's quarters, and peasant households. Conventional views of footbinding as patriarchal oppression often neglect its complex history and the incentives of the women involved. This revisionist history, elegantly written and meticulously researched, presents a fascinating new picture of the practice from its beginnings in the tenth century to its demise in the twentieth century. Neither condemning nor defending foot-binding, Dorothy Ko debunks many myths and misconceptions about its origins, development, and eventual end, exploring in the process the entanglements of male power and female desires during the practice's thousand-year history. Cinderella's Sisters argues that rather than stemming from sexual perversion, men's desire for bound feet was connected to larger concerns such as cultural nostalgia, regional rivalries, and claims of male privilege. Nor were women hapless victims, the author contends.
Ko describes how women--those who could afford it--bound their own and their daughters' feet to signal their high status and self-respect. Femininity, like the binding of feet, was associated with bodily labor and domestic work, and properly bound feet and beautifully made shoes both required exquisite skills and technical knowledge passed from generation to generation. Throughout her narrative, Ko deftly wields methods of social history, literary criticism, material culture studies, and the history of the body and fashion to illustrate how a practice that began as embodied lyricism--as a way to live as the poets imagined--ended up being an exercise in excess and folly.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on Conventions List of Abbreviations Introduction PART I: THE BODY EXPOSED 1. Gigantic Histories of the Nation in the Globe: The Rhetoric of Tianzu, 1880s-1910s 2. The Body Inside Out: The Practice of Fangzu, 1900s-1930s 3. The Bound Foot as Antique: Connoisseurship in an Age of Disavowal, 1930s-1941 PART II: THE BODY CONCEALED 4. From Ancient Texts to Current Customs: In Search of Footbinding's Origins 5. The Erotics of Place: Male Desires and the Imaginary Geography of the Northwest 6. Cinderella's Dreams: The Burden and Uses of the Female Body Epilogue Notes Glossary Works Cited Index
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