Footbinding became the most sexualized objectification of women in Chinese history, while creating a distinct aversion in Western observers. Despite much prurient attention to Indian and Arab women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, western travellers simply did not see Chinese women as erotic...
How Foot Binding Spread During the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279), foot-binding became an established custom and spread throughout eastern China. Soon, every ethnic Han Chinese woman of any social standing was expected to have lotus feet. Beautifully embroidered and jeweled shoes for bound feet becam...
Whereas Europe had the corset for women, China had foot binding. Believed to have begun during China’s Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907-979), one romantically-inclined legend tells us in fabled manner how Emperor Li Yu’s favorite consort Yao Niang danced in a spell-binding way ...
Fan,Hong.Footbinding, feminism, and freedom: the liberation of women‘s bodies in modern China. . 1997Hong, Fan. Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom: The Liberation of Women's Bodies in Modern China. London: F. Cass, 1997. Hong, Fan (1997): Foot binding, Feminism, and Freedom: The...
torture and pain these women had endured during the process. Here, the question arise that why these women had to comply with such a bizarre custom and what inspired them to pass it to generations. In this research paper, I try to explore the reasons behind foot binding practice in China....
Physical emancipation, particularly in the context of the custom of footbinding, which continued to be practised to some extent in China until 1949, was the prerequisite of wider emancipation. Through the medium of women's bodies, the book explores the significance of religious beliefs, cul......
Footbinding as Fashion: Ethnicity, Labor, and Status in Traditional Chinadoi:10.1080/03068374.2019.1706362Christopher Ruane
Using footbinding as masquerade, Chinese women display themselves as artifacts, as theatrical creatures who can be dismantled and put back together according to circumstance . Footbinding then leads to this inevitable question: iffemininity is the work of culture, artifice, and simulation, what does...
aThe status of women in China was low, largely due to the custom of foot binding. About 45% of Chinese women had bound feet in the 19th century. For the upper classes, it was almost 100%. In 1912, the Chinese government ordered the cessation of foot-binding. Foot-binding involved alter...
Chán zú (缠足), or foot-binding, was a practise that stunted the feet of over 3 billion Chinese women for a millennium, in the name of beauty. These days, most people (including modern Chinese) see the custom as a barbaric blot on China’s history, and feminists rail against it. ...