| In Aching for Beauty, I discuss the following issues of footbinding, a thousand-year Chinese fixation on the female body part: (1) how the custom grew from a high fashion into a national practice; (2) how footbinding initiated women into eroticism through physical and linguistic violence; (3) how the dual nature of bound feet, at once utilitarian and erotic, ethical and aesthetic, ugly and beautiful, sacred and contaminated, coincides with China's oscillation between moral restriction and expenditure, and how these cultural phenomena are rooted in the ambivalence and discrepancy of writing and speech; (4) how the binding "cooks" the female body into culture by connecting footbinding with the food culture through euphemism---a "cooking stove" where all oppositions fuse, dissolve and reform; (5) how and why Chinese male writers fetishized women through category and taxonomy, turning the body into a fractured and metonymic text, an obsession that reflects Chinese intellectuals' anxiety over the Phallus and castration; (6) how Chinese women defied such fetishistic textualization of their bodies by using footbinding as a tool and weapon to create a support network through female literacy and bonding, and finally; (7) to invent a female writing that is rooted in speech and performance.;My study employs poetry, novels, plays, essays, and oral accounts by male and female writers from the 14th century to the present to discuss the issues of footbinding in the context of history, literature, semiotics and psychoanalysis. I introduce western linguistic, literary, and psychoanalytic theories in order to examine footbinding from cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspectives. Through pain and violence. women entered the codes of beauty and eroticism. Meanwhile, they turned the binding---the symbol of female oppression---into a theater of masquerade and language, where hierarchy and gender roles were dismantled and reconstructed, where women created their own culture. By understanding why Chinese women mutilated themselves across a millennium, I hope to offer some insight on why women in other cultures "voluntarily" suffer for beauty. |
