Walking Through Modernity: The Social Experiences and Cultural Representations of Boundfoot Women during the Anti-footbinding Movement in China, 1900s-1930s
Open AccessBy centralizing women’s bound feet as a specific locus of experiencing modernity, my research aims to unearth the boundfoot women’s bodily experiences and subject formations in their everyday struggles during the anti-footbinding movement in China’s early social reform era, 1900s-1930s. Through an astute reading of my primary resources, including newspapers, periodic publications, municipal archives, the first part of my thesis seeks for the textual evidence of women’s self-accounts and personal stories about their foot-unbinding, or “fangzu” (放足) practice. My analysis demonstrates that female foot-binders’ fangzu stories can be characterized as a spectrum of experiences with the case of women committed suicide for physical liberation from footbinding traditions on the one end, and the case of female suicide led by the coercive violence of fangzu campaigns on the other. What situated in between the two ends are women who, willingly or not, engaged themselves in the very process of fangzu practice and eventually survived from it. My historical exploration centers the relation between women’s physical transformation and her reconfigured subjectivity in complex living surroundings, where socials tension and familial conflicts surfaced along with the political propagation of fangzu message. I also focus on the narrative patterns of the female foot-binders’ fangzu accounts, whose voices, though rare, did appear on mainstream periodic issues. By developing an acute sense to understand fangzu practicers’ ambiguous ways of speaking suffering, I argue that boundfoot women’s voices were not structurally written out of the nationalist emancipatory narrative, but instead articulated in accordance with the dominant discourse. Here, my concern lies with in what ways the boundfoot woman recounted her past, perceived her present and envisioned her future, and what kind of modern subjecthood had been desired for and constructed through the physical transformation of foot-binders’ fangzu journey.What follows boundfoot women’s social experiences in the transformative period between 1990s and 1930s is the cultural representation of them in the literary creation of native modernist intellectuals. In order to problematize the dominant discourse of women’s emancipation that set up women with bound feet as the biggest social problem in early modern China, the second part of my thesis examines the male intellectual’s anti-traditionalist narratives and compare it with those of the female intellectual’s writing that created a space for alternative representations of subaltern women. Through an acute reading of the selected writings of male intellectual Guo Moruo, and Yu Dafu, I argue that the image of boundfoot women is an indispensable trope for native male intellectuals to claim for themselves a transcendent stance through which they took the credit for saving the oppressed and debilitated female masses. By venturing into the field of feminist representations of boundfoot women and by offering literary analysis of works written by two women writers, Ding Ling and Ling Shuhua, I argue that these two female writers invented alternative constructions of traditional female subjectivities that oppose those contoured by their male counterparts. Their textual representations of boundfoot women not only acknowledged subaltern voice and agency, but also offered a glimpse of an alternative modern female subjectivity at variance with what was postulated by the dominant “new woman” ideology.
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